As you may be aware, ebola is a horrible – and contagious – condition which, when someone contracts it, leads to fever, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and then, in the vast majority of cases (up to 90%), death.
Obviously no one would want to come in contact with ebola, or any creature, human or animal, which has it.
Until now, ebola outbreaks have occurred, almost exclusively, in rural areas of West Africa. But now it suddenly has turned up in African cities as well – specifically in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.
Yesterday morning, I channel-surfed to MSNBC, and caught a few minutes of Melissa Harris-Perry discussing ebola with, among others, Laurie Garrett – a Senior Fellow on global health at the Council of Foreign Relations who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for chronicling an ebola outbreak in the Congo. You can watch a video of this conversation by clicking here – Ms. Garrett starts at about 1:50.
Here are the first words she spoke:
“Ithink the last thing we need to be concerned about is \’oh, will ebolacome to America\’. So let\’s just take that off the table for now andget real.
“Gettingreal is, we have an unprecedented situation that\’s very hard toforecast, because we\’ve never had urban ebola before as well asrural. We\’ve never had a situation where ebola\’s coming out of therainforest, and the rainforest happens to cut across all three of thecountries. So we don\’t actually know how many of these cases arereintroductions from the wild bats and monkeys that usually are thetransmitters of this really rare virus in humans. The third thingis, it\’s cross-border we\’ve never had that situation before…”
Am I missing something here? How can Ms. Garrett first tell us it is ridiculous to consider the possibility that ebola will come to America – “…let\’s just take that off the table for now and get real”….
….and then, her very next words are that we have an unprecedented situation (i.e. one we\’ve never seen play out before) in which ebola is in urban areas (i.e. places where business people might travel to, and then travel to America”.
If that isn\’t self-contradictory, I\’d love to know what is.
Plus, if you watch the video you will then hear Ms. Garrett lament the quality of health care in the countries she is talking about.
So we have an outbreak of ebola, it is in urban areas where there may be business travel, the countries where the outbreak takes place have lousy health care services (presumably this includes poor or non-existent detection and treatment of ebola)……but it would not make sense for us to worry that it could be coming here, so we should “get real”.
It seems to me that Laurie Garrett is the one who better “get real”. Because though that set of circumstances doesn\’t make her worry one little bit about an outbreak in the USA, I can assure you it worries me.
How about you?
