Ebola: Panic and Politics
It is human nature to take the most dire forecasts either more or less seriously than the more routine ones. When the weatherman predicts showers, or a politician warns of the consequences of an otherwise inconsequential piece of legislation, we tend to process those claims in reasonably responsible fashion. But when we are faced with predictions of an historic blizzard or the threat posed by a deadly disease, we usually eschew the middle ground in favor of either panic or a state of denial.
So when we see reports of Ebola’s spread through the dark continent, and arriving on our shores and perhaps in our nation’s capital, we should remember to be cautious about panic. On the other hand, this is Ebola we’re talking about, and the forces in place to protect us reside within the Obama administration, which causes the growing ranks of those who disapprove of this administration to consider heading for the hills and buying up silver coins and diesel generators.
About five miles from where I reside, a new Ebola virus was discovered in 1990. “It is the single member of the species Reston ebolavirus… named after Reston, Virginia, US, where the virus was first discovered.” “The Hot Zone” by Richard Preston tells the tale of what happened in Reston, and how the virus was discovered.
I wouldn’t recommend the book if you have trouble sleeping. “The first chapter of The Hot Zone starts out horrifying – and then it gets worse. That’s what I keep marveling over: it keeps getting worse.” said Stephen King. That’s a heck of a blurb by the man who has created some of the most frightening fictional terrors of all time. It is another thing altogether when he is referring to something real, and in your backyard.
Aren’t we already doing what we can? On August 3rd, Obama appointee Dr. Thomas Frieden, CDC Director, said “… I don’t think it’s in the cards that we would have an outbreak in this country,“ and “The way it spreads in Africa is really two things. First, in hospitals where there isn’t really infection control and second in burial practices where people are touching the bodies of people who have died from Ebola. So it’s not going to spread widely in the U.S.” Oh, so no problem then.
Oops – “Contact Tracing” or “Contact Surface Infection” – “U.S. Journalist Fears His Ebola Infection A Result of Latent Exposure… The American journalist with Ebola who arrived at a Nebraska hospital this week believes that he may have gotten infected when he got splashed while spray-washing a vehicle where someone had died from the disease.”
It would help if the Centers for Disease Control weren’t so politicized and controlled by an administration with a certain, um, flexibility with the truth, not to mention a proven track record of politicizing just about everything. The CDC has been shown to use tax dollars to influence purely political positions before, and the Obama administration has shown that it will put domestic short-term political victories ahead of the physical health and well being of U.S. citizens, including the extra-legal admission of foreigners into the U.S. with infectious diseases. And Obama and his CDC can’t even get their stories straight about whether people can pick up the virus sitting on buses. All this does not exactly generate confidence in our political and public health leaders. And confidence becomes vital when existential threats present themselves and the potential for panic escalates.
Have you seen the list of immunizations required for travel to Africa? It is daunting and must be administered in stages well before travel. And this was prior to the ebola breakout. Africa is already overwhelmed with poor public health, and an impoverished and superstitious population low in scientific literacy. That is not a recipe for success in the containment of pathogens.
In the past, Ebola would spread from its animal host to humans, pass human to human a few times, and then die out. It never had a chance to adapt to humans. The current outbreak is different. Because Ebola now has had many “passages” through the novel human environment, it has had many more opportunities to adapt to humans. This may be reflected in some of the changes in genetic sequence observed in the Science paper. It may also be reflected in changes in the ability of the virus to replicate and spread in humans. People who expect Ebola to remain unchanging in its new human host are ignoring evolution. If mutations can occur which will allow the virus to spread more efficiently in humans, then, given enough time, such mutations will occur.
Ebola was an animal virus.
It is becoming a human virus.
This changing nature of infection and rapidity of mutation are vitally important to public health policy because there are no do-overs possible. If the deadly contagion does become more able to transmit from human to human, the consequences could be catastrophic. Lest we forget, less than 100 years ago, a worldwide flu epidemic killed some 50,000,000 people – almost 5% of the world’s population. Today that would be 350 million people – and that was influenza, not ebola.
The nature of this rapidly changing virus, the disease’s destructive power, and the possibility of airborne transmission, conspire to recommend extreme caution and precaution. There is already a case of transmission of the disease to protected personnel.
Do we as a nation really benefit so greatly from travel to and from West Africa that we can’t suspend such travel until the threat abates? Is it somehow racist or hysterical to suggest the benefits of continuing to allow passage to and from that region are clearly trumped by the current risk to humanity from this disease? We know that “every time a new person gets Ebola, the virus gets another chance to mutate and develop new capabilities” including the most feared – airborne ebola, or “respiratory transmission.” If that happens – well, lets just say lingering arguments about population control will become moot.
The Federal and state governments failed the citizenry in helping reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS in the 1980’s. And while that was transmitted differently than the current threat, we need to pay close attention and demand a high degree of accountability from our elected officials and their appointees when it comes to ebola so we can be absolutely certain they are not playing political games with our lives.
