BBC Radio 4 2015-11-21

When a baby girl tested negative for ebola in Guinea earlier this week, many allowed themselves to hope: no new cases in six weeks, and the epidemic which has claimed more than 11,000 lives in West Africa, would be declared officially over. Then last night three more people were diagnosed with the disease in neighbouring Liberia.

It’s a bitter disappointment. So much has been achieved by governments and aid agencies working with local communities - and professionals risking their lives to get close enough to do what’s necessary. But the warnings are now clearer than ever: without vigilance, the achievement could be destroyed.

The note was sounded even more dramatically this week when scientists prompted renewed talk of an antibiotic apocalypse. They’ve identified bacteria able to resist drugs used when all other treatments have failed. It threatens a return to an age when common infections were fatal, and surgery presented huge risks: commonplace to previous generations, but unimaginable for most of us, used to the notion that there’s no problem which clever scientists can’t fix; that progress is inevitable, onwards and upwards.

But immunity can never be taken for granted, which is why we need continually to be reminded that antibiotics, which are wonderful discoveries, are never universal cure-alls, to be dispensed for every runny nose or sore throat.

‘This is a wake-up call for the world,’ says one campaigner. When some New Testament writers urged their readers to stay awake, be alert, keep vigilant, it was another apocalypse they had in mind - what they saw as the winding up of history with the return of Jesus Christ, the reassembling of the world to its proper order.

Maybe this call isn’t so very different. We’re to stay alert to the fact that as human beings with immense ability and potential, we’re still vulnerable in a universe which can expose our frailty with sudden cruelty.

We’re to keep watch in particular for those individuals and communities which are likely to suffer most intensely. That inevitably means sharing wisdom and resources, translating lofty general principles into practical action, and making choices which will hurt our pockets.

I’ve long admired the work of Philip Zec, cartoonist for the Daily Mirror during the second world war. For VE Day, he showed a soldier, head bandaged and with one arm in a sling, his face haggard and stern. In a landscape of utter devastation, he holds out a wreath of triumph, with the label Victory and Peace in Europe. ‘Here you are!’ he says. ‘Don’t lose it again!’

Victory over many deadly diseases has been won at the price of much suffering and many lives. Holding on to it might also prove costly.