“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 Ebola-related 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 quarantine-craze. 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, whichcontains 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 NewJerseyans who approved of Chris Christie quarantining aid worker, KaciHickox, 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.