The virus was first named in 1976, thus some six years
before the earliest Internet protocol came to be introduced in 1982 and before
the phenomenon we now call Cable TV was fully introduced; that happened in the
1980s. Therefore we had neither cable news channels churning 24/7, nor social
media, nor yet a political culture prone to mega-hysteria. Nor were we likely
to give everything new the e-this or e-that designation; else, surely, Ebola,
named after a river in the Congo, would soon have been transmuted into the E-Plague.
Since then, all told, 35 observations of the virus have been
recorded in the 39-year period 1976-2014. Before this year, three of those observations
had been made in the United States: in 1989, 1990, and in 1996. In 1990 four
people developed anti-bodies to the disease in the U.S., but they did not get infected;
in the other years, no humans were touched at all. And nobody died in the
United States. The observations were traced to monkeys, imported from the
Philipines for medical research.
Across the globe, the 35 Ebola introductions produced deaths
in 30 years of the 1976-2014. Some nine observed appearances of the virus
produced no deaths. Death tolls reported ranged from 1 to 431 before the 2014
outbreak, the high number in 1976. These data are reported by the CDC (link).
The 2014 Ebola outbreak is the most severe ever—and this
time the plague has claimed one life on U.S. soil, that of a Liberian, in
Dallas; and several Americans have been infected and are under treatment in
U.S. facilities. Not surprisingly, therefore—in this age of total
communications—the Hysteria is ON. The politicians are frantic in their attempt
at looking active—as if doing
something is the only proper answer to any crisis, whether you’re qualified to
do something or not.
Alas, the political response has come to focus on the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention, and—as I heard one politico say, at the
recent “hearing” on the subject—the action, the doing, will consist in holding CDC’s feet to the fire.
The media eat this subject up like hungry vultures—in endless
news stories, interviews with folk who know nothing more than I do, and in
outraged op-ed pieces. The result is that yet another institution worthy of
respect and admiration is being thrown to the wolves, the CDC itself. It is
supposedly incompetent. The only competents among us, seemingly, are those who
hold other people’s feet to the fire. I might liken them to a species of monkey
that carries the virus but, fortunately?, is itself immune to the disease.
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