The Real Reasons We Should Care About Ebola

In some ways I feel reluctant to even write anything on Ebola, as I think it’s getting far more media attention than it should, and what’s worse, most of the attention is misdirected. The Ebola epidemic is important, but at this point it is mainly important as a serious humanitarian crisis, and we should be chiefly concerned about helping the people in West Africa who are being affected by it. In sheer numbers it is not by any means the worst humanitarian crisis that is going on; the conflict in Syria, for instance, has killed far more people and affected many times more, and it is still going on. But while people can and should give to help Syrian refugees, not to mention refugees in other places like South Sudan, people in wealthy places like the US and Europe should feel especially motivated to help fight Ebola. Perhaps the best reason, though one that is not mentioned enough, is that with our help it can be stopped entirely. There’s not much we can do to stop the conflicts in Syria, South Sudan, Congo, Somalia, and so on, but given enough of it, Western aid could be sufficient to stop the Ebola epidemic completely. The chief reason the outbreak has become so serious in countries like Liberia is an almost complete lack of medical infrastructure and a severe shortage of trained medical personnel. If we can provide these things in enough numbers, we should be able to help bring the epidemic under control. While the fact that helping today’s Syrian refugees won’t prevent the war or the murderous behavior of Assad or ISIL from perpetuating the crisis should not stop people from helping, the fact that with Ebola we can not only help those that are suffering now but prevent further suffering ought to make people even more eager to take action.

The other motivation for helping to fight Ebola is, of course, that by doing so we protect ourselves from any danger of getting it ourselves. While the danger of Ebola spreading in the US beyond the few isolated cases so far is one of the topics that has dominated news and talk shows, even there a lot of people are getting it wrong. First of all, at this point in time, the chance of the average individual in the US is so miniscule it’s almost not worth thinking about. You are about as likely to have a plane fall on you as you are to get Ebola (okay, I don’t know the exact odds of either, but the point is the chance of either is extremely remote). Even people who have been around people with Ebola are not that likely to get it. As one such person sensibly observed, people would be better off getting hysterical about climate change. For anyone who is not actually in very close regular contact with an Ebola patient, getting hysterical about the chance catching Ebola is completely irrational. But this is not to say that Ebola couldn’t become a serious, world-wide health threat. It is contagious, if not highly so, and it is often fatal (though proper medical treatment seems to greatly reduce the fatality rate). But the right-wing politicians and talking heads whose main plan for dealing with this potential danger seems to be to shut the borders of the US are not only sorely lacking in conscience for their apparent disinterest in the people actually suffering from the epidemic in Africa, but they are also seriously lacking in intelligence or at least common sense.

In a clip that was shown on the Daily Show, Republican Pete Sessions of Dallas, in advocating policies like a travel ban on people from countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone, actually made a point of saying that his priority was to protect his constituents, implying (though not actually stating) that the people of West Africa could all drop dead as far as he was concerned. In case there is any question about their priorities, Republicans in Congress have shown a decided reluctance to fully fund efforts to fight Ebola in West Africa (and as the NIH pointed out, their budget-cutting over the years is a major reason there is still no vaccine for the disease), but are loudly calling for travel bans and other fortress America type measures to keep all the diseased foreigners out,including some truly nonsensical efforts to conflate Ebola, ISIL and undocumented immigrants crossing the US's southern border into a single right-wing paranoid fantasy. Aside from being callous and xenophobic, this approach, like the right wing approach to so many other things, would in the long-term be detrimental to what they claim is their main goal, in this case protecting Americans from the disease. Basically, it works like this. If we help to contain and eventually end the outbreak in West Africa by supplying substantial medical assistance, both in terms of equipment and personnel, no one will have to worry about Ebola, in the US or anywhere else. On the other hand, if we follow the right wing prescription of ignoring the suffering elsewhere but taking stringent measures to keep people from the affected countries out, the disease will continue to spread. Unchecked, it will spread out of West Africa, perhaps to Asia or elsewhere. The more countries and people that are affected, the harder it will be for the US to keep them all out. If it became widespread enough, it eventually would be impossible to keep out, and the US would face a far more serious threat from the disease than the almost negligible threat it faces now.

Unfortunately, hysteria seems to be winning over reason in many cases. Aside from comically idiotic cases like schools closing down because of exchange students from African countries that are nowhere near the ones where Ebola is present, there is the example of the nurse returning to the US from helping fight the disease in West Africa who was quarantined unnecessarily (and it's worth remembering that she knows far more about Ebola than the idiot governors who wanted to quarantine her). As she pointed out, this sort of treatment is likely to discourage those who might otherwise want to go help, a result which would ultimately be self-defeating, as explained above. Americans should care about Ebola, but only because like any others who can afford to do so, they should be helping the fight against it in West Africa, if only by contributing a few dollars to one of the organizations with a presence there (which is what I did myself). It will only become a danger to the US (or any other developed country) itself if our failure to help causes it to become one. In the meantime, Americans should spare some of their hysterical concern for some of the other dangerous epidemics in their country.