It was revealed a couple of days ago that a Liberian-American by the name of Thomas Eric Duncan developed the Ebola virus upon his return from a foreign visit. The story has the American health care apparatus, government officials, and the public on edge. The State of Texas has been searching for any and all persons who may have been in close contact with Duncan in recent days, and are monitoring.
The concern, of course, cannot be overstated. Ebola is fatal roughly 50 percent of the time, and there is no known vaccine or cure. Exposed people have to let the virus run its course, albeit the administration of fluids and certain experimental drugs can help.
Like many diseases which have incubated overseas such as Asian bird flu, Ebola has proven to be very easy to spread across long distances thanks to world travel, although it is much less easy to spread than airborne viruses. But Ebola has proven to be a particular problem because of urban overcrowding in West Africa, as well as poverty, poor hygiene, and the lack of clean water.
Given the lethality of the Ebola virus, it is amazing that there is so much misinformation about it. In Ebola-afflicted areas, the misinformation is that the disease is a curse or a CIA-concocted chemical weapon, or that outside health workers caused the death and misfortune for the village.
Other misinformation has happened in the United States. Some in social media have claimed that Ebola is transmitted only immigrants. Further ridiculous claims about weaponizing the Ebola virus strains have been made by elected officials and conspiracy theorists. Even some health professionals have intimated that Ebola could spread exponentially — something which doesn’t happen in the real world.
Wild claims like these have never proven true: there was a claim during the 1988 Presidential election by the Lyndon LaRouche campaign that the U.S. population would be wiped out by AIDS by 1996.
We’re still here.
I think the public health system of this country, led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, is more than ready for Ebola because of previous outbreaks and epidemiological models which have been made standard practice over the last few years.
But I’m not sure about the rest of the health-care system — the hospitals, insurance companies, and the pharmaceutical industry. It turns out that the hospital in which Duncan has been admitted — Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital — misdiagnosed him in the first place, sending him back to his Dallas apartment before taking him in two days later.
And so it goes.
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