Ebola has killed one person in the United States. Several others are infected. And yet the emergency is considered so severe that President Obama canceled a campaign trip today “so he could convene a meeting of several top cabinet members to coordinate the government’s response to the Ebola outbreak,” The New York Times and others reported.
Suppose Ebola were killing as many as 50,000 Americans per year. And suppose we had a vaccine, but fewer than half of Americans had received it. Can you imagine the public outrage?
And suppose the virus was transmitted through the air, making it highly contagious? The nation would be paralyzed.
Now let’s leave the realm of speculation and consider this: These figures are real. But they don’t apply to Ebola.
The influenza virus kills between 3,000 and 50,000 people per year in the United States. And only 46 percent of Americans have received flu vaccines.
Where is the outrage? Where is the national paralysis? There are no emergency meetings at the White House, no journalists standing outside influenza wards in protective gear, and no plans to dispatch infectious disease specialists to the site of any influenza outbreak.
These figures and this perspective come from an Oct. 14 column in The New York Times by Frank Bruni that ran under the headline, “Scarier than Ebola.”
And he has more:
Tens of thousands of Americans die in car crashes annually, and according to a federal analysis from 2012, more than half of them weren’t wearing seatbelts…
There’s no way to square skin-cancer statistics in the United States — more than 3.5 million cases diagnosed yearly and almost 10,000 deaths — with the number of Americans showing off their tans…
…between 2.7 and 5.2 million Americans are believed to be infected with the hepatitis C virus. Deaths related to it can range widely, from 17,000 to 80,000 annually…There’s a test for it. There’s effective treatment.
Yes, Ebola is frightening. It’s exotic. But it isn’t a public health threat in the U.S., as it is in West Africa. There are reasons why we’re more frightened by Ebola than by the flu, and I’m not going to go over those explanations. But if you’re covering Ebola, keep the relative risks in mind.
And get a flu shot, buckle your seat belt, and stay out of the sun.
-Paul Raeburn
The absolute risk from Ebola is as agent of bioterrorism
I’m familiar with Slovic’s work, but my point was that we sometimes ignore significant public-health threats in favor of the exotic. Slovic explains why that happens, but that doesn’t make it right.
Thanks, David.
Best,
Paul
I think the real issue with Ebola it’s not the current deaths, but the potential ones.
A dozen of deaths of an unknown, untratable and uncontainable disease could turn into millions of deaths, and that’s pretty frightening to me
The case you make is important, and I agree. But my I respectfully offer that, unfortunately, the bulk of your critique compares the two risks statistically, lamenting the irrationality of greater fear for a lesser statistical risk, but only in the last graph, in a throwaway line, does it mention that ‘there are reasons why we’re more frightened by Ebola than by the flu’. Then you say you’re not going to go over those explanations, even though they are central to why Ebola isn’t being covered the same as influenza. Reporters need to understand them if they are going to cover Ebola the way you suggest.
Let me list a few of these explanations, which come from risk perception research pioneer Paul Slovic , who wisely has said that ‘Risk is not a number. Risk is a feeling’.
Ebola is UNFAMILIAR, which makes any risk scarier.. With no vaccines, we feel powerless. A lack of control makes any risk scarier. It kills in a horrific way, and the greater the PAIN AND SUFFERING a risk involves the more afraid of it we are.
And high media coverage raises public AWARENESS (the literature calls this availability) and bogeymen on our radar screen scare us more than those that aren’t.
And why does Ebola get more coverage? Because it is unfamiliar/new, it can’t be vaccinated against, and kills in a horrible way, with a high mortality rate. We play up the very factors that make it scarier.
I hope this helps.
Nearly 30,000 people in China are infected with dengue fever as we speak. Quick news search shows no new coverage in about one week.
Long term I could imagine an ironic outcome of this crisis: an exotic disease from across the sea that the people here (in the US) are (biologically) unprepared for.
Sound familiar?
It should, to anyone who knows the history of how the Europeans brought smallpox to the Americas, resulting in multiple epidemics that practically wiped out the native Americans.
It is probable, since Ebola and related diseases like Lassa are ENdemic in Africa, that the native West Africans ALREADY have some kind of resistance to those pathogens, just as the native Europeans in the 16th Century had some resistance to smallpox.
An actual Ebola epidemic in this country might turn out to be as devastating to white Americans as smallpox was to native Americans back then.
I would add to what David wrote that experts, not lay people or journalists, are worried about what is happening with Ebola: if the epidemic it is not stopped in Africa (and there is not evidence that the measures taken until now are in any way sufficient) we will probably have to face big troubles in the months to come even in Europe and US.
The biggest US cities with people from Ebola-impacted countries:
http://www.towncharts.com/Ebola-Top-500-Cities-in-the-US-for-Total-Born-People-
From-West-Africa.html … A travel ban would help us control.