The largest outbreak to date of Ebola hemorrhagic fever has been taking place in West Africa since about March. The virus, which begins with symptoms such as fever and a sore throat, developing to cause diarrhea, bleeding and decreased liver and kidney function—among other symptoms—has, according to World Health Organization figures from Aug. 22, resulted in death in 1,427 out of the 2,615 suspected cases during this outbreak. The actual death toll is suspected to be even higher than this reported figure.
Though the disease itself has yet been confined to Guinea, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Liberia, Ebola spread to the U.S. as well, infecting headlines and generating popular fear during the summer. The fear, fundamentally, is that the disease would reach the U.S., and since there isn’t a vaccine developed for it, would cause great fatalities here as well. This is a reasonable worry. But I found the degree to which Ebola had taken over news broadcasts and social media discourse bizarre: Yes, the WHO declared it to be a global health emergency; yes, the fatality rate does make it more dangerous than most diseases, but the fear has seemed more of a collective terror or dread rather than a rational worry, and I wondered why.
The first reason is that, for whatever reasons, our fears aren’t always rational: There’s just something about foreign diseases that spooks people, when, say, in the U.S., more than three times the number of people are killed every month in car crashes—people of all demographics—than have been killed by Ebola so far in this outbreak as a whole. But no one freaks out about car crashes.
There are other diseases as well that affect people—in the U.S., but mainly abroad—much more so than Ebola, and we don’t live with such a perpetual anxiety about them as has been the case with Ebola. For example, influenza kills 250,000-300,000 people in the world every year, even though its fatality rate lies somewhere between 5-10 percent. Diarrhea kills 801,000 children annually. Tuberculosis affects two billion people a year and kills 1.3 million of them.
But when thinking about why people in the U.S. feared Ebola, but none of these other diseases, the unconscious psyche became apparent: Ebola could actually hurt the people who decide what’s news and who appear on my Facebook.
Americans, particularly middle-class Americans, never really have to be afraid of being killed by diarrheal infections the way people in Africa and South-East Asia do, and 90 percent of tuberculosis deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries. But with Ebola, since there’s no cure to it yet, if it gets here, we will suffer. (Though, still not as badly, since we do have better conditions of sanitation and healthcare setups that would offer superior quarantined care to patients.)
What the frenzy regarding Ebola actually reflects isn’t a mere fear of the disease but also the huge inequality in global healthcare, the fact our populace’s unconscious comfort derives from not having to worry much about tuberculosis and the flu and that we really only considerably care about diseases in low-income countries when our middle class could get them too. In fact, the same allegation could be raised not just against the public and the media but also against major institutions such as the WHO.
That isn’t to say that Ebola isn’t something that should be dealt with or that the people who are sad about the loss of lives in West Africa aren’t genuine in that. But collectively, this awareness and antipathy to the disease would not exist in the U.S. if our simple material conditions didn’t protect us, as compared to West Africa from more quantitatively significant diseases. There wouldn’t be the anxiety about Ebola that exists if it didn’t put us at the same level as Africans—something the American middle-class isn’t used to dealing with. Our anxiety (not theirs, which is very well-founded), in other words, is but a manifestation of global class-consciousness.
