CNN is reporting that “A patient being treated at a Dallas hospital is the first person diagnosed with Ebola in the United States, health officials announced Tuesday.”
Don’t be surprised if you start seeing all kinds of “Chicken Little” style reports popping up. News that Ebola has turned up is freaking out a lot of Americans. “Helpful” bits of commentary include things like it’s “deadly uncurable,” has a 90% fatality rate, and causes “a hemorrhagic fever that eventually leads to a complete bleed-out.” Today’s news merely amplifies the anxiety that’s been building since word got out that two Americans infected with Ebola have been moved to US hospitals for treatment.
But Quartz wrote an excellent article explaining why you shouldn’t be that worried:
- Ebola’s not airborne. It can only be spread through bodily fluids. The virus spreads when blood, semen, urine, vomit, feces, or other bodily fluids of an infected person come into contact with someone else’s mucus membranes.
- And it’s not just any infected person—it’s asymptomatic infected person. People can only catch ebola from someone actually exhibiting symptoms. Those include vomiting, diarrhea, and, in some cases, hemorrhaging of mucus membranes, such as nose, nail beds and eyes—in other words, pretty hard to miss.
- It isn’t curable, but people survive it. In fact, this outbreak has a 57% mortality rate—much lower than that oft-cited 90%. Victims die of organ failure, not blood loss.
- That pig study doesn’t mean anything. Some people are citing a 2008 study showing airborne Ebola transmission from pigs to rhesus monkeys (they were never in direct contact with each other). However, as Aetiology explains, this experiment showed merely that pigs seem unusually good at spritzing the air with coughed-up viruses. Avoid Ebola-infected pigs and you’re fine.
- Nearly every hospital in the US is equipped to treat Ebola patients and keep them in isolation. And the symptoms, once they set in, are so aggressive that it’s hard to do much of anything except head to the hospital.
- Another reason for all the worry is that the media (Quartz included) has tended to zero in on this outbreak’s rapid spread and its being the “deadliest in history.” While both are true, that says way more about the quality of medical care in war-torn, poverty-stricken pockets of West Africa than it does about Ebola’s virulence.
So, while the news of Ebola showing up here in the US is something to be aware of, it’s by far not time to start making your funeral arrangements.
