From The Washington Post, Why the escape of numerous Ebola patients in Liberia’s worst slum is so terrifying:

People gathered near the entrance of an Ebola isolation unit, where dozens of patients, many of whom were suspected if not confirmed to be infected, were getting treatment. Pictures showed some in the crowd had masked their faces with T-shirts or shawls. Others, including a woman in a red dress named Batu Flowers, tried to convince the mob that Ebola was real, they weren’t being lied to, that news of the outbreak wasn’t a hoax. But the crowd wouldn’t be dissuaded.

It pushed against the gates of the Liberian primary school, which had been converted into a treatment center in the middle of West Point, which some call the most squalid community in Liberia if not West Africa. Thanks to poor sanitation and open sewers, the community of tens of thousands crowded onto a peninsula jutting into the Atlantic Ocean has long been prone to debilitating sicknesses from typhoid to malaria to lethal diarrhea. Now it has one more to contend with — a virus spread through feces, blood and vomit.

“No Ebola in West Point!” the crowd chanted, according to Getty Images photographer John Moore. “No Ebola in West Point!”

Three patients had already escaped, reports Buzzfeed’s Jina Moore. “We begged them” to stay, one nurse worker told the reporter. We “told them people are coming tomorrow to help you. But there was no way we could fight them.”…

Soon, between 17 and 29 Ebola patients had run away — or were physically removed by their families — and the looting began. They took off with items — goggles, masks, blood-stained mattresses and blood-stained sheets — that were likely infected with Ebola, a lethal disease that the World Health Organization says has killed 1,145 people in West Africa, 413 of whom were Liberian. Following the patients’ escape and Saturday’s looting, officials and health workers fear even more will be infected as patients return to their family’s homes and looters sleep on fetid mattresses…

It’s difficult to imagine such an incident occurring in a more vulnerable place. The slum of West Point, which health officials have considered quarantining, is populated by some of the poorest people in West Africa, most of whom have few resources or training to adequately treat or quarantine sick residents…. “It’s an informal community, a ‘slum,’ with no running water or toilets,” wrote Moore. “People can live seven or more to a single dwelling, and the density is dangerous: A positive Ebola patient disappearing into the maze of metal shacks can be a public health horror story.”… “West Point is densely populated, characterized by a constant through-flow of residents, who come from other parts of Liberia and neighboring West African cities.” The makeshift dwellings became permanent — and even now, almost all of them are without indoor plumbing or running water….

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which reported on the slum in 2009, there were only four public toilets servicing 70,000 residents. Using the toilet cost 3 cents, and bathroom operators estimated they got about 500 patrons per day. “The facilities can be smelled 50 meters away, with the floor of each squalid cubicle 15 cm deep in soiled newspaper that residents use to wipe their posteriors,” the service reported. “Staff use gloved hands to scoop the used paper into a wheelbarrow, which they lug to the nearby river or beach to dump its contents into the water.”

Other residents prefer not to deal with all that, and instead use the beaches as public bathrooms. “Before I can take my first step into the sand [I see] the small black and brown piles underfoot,” a Providence Journal missive says. “A few yards ahead, a scattering of about a half a dozen or so small children squat, eyes towards the sea.”

Now, if Ebola ravages the slum as some fear, it is this act of public defecation that may tragically fuel its rise.

From The Dark Mountain Project’s Manifesto:

Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die.

The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric. How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of stability that pattern gives? So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are able to plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don’t think about too care- fully will still be there. When the pattern is broken, by civil war or natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies that tear at its fabric, many of those activities become impossible or meaningless, while simply meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives.

What war correspondents and relief workers report is not only the fragility of the fabric, but the speed with which it can unravel. As we write this, no one can say with certainty where the unravelling of the financial and commercial fabric of our economies will end.  Meanwhile, beyond the cities, unchecked industrial exploitation frays the material basis of life in many parts of the world, and pulls at the ecological systems which sustain it.

Precarious as this moment may be, however, an awareness of the fragility of what we call civilisation is nothing new.