A Liberian national arrives in Dallas while sick with Ebola.
A Liberian national arrives in Dallas while sick with Ebola.
Because he is not yet showing symptoms of the disease and perhaps because of lax screening procedures at the airport, the man is able to enter our country. When symptoms of the disease begin to appear, the man seeks help at a local hospital, is sent home and then when he returns is too sick to be saved.
The people he came in contact with are closely monitored and none of them show signs of Ebola. That is, until, a nurse discovers she had contracted the disease.
In the world of fiction, that’s the opening to a novel most of us would read by the pool or on an airplane. Sadly, this time these events actually happened and officials at the local, state and national level still are dealing with the fallout.
Also, the bedside manner from the folks at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention could use some work. For instance, officials said a breach in protocol led to the nurse contracting Ebola but they have not said what exactly was done wrong. And the threat in Dallas apparently will not end with the nurse.
“It is possible in the coming days that we will see additional cases of Ebola,” CDC Director Tom Frieden said.
For some people, including some in the national media, it is officially panic time.
However, the national media is in a constant state of panic about one thing or another and Ebola is just the latest. Those of us who live in hurricane country know just how overwrought their reactions can be to things they’re not used to. We’re reminded of one summer when sharks were, somehow, a major threat to all of us.
Panic sometimes overrides reason. Consider how many people urged U.S. government officials to do something to prevent two American missionaries from coming home for treatment after they contracted the disease in Africa. Thankfully, both of them recovered and no one else contracted the disease from them while they were being treated.
There is an old saying in the news business: When a dog bites a man, it isn’t news. But if a man bites a dog — that’s news. We often use another similar phrase when readers complain about the glut of negative news: Any plane that lands safely won’t make the paper; it’s the rare one that crashes that makes headlines.
Ebola, so far, is the man biting the dog. It’s uniqueness, gruesome symptoms and the difficulty in treating it make it major news.
Hopefully, this Ebola outbreak will be contained. In the meantime, there is one thing you and your family members can do to protect yourselves from a disease more likely to affect you: get a flu shot.
The shot obviously won’t protect you from Ebola, but it will protect you from a disease that infects between 5 and 20 percent of U.S. residents and sends 200,000 people to the hospital each year. Also, between 1976 and 2006 the flu killed as few as 3,000 people a year and in bad years it killed as many as 49,000.
While some of us are numb to the reality of flu season it is clearly far more dangerous to most Americans than Ebola.
Sometimes the bigger story ought to be when the dog bites the man, just as a reminder that it could happen to you.
— From the Panama City News Herald