Don’t Panic! Part II: Ebola in America

Nearly everyone has heard of the Ebola epidemic that has been raging in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea for the better part of a year. Maybe not ten months ago when it first came to attention, but almost certainly as of last week, when a man was diagnosed in a Dallas hospital with the disease after recent travel to the region. I stumbled across the video above, and it really made me want to write a companion to my blog on mass panic and epidemic hysteria, putting the concept into the context of Ebola.

Ebola is not a disease like the flu. It is contagious only after the patient begins to run a fever and show symptoms, and can only be spread through contact with blood or bodily fluids, unlike the flu which is primarily transmitted by droplets in sneezes or coughs and can be contagious before the symptoms set in. It’s not to say that Ebola isn’t a dangerous disease–it is. There still isn’t a vaccine or cure, and it hasn’t yet been contained. That being said, the differences in public health infrastructure and culture between the endemic countries and the US could not be more different. Sierra Leone and Liberia have experienced major domestic warfare in recent years, and there is little government outside of the capital cities. Family members are most often the ones taking care of their ebola-stricken loved ones: combining that close proximity and lack of education about how ebola spreads (many believe that the disease is a curse from God) creates a high risk environment. Burial practices are also contributing to the spread of the disease–in many cultures, physical contact such as touching, washing, and kissing the deceased is common, and if the person has died from ebola, their body still carries the virus and is contagious.

So why is our media so focused on ebola? Why in the video does Elisabeth Hasselbeck insist there should be concern and panic over this disease, while the epidemiologist calmly explains there really isn’t anything to worry about?

I believe that, similar to the Monty Hall dilemma*, people don’t want to be wrong. Though the probability of mass secondary cases of ebola developing in the US are slim, the consequences of someone getting ebola are still so severe (since I’ve started writing this, the Dallas patient has died) people are willing to take unnecessary precautions. As improbable as it might be, people still are in the mindset of “just maybe“, or “this could be the exception“, and public health officials in Dallas are warning that the anxiety of this potentially-present disease will likely cause more damage than ebola ever will. Epidemiologist Larry Brilliant puts it, “they failed to diagnose Ebola, they diagnosed zero out of one. Over the next four weeks we will diagnose 1,000 out of zero. We’ll diagnose everybody with Ebola”. A pileup of hysterical cases in Dallas ERs could be disastrous, taking doctors away from patients who truly need their care (or in an unlikely scenario, exposing more people to ebola should another isolated case come into the hospital).

Overall, the media seems to be inciting more panic than actually educating people on the fundamentals of ebola and how it spreads. The focus isn’t on how drastically different west Africa is from Dallas, Texas, but rather how we could be looking at “a plague like no other!”, as Donald Trump likes to put it. While vigilance, especially at international hubs like airports is important, Americans need to learn more about and understand the disease that has the media buzzing.

*In which people, despite a decreased statistical probability of winning, will still tend to stick with their first guess to avoid the sinking feeling of getting it wrong after switching and having been right the first time.

 

One thought on “Don’t Panic! Part II: Ebola in America

  1. Richard Michael Francis

    I actually watched this report live the other day and it honestly did nothing but make me panic about the situation. The reason is because we here how bad it is over there in Africa and we hoped it would never make it here but now it finally is. This makes me wonder how long its going to be before it gradually makes its way into somewhere like state college. However, this post is definitely more comforting in the considering so many articles are based around how harmful it is. I posted a link below talking about how fast Ebola is actually expected to spread across the country along with the world.

    http://www.freep.com/story/news/world/2014/10/08/experts-concerned-ebola-strain/16879009/

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