Putting Ebola in Perspective

If you follow news of disease outbreaks, you'll know about the outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. So far there have been more than 2,000 cases and more than 1,000 people have died.

Now the outbreak has infected the political discourse in the United States, as right-wing "news" sources are claiming that there have been cases on the southern US border with Mexico. This is, of course, completely untrue, as Crawford Killian points out. Ebolanoia has returned.

As if this kind of mendacity weren't bad enough, I'm reading Mark Honigsbaum's excellent new book The Pandemic Century, whose subtitle is "One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris." One chapter describes an outbreak of plague that hit the Mexican quarter of Los Angeles in 1924. The response of the politicians was cover-up, and the media obliged. When the news eventually got out, it also triggered alarms about imaginary hordes of diseased Mexicans sneaking across the border to infect upstanding Anglo-Saxons. 

Ninety-five God-damn years later, InfoWars and Gateway Pundit have driven spikes through the heart of any belief we might still have in progress. Yes, we've advanced scientifically and technologically and medically in countless way, but we've also dragged millions of people with us who have never abandoned their medieval view of the world ("Black plague? Burn the Jews!"). Whether they're in hostile North Kivu villages, or sitting behind keyboards anywhere in the world, they—not Ebola—are the biggest threat to global health we now face.