Ebola Hysteria

I am fed up with the irrational and distorted  Ebola stories. If one watches media often today he or she would think that civilization is imperiled by the outbreak in a part of Africa for a weak strain of the Ebola virus.  But wait! Don't let news reports infect your brain with nonsense. According to the Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health, statistics indicate that  the actual risk a person faces of contracting Ebola, which, like the virus itself, is so tiny, it's downright microscopic. Here are far more common ways a resident of the U.S. could die this year.

• Heart disease — A U.S. resident circa 2005 faced a 1-in-5 chance of dying of this in his or her lifetime,
• Cancer — 1-in-7 lifetime odds of dying from this.
• Stroke — 1-in-23
• Accidental injury — 1-in-36
• Motor vehicle accident — 1-in-100
• Assault by firearm — 1-in-325
• Natural forces (heat, cold, storms, earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, lightning strikes, etc., combined) — 1-in-3,357
• Drowning — 1-in-8,942
• Air travel accident — 1-in-20,000
• Asteroid impact — 1-in-147,717
• Tsunami -1-in-500,000

What about the risk from Ebola? Well, the lifetime odds of dying from the disease is so small it is hard to compute, but it is far less likely than a person winning a multi million dollar power ball lottery.  Since Ebola's first outbreak in the 1970s through the one raging today, according to the World Health Organization, the total number of deaths attributed to Ebola has been 5000. That's it!

So, if the odds are far more likely to die in a car accident than of Ebola, H1N1, tsunamis or a natural disaster, why does Ebola seem to worry so many people so much? Familiarity with an agent of death can be one factor affecting our perception of risk. With cars, we take so many trips over our lifetimes that our brains learn not to be afraid of what might happen in the event of an accident. But the mass hysteria the media causes by introducing Ebola to us creates an irrational fear in us. Ebola for many people is new and not something they have personal experience with, so it's perceived as riskier.

Too, the lack of control over something like Ebola makes us fear it more.....like the small child terrified of "the monsters hiding underneath my bed". We don't have any sense of control over Ebola and the media reports it as being out of control.  Logically, people should think more about the reality of Ebola and realize that Ebola is not highly contagious, it's being managed carefully, and there're been epidemics in the past. They've all been controlled, and the same thing's even more likely to happen now, given modern medical advances.

What the media should say (and not so much because the story just isn't that newsworthy) about Ebola is what is true. Ebola is hard to catch and transmit compared to other infections because it requires direct contact with bodily fluids . In the six months of the 201) outbreak, there have been 3,431 deaths. That's a very low number for a serious infectious disease . The influenza pandemic spread by coughing of 1919, for example,  infected 500 million people across the world, killed 50 to 100 million (5 percent of the world's population in a year) .

Maybe instead we should worry about what needs worry, and that certainly isn't about catching the Ebola virus.