Spot on.
I dont understand why so many peoplr are just dismissomg the serious nature of what could happen....
I dont want hysteria, far from it... just a healthy but if caution.
What worries me isnt the virus... its this apathetic 'ah, itll never happen, ebola sucks as a virus' mentality.... where theyre saying one thing but itd spreading like wildfire.
That will cause hysteria, if and when people realize that what theyre being told by the science textbooks doesnt match up with the reality on the ground.
And thats whats scares me, the hysteria of stupid people flocking together violently, looting, etc.
I feel like if they took it seriously and approached it with a healthy amount of caution, itd be a lot easier to keep the people calm than it is telling them they have nothing to worry about and then trying to explain why people in hazmat and NBC/MOPP/whatever the fuck protective suits keep getting it.
okay let's pause a moment and use a little bit of our cerebral tissue here.
the spanish flu pandemic was an airborne disease in a day when spreading the news meant handing a letter to someone and crossing your fingers it might get there in a week. by the time anyone even realized there WAS a pandemic the continent was already decimated. ebola is a direct-contact disease in a time when the entire world knew about the outbreak before it had a significant body count.
in 1919 "modern medicine" was still trying to wrap its head around the germ theory of disease. it was only about 40 years prior that doctors were fucking starting to wash their hands before surgery. in 2014 we have the human genome decoded and a doctor in Melbourne can conference call with a virologist in North Carolina to confer about something a scientist in Madrid told them both about that morning.
when the spanish pandemic happened no one knew who had it until people started dropping dead. when we found out about a single person in dallas they landed in a quarantine and almost ALL of them got cleared (the ones who didn't are still waiting for the 21 day incubation period to end). there was a hint of possible ebola in state college PA (near me) and 80 students got quarantined and tested.
i caught Glenn Beck on CNN yesterday morning talking about "if ebola got airborne..." and you know what it reminded me of? the frenzy about people saying "if bird flu could transfer from human to human". viruses don't work like that. a virus isn't a checklist where you can just flip a switch on "airborne" and the virus will just remain exactly the same except for the one trait. ebola is also not showing any mutation, and in fact people who survive ebola are the best to use to treat people who later get it.
the only, and i mean the ONLY, reason it spread as far as it did was because nigeria and sierra leone are so woefully behind in containment that they had the first wave of infected people running away from hospitals and hiding.
you're talking about you want "caution", which is what every single governing body is screaming about. the UN, WHO, CDC, TSA, and everyone with even a hint of influence is making sure this does not spread further. the people with the blase attitude are people like me, and we're blase for two very salient reasons:
1. ebola is a deadly disease, but one of the absolute worst for transmission.
2. the medical community is so on point for this it's only a matter of time.
plus, let's look at another number: 80%. that's the survival rate for US patients with ebola. out of five, one died. is it a tiny sample size? of course, but it shows the power of modernized medical practices and you'd have to be really determined to believe in the ebolapocalypse to ignore that surprising result. initially ebola was thought to have a 90% mortality rate, now death is an anomaly for people who contract it in the more modernized world and get medical attention in a timely manner. let's not forget that the first dude who got it went way too damn long before getting seen by a hospital.
the ebola outbreak started last december and less than 10,000 people have died. since then, well over a million people in sub-saharan africa have died of malaria and tuberculosis. that's two orders of magnitude more worrisome. one american has died.
this is the american problem. two americans get beheaded by ISIS and suddenly ISIS is the greatest threat to american lives, meanwhile the mexican cartel has beheaded about 250 americans and no one cares. five americans get ebola and the virus gets contained and people shriek that the world is going to die, meanwhile several thousand people are going to die from the goddamn flu this winter and everyone just shrugs. the media latches onto one juicy story and gullible people lose their goddamn minds about it.
it's not like climate change because the difference here is that the common people just need to settle down BECAUSE it's being taken care of. the appropriate actions are being done, the disease is being controlled and contained, and we will survive. climate change has right-wing fucktards claiming it doesn't exist AT ALL and that we don't need to do ANYTHING, and it's hamstringing legislation to get the situation well in hand. with ebola, there is a microscope on every little thing out there and everyone is working hard to make sure it doesn't (and hasn't) spread.
is ebola serious? you're fucking right it is. should you personally be concerned? no, you should not.
