Panic: the dangerous epidemic sweeping an Ebola-fearing US

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/20/panic-epidemic-ebola-us

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Panic is less a side-effect of Ebola than its own sort of infectious disease, spread by misinformation and fear, a sickness that frays and tears the ways people usually get along. Hysteria shuts down schools and airports, paranoia undermines health workers and law enforcement, and fear encourages some of people’s worst instincts. As of Monday, there’s a lot more panic in the US than Ebola.

In Strong, Maine, an elementary school put a teacher on leave because she travelled to Dallas for a conference and stayed in the Hilton Anatole – “exactly 9.5 miles away” from the hospital where two nurses contracted the virus. The school board said parents feared the teacher could have contacted someone who contacted the nurses, or maybe someone who contacted someone who contacted one of the nurses – a rationale that would have fenced Maine off from Dallas, even though dozens have been declared healthy there.

In Georgia, a school district barred enrolment for students from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea unless they can present a doctor’s clean bill of health. In Hazelhurst, Mississippi, parents pulled children from a middle school after learning that the principal had been to Zambia for his brother’s funeral. Zambia, just a country away from South Africa, is well over 2,000 miles away from the Ebola outbreak in west Africa.

Nor is the mania limited to parents. Syracuse University “disinvited” a Pulitzer-winning journalist from speaking because he recently went to Liberia for work. Curiously, the dean who made the call said that while “this is not what you want to do as the dean of a premier journalism school,” she was “unwilling to take any risk”. The journalist, Michel du Cille, who has shown no symptoms and even been to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for work since his return, said he is “completely weirded out that a journalism institution that should be seeking out facts and details is basically pandering to hysteria”.

Also among the institutions that should probably know better, airlines must know by now that Ebola – contagious only through direct contact with a symptomatic sick person’s fluids – is exceedingly unlikely to contaminate a plane. But the message may not have made it to passengers and crew: on Friday an American Airlines flight crew reportedly locked a woman in the bathroom after she vomited into the aisle – an incident the airline said was unrelated to Ebola, and only occurred because the woman “probably had food poisoning or something … she asked to remain in the lavatory for the duration of the flight”. However, a witness told the Houston Chronicle that the crew wrapped the woman’s luggage in plastic and told her “We can’t let you out.”

Frontier Airlines, on which one of the sick nurses flew with a low fever, has adopted a more reasonable tact: directing passengers on relevant flights to the CDC, scrubbing the plane with extra assiduity and reminding people that Ebola is not airborne, and probably never will be (when a virus mutates it almost always gets weaker or less infectious). US congressmen, on the other hand, have called for travel bans that security and health experts call counter-productive.

Nor is Ebola seaborne, but that fear prompted docks in Mexico and Belize to refuse a cruise ship on which a Texas healthcare worker was sailing. The worker helped care for but had no direct contact with Thomas Eric Duncan, who died from Ebola; the passenger voluntarily quarantined herself anyway – presumably after consultation with the crew, who said the ship was returning to the US “out of an abundance of caution”. (Outbreaks of norovirus and influenza are far, far more common on cruises; the CDC even has a page dedicated to them.) The worker eventually tested negative for Ebola.

Worst of all, as echoed in Georgia and the comments of American politicians, west Africans and their relatives are increasingly the target of discrimination fuelled by fear. One woman from Sierra Leone told the Guardian’s Sam Jones “we feel like a pariah nation”; two British landlords refused a man lodging; the UN human rights chief has denounced anti-African discrimination; national soccer teams are treated as security risks; Pennsylvania students taunted a Guinean teen; Staten Island’s “Little Liberia” was dubbed “the Ebola zone”; it goes on and on, and makes even less sense than the hysteria.

Like a terrible incarnation of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon – people learn about a virus and suddenly start seeing it everywhere – the fear is simple human psychology. The annual annoyances of flu season mutate into the irrational terror that that man on the subway looks like he broke into a sweat, and he’s leaning your way, and what if the soap at work isn’t strong enough? – is it time to buy bulk supplies of industrial-quality latex gloves? It’s not. Get a flu shot. Wash your hands. Be nice to people. Don’t panic.