Fearbola: Ebola hysteria more pervasive than the disease

I don’t want the Ebola virus. And God help me if I get it.

I don’t want AIDS, or swine flu, or bird flu. I don’t want tuberculosis. I don’t want malaria.

Maybe a tapeworm, as it would work wonders on my waistline. But other than that, I’m not having it.

Miraculously, though, I’ve been able to make it this far without contracting any of these communicable diseases that have at one time or another been classified as a global health crisis or a pandemic.

God help me if I get Ebola, because chances are I’ve taken part in a long, wet make-out session with a Liberian fresh off the African continent. Like most of the deadly contagions in the world, they are fluid-borne and you’d need some very intimate contact or live in some strange and strangely unsanitary, Third World conditions to make that happen.

Does a Dallas hospital count? Probably not.

As a rational human being who isn’t prone to fear-mongering or hysteria, I am confident America is not about to be overrun by Ebola virus. We’ve been watching too many episodes of “The Walking Dead,” become way too fascinated with incurable diseased-brain zombie culture.

Even worse, though, there are people who are invoking politics and maybe a little bit of racism, xenophobia and fear of the Third World and its poor to keep many of us scared beyond good sense on Ebola. When largely conservative political candidates use Ebola as an opportunity to stoke fears of a porous U.S.-Mexico border, then we have to question whether these idiots are qualified to lead us if they are uneducated enough to make such statements. If fear is a tactic here, where else will they use it?

We’ve got a lot more to be scared about than Ebola. Yet this is a disease that will require extra precautions and some changing of standard health practices and screenings that likely needed revamping anyway. After all, we live in a world that is becoming increasingly fluid and increasingly borderless.

I would hope that all of us would be better protected from potential biological disasters as global citizens, friend and foe, come in and leave through our nation’s airports.

Although the director for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is a viral (excuse the pun) video star this morning after he likened the threat of Ebola to the global threat of AIDS, are we all grasping the context in which he said it or meant it? I believe he was referring to the slow manner in which the U.S. government and world governments responded to AIDS, to the lack of efforts in containment, research and simple acknowledgement that the public was at risk. The Reagan administration was among the most guilty in ignoring AIDS/HIV as the “gay disease,” that is, until those non-gay bodies started piling up.

As a result, AIDS/HIV hysteria took root across the country very early for lack of understanding. That makes it even more important that people take a moment to react with reason and not out of fear when it comes to Ebola.

There are a number of instances in the news where people are being profiled and coming under unreasonable scrutiny because of their travels or their skin color, their backgrounds. At what point will people became suspicious over a sniffle and sneeze, paranoid over a hacking cough and a minor fever?

The death rate of Ebola is pretty alarming, for certain. With just over 8,000 cases diagnosed in West Africa and 3,900 deaths as of Wednesday, according to the World Health Organization, the rapid spread of the disease is scary.

But for perspective’s sake, AIDS has claimed 36 million lives and now infects 35 million people since it was declared a pandemic in the early 1980s. Yet AIDS/HIV’s growth and rapid spread had more to do with not raising public consciousness fast enough, not marshaling world health efforts on a global scale until it was too big a problem to contain.

There are problems still in terms of addressing global health crises. Watching Ebola make its way into Western Europe is equally as panic-inducing as seeing it in America, killing deep in the heart of Texas. CDC, Customs and Border Protection at our international airports, the World Health Organization, they do need to tighten the gaps in what they do.

Still, the world is responding to Ebola a lot faster and more efficiently than AIDS, and a lot of more thoroughly to the diseases that kill far more people than Ebola, such as tuberculosis, malaria, even dysentery, which is nothing more than glorified diarrhea due to contaminated water supplies.

Please, let’s get some perspective on Ebola. I don’t want it either, and I’m probably not going to get it.

This column first appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, Oct. 10, 2014.