I’m not concerned with Ebola (yet). Still, everyone seems to be freaking out about it so I find myself reading up on it more than I normally would following a “big” story.
That, along with any major virus-spreading story, it’s further magnified 10x because I live in New York City.
I can see hyping Ebola up a little in NYC because we live in dense city where close contact (bus, subway, walking streets) is an everyday thing. We city dwellers should be the most-concerned that someone with Ebola sneaks into one of the five boroughs. So relax suburbs, you can sit this one out.
Really, all the truth I needed to quell any little concern that I had was reading that Ebola is not an airborne virus. Any major contagious life-threatening virus needs to be the airborne kind because it would be easily transferred. One can only contract Ebola by exchanging fluids or come into REALLY close and extended contact with a exposed individual.
To belabor the point (mom, I’m looking at you), you cannot get it from sneezing or coughing:
“You’d have to actually put your hand in a person’s mouth and get their saliva on your hands,” he said. “Close contact with an already sick person,” Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of the Department of Preventive Medicine at Vanderbilt University told Headline News, “and [transmission of] bodily fluids,” are the two ways you can get the disease.
We’ve been fearing and scaring about Ebola for weeks now, and we have what? Three cases? Two cases? Let’s use any Ebola-energy and focus on helping out the people that are really at the most risk – those in Western Africa where 4000+ people have actually died from the disease.
If not, at least read this:
Just to put Ebola in perspective, since the initial reported cases 10 months ago, more than 4,500 people have died of the disease. While those are genuine tragedies, so are the roughly 600,000 Africans who died of malaria last year and the 1,000,000-plus Africans who died of AIDS.
Got it? Good.
