“Aren’t you afraid of getting Ebola?” Almost everybody I told about my
upcoming trip to Morocco was asking this very question. People were shocked and
wore looks of worry and confusion as if I was taking an extreme and unnecessary
risk. For me, this panic seemed a bit extreme. Yes, I was travelling to Africa where
the Ebola epidemic was located, but Morocco did not have a single case of this
disease and it is far away from the infected region.
Unfortunately, my Ebola grievances did not end here. The day before flying
home from Morocco, where unsurprisingly I did not contract Ebola, I had a bad
tagine and, to put it lightly, began to experience some unpleasant stomach pains.
The flight attendants seemed convinced that I had Ebola and continued to ask me if I
was experiencing a fever or any other Ebola-like symptoms. This questioning ended
with them asking if I would rather get off the plane, to which I politely declined.
While I understand the need to be cautious, I think there is a fine line between
rational and irrational fear.
The Ebola-caused hysteria that was engulfing America a few months ago,
appeared to me to be crossing this line. During this time, it felt like every Ebolarelated news article was calling for an increase in quarantines. From Oklahoma,
where a teacher was placed into quarantine after a trip to Ebola-free Rwanda, to
Meadowside Elementary in Connecticut, where are girl couldn’t go to school
because she was Nigerian, it seemed as if everybody was struck by this quarantinecraze. To those of you who were sucked in by the media into supporting these
isolationist policies, I would suggest you take a moment to reassess the situation.
These measures introduced to quarantine individuals who were of almost no threat
to our society were unnecessary and irrational. I am not arguing that all
quarantines and safety measures are bad, but there is an extreme difference
between quarantining an aid worker with Ebola-like symptoms and not allowing a
Nigerian girl to go to school.
The first thing everybody who doesn’t agree with me should do is look at a
map. The region infected by Ebola is less then two percent of the entire continent of
Africa, which contains about twenty percent of the world’s land mass and is bigger
then the US, Europe, Argentina, China, and India combined. The teacher who
travelled to Rwanda was 2,846 kilometers away from the affected region, which is
greater than the distance between New York and L.A. Therefore, quarantining the
teacher is like if the French didn’t allow a New Yorker into Paris because of an
outbreak of the swine Flu in Los Angeles. Would you call that being rationally
cautious?
Many, including the 69% of New Jerseyans who approved of Chris Christie
quarantining aid worker, Kaci Hickox, may argue that even though the precautions
may be extreme, it is better to be safe than sorry. But there is a reason why the CDC
categorizes the risk of an outbreak as very low. The Ebola virus is not very
contagious and can only be transmitted through contact with bodily fluids of an
infected person. This is problematic for Western Africa, which, for the most part,
does not have a sanitation system, and thus has no easy way to remove
contaminated waste. The US, on the other hand, has a very sophisticated sanitation
system, that makes it very unlikely that someone would ever come into contact with
infected human feces.
Not only is the transmission rate low, but the US also has an immense
amount of health care resources and capacity. One reason Ebola has been able to
spread across Western Africa is because none of the infected countries have to
strength to combat such a disease. These countries have recently been ravaged by
civil wars and the remnants of colonialism, which have left them void of a robust
political and healthcare system. The book, The Postcolonial State in Africa, by
Crawford Young, explains this issue showing how the last 60 years has caused many
African countries, including those infected with Ebola, to have low capacity. This
low capacity makes them unable to effectively implement strategies such as
quarantines and contact tracing. Unlike West Africa, the US has an extremely high
amount of resource and capacity to combat a disease such as Ebola. Thus, while
Ebola was easily able to spread across West Africa, this would not be the same case
in the US.
One reason that this hysteria is bad is that it endorses mistreatment of
Africans and Ebola workers. There have been countless cases of Africans living in
other countries who have been harassed due to their origin. In Pennsylvania, A high
school soccer player from Africa was taunted by the opposing team who chanted
“Ebola!” Other students around the country weren’t allowed to school because they
were from Africa, even though many of them had not been to Africa within the last 6
months. The irrational fear that grips many Americans fosters this horrible
mistreatment of Africans, which is both sad and harmful.
Not only does this irrational fear foster harassment in our society, it also
hurts the ability of the international community to respond to the epidemic. People
are less likely to volunteer after seeing how returning aid workers are harassed and
poorly treated. Knowing how annoying it was to be held up at the airport in France,
I cannot imagine the type of screening and harassment that the returning volunteers
have to go through. This creates a deficit in number of aid workers, which makes it
harder for the disease to be controlled. Thus, the irrational caution that many
Americans believe in actually did not help contain the disease but rather only
allowed it to grow further out of hand.
My biggest hope is that we learn from the Ebola crisis. People were dying in
Africa and instead of uniting to help them, we were caught up in a storm of
unfounded hysteria. Next time there is an international crisis, don’t get stuck in the
media induced frenzy, read and understand the issue because your actions do have
consequences.