By Ryan Geever
Staff Writer
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Many people are in uproar over the Ebola virus, and frankly, most of it is uncalled for. Yes, it is fact that there have been people who have died from Ebola. Yes, there are cases of Ebola in America. Now that we have those facts out of the way, let me tell you some reasons why Ebola isn’t going to end the world as we know it.
Ebola is Extremely Hard to Catch!
To contract the Ebola virus, fluids from an infected patient have to enter your body via a cut or one of your orifices. If you wanted to, you could literally douse your hands in infected blood and—provided you didn’t have a cut and you washed properly afterward—still not get Ebola.
You might be saying to yourself, “But what about the common fluids, the sort we share on a daily basis like saliva and sweat?”
Well, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), the live virus has never been isolated from sweat, so no, your bodies aren’t going to be spreading Ebola anytime soon via your perspiration.
As for saliva, it only becomes a problem in the most dangerous stages of the virus, meaning you’d have to be French-kissing a terminally ill patient to even begin to stand a chance of catching it from saliva. And no, bloodsucking insects like mosquitoes do not carry the virus from one human to another.
Ebola is not Airborne!
Well, okay, it’s possible for it to mutate and become airborne, but only in the same way that it’s technically possible for Kanye West to become the 45th president. While Ebola theoretically could evolve to take to the air, it would have to go against everything we know about virus transmission to do so. According to the WHO, there is literally no evidence that in any way documents airborne Ebola (not even the 1989 Ebola mutation discovered in Reston, Virginia). No virus in history has changed its method of transmission so drastically. Even super-fast mutating viruses like HIV and flu have never switched delivery method, and Ebola is like a sleeping sloth compared to those two.
And what about the possibility of Ebola being spread by coughs and sneezes, flu-style? Again, it’s extremely unlikely. As Scientific American pointed out, Ebola doesn’t replicate in sufficiently large quantities in the lungs and throat to make infection via sneeze a possibility. The virus also doesn’t give its victims cold-like symptoms.
There’s a Small Number of Actual Cases of Ebola!
Who of us here remember swine flu? In 2009, we were convinced that a flu outbreak was going to annihilate all life on Earth. We barely noticed as it first spread across the globe, yet the virus still managed to infect over 60 million people in the US alone. If the States could shrug off nearly one-fifth of its population coming down with the last media panic, how many people must Ebola have already infected to cause such a storm this time?
8,000… worldwide. While that’s clearly 8,000 too many and horrible for all concerned, it does show how phenomenally slow and limited Ebola’s spread is. Only a single infection has been reported in Spain and Senegal each, with no deaths. Even in the States, where Ebola has already claimed a life, the total number of infected people (at time of writing) stands at three.
For comparison, on average, the bubonic plague infects seven Americans annually. Yet, as of 2014, we’re still to experience a repeat of the Black Death pandemic that devastated Europe.
It’s Been Here Since 1976!
Ebola has been a thing since the mid-seventies, and even came to America in 1989, so if this extremely deadly virus has been here that long, shouldn’t everyone in Africa and America be diseased and long since dead by now?
The Media is
Fear-Mongering You
By now, you’re probably wondering why we’re hearing so much about a virus that will almost certainly burn itself out with very limited fatalities. Why are newspapers publishing stories that suggest all health and medical professionals are intentionally lying to us and the world as we know it is about to end? There are a few reasons, and one is very simple: audiences eat it up.
Look back at almost any pandemic story of the last decade, and it’s pretty clear that the media focuses almost exclusively on the negatives. During the SARS epidemic, the Daily Mail ran the headline “SARS more serious than AIDS,” predicting over a billion cases. There hasn’t been a single case reported globally since 2004. When swine flu blew up, multiple papers claimed that it could kill 120 million people. In the UK, the effect of the panic was worse than the flu itself. By summer 2009, only 30 people had died, but the media-induced panic had nearly crashed the nation’s health services.
People simply don’t want to be reassured. If I’d named this article “Ebola Will Destroy America (And It Is All Obama’s Fault),” this would be the most read issue of this paper thus far.
Same deal with news sites: they can’t let the other guy get all the Ebola clicks, so they churn out bigger, louder, and scarier articles to pull everyone in.
After all, if they keep on scaremongering, they may be right sometime. A disease may devastate the whole Earth at some point in the future. But this Ebola epidemic won’t. And the sooner the world’s editors and reporters realize that and just settle down, the better.
