Among the methods of dying I am far more worried about than contracting the Ebola virus:
– Getting run over by a combine driven by a farmer angered by my enthusiastic support of North Dakota’s Measure 5.
– Getting drowned in the murky waters of the Red River by a farmer south of Fargo-Moorhead angered by my unwavering support for the much-needed diversion.
– Having an Acme anvil dropped randomly on my head, out of the clear blue sky, for no particular reason, a la Wile E. Coyote.
In other words, I sleep just fine at night. Speaking of which, I worry more about being murdered in my dreams by Freddy Krueger than I do about Ebola.
This despite the constant drumbeat of sensationalism blaring from our television sets daily – with Fox News in the lead, of course – about how the Ebola epidemic is rampaging throughout the United States and how, naturally, President Obama is to blame.
Let’s present some numbers to back up the talk of an epidemic, or outbreak, or plague.
Two.
Two people. That is the exact number of people in the United States who’ve tested positive for the Ebola virus when this column was written early in the week. The first was a Liberian man who flew to the United States and later died. The second was a nurse who cared for the Liberian man in Dallas and, according to early reports, was thought to have contracted the virus through a “breach in protocol.”
There might be more, no question. But as of Sunday, two people in a nation of 319 million had tested positive for Ebola.
I’ll take my chances with those numbers.
Yet the media would have us believe we are smack dab in the middle of a Hollywood thriller like “Contagion” or “Outbreak,” with people dropping like flies in the streets and our largest cities just days away from anarchy.
It got so ridiculous last week that the former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party, somebody who actually held sway over state politics at one point in his life, sent out Twitter messages calling for the execution of anybody who tests positive for Ebola.
Todd Kincannon, who trumpets that he is strongly “pro-life,” tweeted the following messages:
“People with Ebola in the U.S. need to be humanely put down immediately.”
And:
“The protocol for a positive Ebola test should be immediate humane execution and sanitization of the whole area. That will save lives.”
And:
“There’s just no other way with Ebola. We need to be napalming villages from the air right now.”
I’m sure it’s just coincidence the villages to which Mr. Kincannon is referring are located in West Africa and populated mostly by black people. Yeah, a coincidence.
All this while, statistically, you have a much better chance of dying from the flu than you do from Ebola. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 5,643 deaths were attributed to the flu (or pneumonia, which is often caused by the flu) between Dec. 3, 2013, and Jan. 12, 2014.
And when’s the last time you worried about dying from the flu? The next time will likely be the first time.
Why the panic over something that most medical experts say will not be a major deal in the United States because of our advanced health-care system? A couple of reasons, IMHO.
No. 1, Ebola makes for what we in the media business call “good copy.” It is a mysterious disease that comes from Africa for which there is no known cure. And it causes a horrific death. People don’t just quietly die in their sleep. There is awful vomiting, diarrhea and body sores. It’s just a horrible way to die. And that, in the 24/7 media world, is “good copy.”
No. 2, the conservative media (Fox News, the right-wing talkers like Limbaugh, Hannity and others) are using Ebola to attack President Obama. Conservatives have accused Obama of putting U.S. troops in harm’s way by sending them to West Africa, they’ve accused him of being slow to react, they’ve accused him of not closing the nation to all incoming flights from Africa, they’ve accused him of not naming an Ebola “czar.” And that fuels those who consume conservative media into believing a couple of cases of the disease is going to turn into the Zombie Apocalypse. It’s political scare tactics, on which the right thrives.
A history lesson: At the end of World War I, an influenza outbreak turned into a global pandemic. Worldwide, an estimated 20-40 million people died as a result. In the United States alone, an estimated 675,000 citizens died from influenza.
That is an outbreak worth losing sleep over. Two confirmed cases of Ebola are not.
(Mike McFeely is a talk-show host on 790 KFGO-AM in Fargo-Moorhead. His show can be heard 2-5 p.m. weekdays. Follow him on Twitter @MikeMcFeelyKFGO.)