Ebola in Dallas. Ebola in New York. Even our small state cannot escape the news coverage – “NBC news cameraman from Providence diagnosed with Ebola,” ran one recent headline. It seems hard these days to get away from the Ebola hysteria. Parents are pulling their children from school, families are deciding to stay at home and U.S. companies are massively increasing their production of protective gear. Brown’s campus cannot even resist the hype. The Herald has run multiple Ebola related pieces — with one column even going so far as to suggest that the entire U.S. population might contract Ebola. A writer for USA Today wrote of the situation: “All the elements of hysteria were there in print and online, the large font headlines, hazmat suits, police in masks.” Our own university sent a campus-wide email declaring a University ban on travelling to West Africa. But is all this hype and hysteria called for? No, not really.
For starters, Ebola is just not that easy to get. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, you can only get it from direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person. So unless you’re within spitting distance of an infected person, you’re safe. You can’t even contract the disease by contact — the virus has to enter your body through an orifice or open wound. The nearest infected person? Nearly 200 miles away from Providence. Then, it’s nearly 2,000 miles to Dallas, Texas. After that, you’d have to go all the way to Africa to find someone with Ebola. Only four cases have been diagnosed in the United States. Four. The CDC also notes that Ebola cannot even be passed along in food or water.
A recent letter to the editor in The Herald by Richard Bungiro PhD’99, senior lecturer in molecular microbiology and immunology made a comparison between Ebola and the flu. The flu is far more contagious than Ebola, and millions of Americans contract it each year — up to 20 percent of the population, according to the CDC. I certainly don’t want to start another panic, but in bad years, the flu can cause up to 49,000 deaths in the United States. If you take nothing else from this column, stop worrying about Ebola and just go get your flu shot. If you missed the free shot clinics, Health Services offers them for free by appointment.
Don’t worry, our government is taking all the steps necessary to contain and halt the spread of the disease at the national and state levels. All flights from Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea are being routed through U.S. airports with special screening stations. New York, New Jersey and Illinois have gone ahead and imposed controversial, mandatory quarantine rules for aid workers returning from affected parts of Africa. And in September, President Obama committed up to 3,000 U.S. troops to help fight the Ebola outbreak in Africa.
Brown is among several universities taking serious precautions, including banning undergraduates from University-funded travel to affected regions, requiring staff and faculty to receive clearance before traveling to them and offering rooms and meals to students over Thanksgiving or winter break who would ordinarily head back to those regions.
Some politicians are calling for President Obama to issue outright travel bans to Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. Their calls seem to be motivated far more by a desire to score political points before the midterm elections than by reason. Health experts have derided the idea of a travel ban. J. Stephen Morrison, the director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, went so far as to claim that “a cordon sanitaire of this region would be a public health failure as well as an ethical and political failure.” Such a ban would also limit and stymie our efforts to combat the spread of the disease in Africa and care for the victims there. Some commentators even assert that calls for a travel ban have an element of racism. Ask yourself: would we consider a travel ban anywhere besides Africa?
Former U.S. Sen. Scott Brown, who is now running in for a Senate seat in New Hampshire, and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, among others, are trying to mobilize Ebola hysteria even more brazenly. They are calling for Obama to close the border with Mexico to stem the flow of Ebola-stricken migrants into the Southwest. The problem? There are none. The only confirmed cases of Ebola in North or South America are in the United States. Maybe the Mexicans should close the border on their side. I would also note that there have been no calls to close the U.S.–Canada border. This is a case of political opportunism — these are the same politicians who have used every crisis from the rise of the Islamic State to the rise in unemployment as a reason to clamp down on the border.
So, in the face of 24/7 media coverage, international hype and doomsday language, should you worry about Ebola? No, not really. The rest of your midterms are probably a bigger threat to your happiness and quality of life.
Walker Mills ’15 got his flu shot last week. He can be reached at walker_mills@brown.edu.
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