Ebola and Ignorance: Confronting Both Epidemics at Once

       Conspiracy theorists have been quick to spread all kinds of rumors about Ebola. As expected baseless rumors are often contradictory. They can't all be right, and yet the internet is ablaze with them. According to the sages of the internet Ebola is a communist plot, a symptom of capitalism, a government hoax, Obama's handiwork and a plot against Obama and the government. Cultural elders like Phyllis Schlafly and Rush Limbaugh have publicly opined that the American administration wanted Ebola to spread in the US to atone for slavery and make the US more like Africa. We are confronting an epidemic of stupidity.

      The American College of Emergency Physicians and the CDC update their information on Ebola daily. There are real issues Americans should be concerned with. Ebola is known to have a very high mortality rate; by our best estimates 50% or more of people infected die. Therefore we must be concerned with how the virus is disseminated. The CDC has stated that the virus can be disseminated by direct contact i.e. when open skin or mucus membrane interfaces with pretty much any bodily fluid, object or animal contaminated with the virus. The question of airborne particle transmission is an open and scary one. According to the CDC's own materials airborne transmission has been demonstrated in animals under experimental conditions. It is entirely possible that Ebola can be transmitted via airborne particles, in which case it could be as contagious as the flu and as deadly as a heart attack. It is impossible to discount entirely that we could enter a pandemic of medieval proportions. But what is far more likely is a pandemic of fear, paranoia and even hysteria with consequences in every aspect of human life. When a completely globalized world starts to disconnect, there will be consequences for everyone. When uneducated people view their lives as at risk the consequences are extreme.
  
     In the late1990s I volunteered with recovering heroin addicts. I got a glimpse of a world only a few meters away from my alma mater Columbia University, but eons away in norms. Staff members of a recovery house had observed the worst aspects of human behavior when the HIV scare swept the country. In one case a woman and a young baby moved to a nearby apartment building. The woman was rumored to have HIV. Some other residents of the building broke into the woman's apartment and killed both her and the baby out of fear they might become infected. In retrospect the incident now seems to be the most absurd tragedy. A newborn baby was viscously murdered. Those who killed the woman exposed themselves to the virus they sought to avoid via her blood. Extreme fear has extreme consequences.

    Fortunately, inside the Ebola crisis is an opportunity. It's past time that the public got a better education on infectious disease. Yesterday it was SARS, today it is Ebola, tomorrow there will be a new potential global health pandemic as surely as there will be rain. Educators of all kinds and at all levels can seize the moment and influence the world. Education is always possible even in illiterate populations. In Brazil the life cycle of a common parasite is drawn onto certain bills of money. Since everyone uses money, and almost everyone can see pictures whether or not they can read, the public has basic information at their fingertips on this one pathogen. Perhaps the one positive thing that can come from the Ebola crisis is innovative public health education campaigns that will stop the global pandemic of fear that seems to follow every new infectious disease that emerges.