It seems like every single year, there is an outbreak of a deathly illness that sends people running mad. In an episode from the TV show “Scrubs” a news reporter announces an outbreak of E. Coli, which sends the entire town literally sprinting towards the hospital. Now, obviously, this is a dramatization for a TV show, but in this blog, I will investigate the real life instances in which this occurs.

Last summer and into the fall, the disease of choice was Ebola. Ebola is a virus which is spread to humans through wild animals, and is very contagious. Originating in Africa, it effects both rural and urban areas. Previous outbreaks of Ebola have spelled near certain death for patients, but recently, a rehydration method has lowered the average fatality rate down to around 50%. This fall, three cases of Ebola were diagnosed in the U.S., and people went ballistic. A WebMD survey  showed that 80% of people were concerned that they were going to contract Ebola. A majority of Americans wanted to screen people flying in from overseas, and a smaller, yet significant, majority wanted to quarantine all passengers coming from Africa. This is quite ridiculous when you consider the very low hazard that Americans had of contracting Ebola. There are over 300,000,000 people in the United States, and three were infected. This puts the hazard at a “massive” 0.00000001. The risk of death once you contract the disease is high, but not as high as many people thought. In another survey done by the Washington Post, it was found that 65% of Americans were worried about a widespread epidemic. This, all because three people in the US had the disease. This case clearly points to the sensationalization of sickness, but it is certainly not the only case.

In 2009, there was a virus called H1N1, referred to as Swine Flu. Swine Flue was first diagnosed on April 15th, and by the 26th of that same month it was declared a public health emergency.  School districts were urged to close for two weeks if a student was diagnosed, but some took liberty to close if a student was diagnosed as “probable” for having the disease. On May 4th,  2009, over 500 schools were closed, leaving 330,00 students without a place to go, and countless parents unable to go to work. My summer camp was effectively shut down for a month due to this virus. This was merely the first wave of the disease, though. On October 24th, it was declared a national emergency by President Obama. With this overwhelming response, one might expect the hazard of infection to be around 60%, with the risk of death being around the same level. For the six months that the disease was raging in the US, only 115,000 people were infected, with 3,400 deaths. This is a hazard of .03833333333%, and a risk of death of 2.956521739% if infected. This is minuscule compared to the reaction that the disease received. The hazard and risk clearly do not fit the response in this case. The common cold, on the other hand, receives no attention at all each year, yet it claims 36,000 lives in the US each year, 10 times as many as swine flu did in its entire existence. This illness has a much higher hazard as well, as the CDC reports that that average adult gets 2-3 colds each year. This is a whopping total of 750,000,000 colds, and that is without statistics on children, who have much weaker immune systems.

The sensationalization of sicknesses is very clearly quite real. Based on my calculations of hazard and risk, when juxtaposed against the responses sicknesses receive shows supreme overreaction, similar to that of the hazard of shark attacks. The CDC, FDA, and many other government organizations put lots of time and energy into attempting to solve these crises, but in reality, there are much more important issues that they could be dealing with.