Ebola: The preparation and the sense of panic
Ebola’s spread from “over there” — West Africa — to “here,” North America, is likely to spread irrational panic that has observers worried about what that panic will do.
Ebola carries such strong connotations in the public’s collective imagination through popular fiction and film that the emergence of the first confirmed case of Ebola in the U.S. will generate unnecessary concern and anxiety “even bordering on hysteria or panic,” says Priscilla Wald, a professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers and the Outbreak Narrative.
Fictional depictions of people bleeding from multiple orifices or their organs “liquefying” triggers responses most people are not even conscious of, Wald said. “There’s an automatic sense of panic that gets triggered.”
“It’s very important to try to countermand that effect and to say to people: ‘This is not about the film Contagion. This is not (the film) Outbreak. We are not in that situation’.”
Despite repeated assurances from Canadian health officials the risk of Ebola arriving in Canada is exceedingly low, a new survey suggests “contagion fear” is already taking hold.
Researchers from Carleton University in Ottawa who surveyed a random sample of 598 Ontario residents in early September found 45 per cent of respondents were either “very” or “somewhat” concerned that “there will be a large outbreak of Ebola inside Canada within the next 12 months.”
“It is remarkable that, against most expert analysis, more than four in 10 Ontarians worry that a public health emergency on the other side of the planet could soon pose a threat here,” co-authors Josh Greenberg and John Rainford write in the journal, Policy Options.
Greenberg, who specializes in risk and crisis communication in times of public health emergencies, said that while Ebola remains a “fairly remote, foreign and distant threat” to Canadians, people are drawing from a catalogue of powerful images of Ebola “that cre- ates a very sort of messy mixture of information for them to draw on.”
Sixty-seven per cent of those surveyed said they were closely following news of the outbreak in West Africa, the worst on record; only four per cent hadn’t heard of Ebola. Seventy-six per cent wrongly believed Ebola spreads easily. (Ebola isn’t spread through casual contact, like the flu. It’s spread via direct contact with blood and bodily fluids.)
A “startlingly high number” of respondents — 82 per cent — supported a travel ban to and from any affected region.
The survey also reveals an apparent contradiction: While 82 per cent said they have confidence in the government’s assessment that the risk of Ebola coming to Canada and spreading is remote, 45 per cent still worry “that there is going to be an outbreak here.”
The Carleton University Survey Centre on behalf of the Communication, Risk and Public Health Research Group carried out the telephone survey. A sample of this size carries a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points, 95 per cent of the time.