London Letter: Political correctness can kill

I have regularly slammed today’s fetish-like obsession with political correctness in these columns – probably annoyingly so.

But I never thought I would accuse the PC brigade of actually killing people.

I do not use the word lightly.

It happened in the recent outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, that has now even spread to London as a Brit medic working in Sierra Leone has been repatriated, stricken with the plague-like disease.

It is thought that the Ebola epidemic sparked off when a Liberian government minister, Patrick Sawyer, flew to Nigeria for some big wig conference.

His colleagues, who suspected he had the virus, apparently didn’t cancel the visit as it is claimed they didn’t want to deprive their mate of a jolly at taxpayers’ expense.

Mr Sawyer collapsed at the Lagos airport and died in hospital. A nurse treating him has also since died.

From there, Ebola exploded through West Africa, claiming so far more than 1 500 people in its wake.

Soon afterwards, Sheik Umar Khan, one of Sierra Leone’s top doctors courageously leading the fight against the rampaging disease, became infected.

There is a potential cure for Ebola, a serum called ZMapp, but officially it is still registered as an experimental drug.

Dr Khan was working alongside international colleagues from the charity Medecins Sans Frontieres and the World Health Organisation, who have access to ZMapp.

Tough choice

As he was about to die anyway, the doctors there could give it to him if they chose.

MSF (Doctors without Borders) is a French-based group of medics who do sterling work in the Third World and will treat anyone from a humanitarian point of view – including

hostile combatants.

The WHO, of course, is imbued with the same political correctness that makes the UN such a colossally useless bunch.

MSF and WHO were faced with a dilemma that would be a joke if it wasn’t so tragic. The ‘problem’ was this: do they administer a drug that had never been tested on people to Dr

Khan as he lay dying?

The doctors, apparently, debated long and hard into the night. If they, as whites, gave Dr Khan the experimental ZMapp, would they be accused of treating an African like a laboratory rat, even if he lived afterwards?

As you know, racism is political correctness’s most heinous crime.

The blatantly obvious fact that Dr Khan was going to die anyway without the drug wasn’t the issue. It was now no longer a health matter. It was a political concern, and a

risk the white officials were not prepared to take.

Dr Khan died on July 29.