The Ebola crisis has gripped the American media, and by extension the imagination of the public, punctuated by breathless pronouncements from TV news reporters of the medical status of actual and potential victims of the disease; hysteria-inducing magazine covers, like this issue of Bloomberg Businessweek sporting the message “Ebola Is Coming” in blood- smeared letters; and Facebook feeds dominated by click-bait images of microscopic photos of the virus with eerie back-lit tangles of fat worms symbolizing the foreign bodies that could invade us all.
Some media outlets around the world have taken advantage of this outbreak to increase their ratings and this in one way or the other & the same have forgotten that there is a dangerous strain of the common summer respiratory ailment enterovirus, which mostly affects children, has emerged this year in larger than expected numbers. EV-D68 has infected more than 700 children in 46 states and the District of Columbia, and it has killed at least five children so far. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has taken steps to track the outbreak, saying it “has received substantially more specimens for enterovirus lab testing than usual this year, due to the large outbreak of EV-D68 and related hospitalizations.”
Ebola is a form of hemorrhagic fever whose symptoms are diarrhea, vomiting and bleeding.
The virus spreads through direct contact with infected blood, feces or sweat. It can also be spread through sexual contact or the unprotected handling of contaminated corpses.
Latest figures issued by the WHO show that 4,555 people have died from Ebola out of a total of 9,216 suspected and confirmed cases, as of October 14. The health agency has admitted to failure in anticipating the current scope of the Ebola outbreak and falling short of giving a quick and appropriate response.
This Ebola hysteria has fueled racism in the following ways;
#There are some politicians & business men who have been pressing their leaders and governments to ban all flights from West Africa. Trump e.g. called Obama a "psycho" for refusing to restrict commercial flights from Ebola-stricken countries in West Africa. However, the US President Barack Obama has announced that a travel ban from West African countries hit by Ebola would not be effective against the spread of the deadly disease.
#There is a college outside Dallas which has unilaterally made the decision to rescind its admissions to foreign students from countries with confirmed Ebola cases, including Nigeria, where the disease has just been officially declared under control.
This is really absurd; According to the WHO Senegal was declared Ebola free. The statement came following the 42-day mark, which is twice the maximum incubation period for the disease, without any new cases since Senegal's single, non-fatal Ebola case on August 29. Nigeria on the other hand will also be declared Ebola free on Monday if no new cases emerge in the country, in which the last case was detected on August 31.
#Children of African immigrants in Dallas being labeled “Ebola kids,” and residents in Duncan’s immigrant-heavy neighborhood feeling personally discriminated against at work and at restaurants.
#Duncan’s family, stricken with grief over his death, has already questioned the fact that the only person to die of Ebola on U.S. soil so far is a black man. They say Duncan’s death was the result of actions that could have been racially motivated given that he was not moved to the same hospital where other Ebola patients successfully received treatment.
#While other Ebola patients were seen as victims, Duncan was viewed by authorities as a malicious carrier of the deadly disease. Even as he battled for his life, a county prosecutor publicly considered filing criminal charges against him.
#Perceptions matter, and in our current social and political context, the question posed by his family is a valid one, if only because in the wake of his story, we are already seeing a disturbing level of backlash against dark-skinned immigrants, including children of African immigrants in Dallas being labeled “Ebola kids,” and residents in Duncan’s immigrant-heavy neighborhood feeling personally discriminated against at work and at restaurants.
Any human being with a stable mind & character truely & accepts that Ebola is indeed a serious crisis—in West Africa. More than 4,000 people in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea have died and thousands more are at risk of death. There are major concerns of a global scale that ought to be discussed but are rarely tackled in the mass media.
My urge to all governments, donors, health workers, the media should focus mainly on measures on how this scourge can be averted rather than creating an environment that fuels racism against minority inhabitants.
In fact, all four aforementioned and rarely discussed aspects of the Ebola crisis have an overarching theme: Moneyed interests are trumping our public health. Perhaps that is why it is more convenient to invoke the myth of the diseased foreigner and distract us from a far more insidious malady inflicting our society and our world: capitalism.
