There is a very important and illuminating article about Ebola this morning in Wired. The gist is that the unless we rapidly contain and stamp out Ebola in West Africa the future really is grim – just not for the reasons which have dominated press coverage in the US. Ebola will likely never be a significant threat in the US (or other wealthy, technologically advanced countries). And it is very unlikely that it will mutate into a more effective contagion (like the flu). The real threat is that it will become endemic in West Africa and then migrate to other parts of Africa and then or other parts of the globe like the many global mega-cities with vast slums with poor public health infrastructure where Ebola could take root and become endemic.
In this scenario, it’s not always at crisis proportions as it currently is in West Africa but always there percolating at a low level and episodically erupting into major outbreaks at different hot points around the globe.
The scale in human lives and suffering should be enough and obvious enough. But also at stake would be a major economic downturn as the free flow of goods and people – which is the virtual life blood of the global economy – were permanently slowed or bottlenecked in various places because of fears – real or paranoid – about Ebola.
This makes it all the more important that as many doctors and nurses as possible be able and willing to go to West Africa to try to stamp out the outbreak. In this weekend Christie-Cuomo quarantine fiasco, it’s been more or less treated as an given that doctors going to Africa is laudable, nice, and all that. But fundamentally it’s charity. And don’t endanger us because you want to go and be a do-gooder in Africa and possibly expose yourself to Ebola.
But it should be clear that we’ll never be fully safe from people bringing Ebola into the United States (even if the chances of a substantial outbreak permanently remain very low) as long as its raging totally out of control in West Africa, let alone if Ebola has embedded itself in mega-city slums across the world.
Another point along these lines: I’m not sure how widespread it is yet. But in this weekend’s public frenzy over this nurse who was detained in New Jersey there’s been a growing argument on the right that she’s some sort of left-wing do-gooder endangering the rest of the country. So tough luck if she doesn’t like being detained in a tent in Newark – that’s what you get!
Indeed, there’s even been this fringier but growing line about her ‘concealing her ties’ to the CDC, as though the CDC is itself a suspect, nefarious institution – almost like the CDC, before our eyes, is being transformed into the right’s next ACORN.
This last point especially bears watching. Ebola has already been – ridiculously – pulled into our national culture wars. It’s too serious to let that happen or let the nonsense grow to truly epidemic proportions.
