When I was 15, I couldn't get a paid job, so I worked as a volunteer lab assistant in a Federal water polution lab doing virus research. Ha now you would need a MS to do bottle washing! Anyway I got the story of the emergence and identification of the Marburg virus from researchers who had been exposed to the same risks of a virus mutating and jumping from chimpanzes to people.

The virus was brought to Marburg, Germany in African chimpanzes used for research. There it jumped to the lab workers, almost all of whom died. Those chimps had been in a London air terminal 3 days before, if the virus had mutated and jumped to humans then, the virus would have been spread worldwide. Given Marburg has an about 85% mortality rate for people with the best health care on the planet, you can do the math.

So, as humans, in Africa, the Americas, Europe, China, Japan, wherever, we exist in a biosphere where at any given moment, some infectious strain could emerge and wipe us out. Even the plague in Europe wiped out 1/3 of the population. There's plenty to be done in Africa improving living standards, but we're equally subject to disaster on a large scale or individually wherever we live.

The real question is how to respond to that - self interest, compassion, dispair, transcendence?