Thanks But No Thanks, Ebola

If you haven’t heard of the Ebola virus, then you must be living in a cave.  If you are living in a cave, you should be prepared for some of us to come join you soon because Ebola virus scares us all and such paranoia may send me to the hills. 

Ebola is not a new virus.  Relatively speaking, it is new to humans, but it has been around long enough for most of us to know about it.  We’ve heard stories about this deadly contagious disease that mostly existed in remote African villages, causing many of its victims to die in a truly horrific way- while bleeding out of their orifices.  But most of us haven’t feared Ebola because we never imagined it would spread and we never imagined a patient infected with this deadly virus would actually touch ground on U.S. soil. (Which is where they belonged- at home, being cared for by the best doctors we had to offer.)

Yet here we are, in a state of virtual panic because Ebola is spreading in Africa and Americans working over there are contracting it and we don’t have a cure or a vaccine to protect us. (Never mind a cure or vaccine for those who are facing it in real life.)

This is what I think- Ebola is terrifying us because we have forgotten what it is like to fear disease.  We think of deadly infectious diseases as things of the past.  We walk around our twenty-first century world feeling secure in the knowledge that modern medicine can rid us of most infections that in the not too distant past were nothing less than deadly.  Perhaps the biggest fault with vaccinations is that they do their job too well.  Children rarely become ill with any type of life threatening infection.  Rarely are they so sick that a quick visit to the doctor won’t help.   Antibiotics are cheap and readily available and we use them like a talisman to ward off infections even before we get sick.  I wish I had a nickel for every time I’ve had a parent request an antibiotic for their child because “We are going on vacation this weekend and I just don’t want them to be sick while we are at the beach.”  

We’ve forgotten how summer time would often bring waves of panic among communities as children would go out for an afternoon swim at the local pool and come home infected with polio.  Most young parents today have never even heard of an iron lung.  We don’t remember the heartbreak of a pregnant mother who contracts Rubella and knows with almost certainty that her unborn child will now be born severely malformed.  We haven’t lived through an influenza outbreak so bad that it wipes out one third of our population just like that.  Infant mortality is a rare tragedy today, and that is a good thing.  We forget that our town graveyards are speckled with the tiny unmarked graves of all the babies who died too soon from diseases like whooping cough, diphtheria, measles, and meningitis.  We forget that before the introduction of modern medicine and vaccinations, most women saw only half of the children they gave birth to survive past childhood.  And now, in an irony of ironies, mothers hold their babies close and refuse to give them vaccines, thinking that by doing so, they are somehow keeping them "safe."

It is human nature to forget the horrors of our past.  That is just how we survive.   But if we don’t start remembering some of the fear, these diseases will come back to haunt us once again.   So, if you are going to be afraid of Ebola, that’s ok.  It scares me a little, too.  But not as much as a world where children are no longer vaccinated against polio, or measles, or tetanus, or….take your pick.  Truthfully, they are all pretty scary to me.