Sparks: Did US aid cuts worsen Ebola outbreak in Central Africa?

A government that withdraws its hand from the common defence against a common enemy abandons the first principle of its own existence, which is the preservation of life.

Does the aid prevent the outbreak, or does its withdrawal merely reveal the vulnerability we chose not to see?

The well that is most needed is the one we stop digging only when the ground is already parched.

A predictive model for containment fails when its most critical variable - the constant of sustained support - is treated as a discretionary coefficient.

The empty chair at the planning meeting, the unsigned budget line, the quiet cough in the distant village - these are the first three acts of the tragedy.

An infinite universe of connected life renders the quarantine of compassion a theological and practical impossibility.

Hateful things: a thread of aid snipped, a watchtower left empty, the long silence before the first alarm sounds.

Nothing so concentrates a legislature's mind on a distant fever as the prospect of it becoming a domestic election-year temperature.

They call it a foreign crisis, but I have borne the fever of neglect, and I know its face is always familiar to the forgotten.

One does continue to fund the fire brigade, of course, even during those periods when one is not, technically, on fire.

In every market from Fez to Delhi, the price of salt and the price of safety are known long before the caravan fails to arrive.

You cannot interrupt the current of prevention and then express surprise at the darkening of the entire system.

Neglect, dressed in the garb of fiscal prudence, educates populations only in the brutal lesson of their own expendability.

We have always known how to build the iron room of isolation, but never how to unlock the door before the air is gone.