Podcast Center
Video Center
Webcasts
Resource Center
Events
October 20, 2014 at 10:42 AM
One scary thing about Ebola is how quickly we become like those primitive, irrational people who had to deal with the Black Death in the Middle Ages.
Those cruel, foolish people who used to keep poor, suffering souls dying from the plague out of their towns.
It’s funny how tough and rational those people suddenly seem now that I’m the one worrying about whether “someone with Ebola-like symptoms” has attracted a crew of emergency response workers in Hazmat suits at a nearby airport.
A few weeks ago, I used to try to track the ups and downs in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) exchange system by searching Twitter for terms like #HIX and unpaid. Now, I find myself searching Twitter for hazmat, or plane and hazmat, or airport and hazmat.
On the one hand, Ebola is certainly not nearly as contagious as the common cold, or even something like tuberculosis. Countries like Nigeria say they’ve managed to stamp out outbreaks. When officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) say, “We have no evidence that people can spread the virus before symptoms appear,” it seems reasonable to believe that they’re correct.
Public health authorities ring alarm bells for one outbreak or another every few years, in part because of trauma over the 1918 flu pandemic. In most cases, a catastrophic pandemic does not occur, or at least not in Western countries. Our public health authorities get the situation under control, and life goes on.
