Should I Worry About Ebola?

By Matthew Hutchings on October 28, 2014

Photo courtesy Will Wintercross, Telegraph photojournalist

Just like Hulkamania, Ebola is taking the country by storm.

At least, that’s what one would think if they got all their news from the television, which I personally do not recommend. Every day we hear more news out of Dallas, and now New York, about how doctors and nurses were not ready to handle the large quantities of contaminated blood, vomit and feces that unfortunately are the result of the hemorrhagic disease.

There were tales of deadly samples making their way to the toxicology lab with no added precautions, and of woefully inadequate quarantine procedures. Some Americans have responded by buying up large quantities of protective equipment that will probably end up at a yard sale a few years from now, unused, when the expected epidemic never appears.

Why? Because even accounting for the worst case scenario, it is unlikely that the United States will experience an outbreak, and almost certain that if one does occur it will not be one on the scale of what is happening in Liberia or Sierra Leone.

To be sure, the worst case scenario is grim. Without intervention, Ebola could spread like wildfire until it has infected hundreds of thousands or even millions of people in Africa. Luckily, there is an intervention under way, but it still needs more trained doctors willing to face down a horrendously lethal virus.

Over ten thousand people in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Nigeria and Senegal are confirmed to have caught the disease so far, and of that number, roughly half have died, making this the worst Ebola outbreak in recorded human history by death toll, surpassing all other outbreaks combined. Faced with numbers like that, it’s hard to believe that there isn’t cause for alarm.

But there are encouraging statistics too. According to the New York Times, Doctors Without Borders currently has 270 medical personnel on the ground, and out of a total of 700 doctors that have gone to Africa to fight the disease, only three have contracted it, a Norwegian, a Frenchman and an American.

Both the Defense and the State Department have assets in Africa that are moving to assist the local authorities as they try to enforce order and quarantine without the hospital beds or doctors required to treat the mass of those falling ill. A common local complaint is that while the corpse disposal teams are usually prompt, getting a doctor to help the living requires days of waiting, sometimes in vain.

Only 18 total cases of Ebola have been reported outside of Africa. The reason for this is that western countries have quarantine procedures in place, and also the manpower, money and coordination needed to ensure those procedures.

The reason this current outbreak got as bad as it did was because the region in which it emerged is one of the poorest on the planet and thus does not have nearly the same level of resources to devote to solving the problem. In a way, our own paranoia about a few doctors and nurses getting sick is akin to the immune response of the white blood cells in our bodies. So perhaps it is a good thing that whenever somebody coughs next to us on the bus, we silently wonder whether he has Ebola, even if we already know the answer is no.

 

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