Ebola — The viral spread of fear

On a rainy Thursday morning, police blockades, fire trucks and news vans lined Cedar Street in New Haven.

On a rainy Thursday morning, police blockades, fire trucks and news vans lined the length of Cedar Street in New Haven. This arena of action was the latest of many concerning the outbreak of Ebola. A doctoral student, returning from research abroad in Liberia, was hospitalized with a slight fever. The individual was quarantined and the relevant authorities were informed. It was confirmed later that afternoon that there was no Ebola, just a common cold. But it was what unfolded that day outside of the disease itself that scared me the most.

Let’s start with the mass of police cars and fire trucks. Ebola is a virus. It can’t be visualized without a high-resolution microscope, let alone handcuffed or doused with water. I am not saying that proper precautions shouldn’t be taken. Ebola, while not airborne, is incredibly virulent, contagious, fast-acting and about as viscerally gruesome as a disease can get. But in this age of massive amounts of information, we are also being inundated with misinformation. A clinician I spoke to the day of the incident mentioned that their African-American colleague went home early for the day because many of his patients called to mysteriously cancel their appointments. At the after-school program I work at, many felt that the most worrying thing about Ebola is that it was killing people in this country, “a clean country with the best medical care, not like the countries it usually affects.” There was this undertone that in developing countries, the lack of sanitation made the disease inevitable, something to take in stride.

In Yale President Peter Salovey’s email that morning, the following was included at the end: “I feel that I should directly address the question of why our Public Health students — or why anyone affiliated with Yale — would even consider traveling to these dangerous parts of the world.” He went on to explain that “as an academic institution with a research and teaching mission and a long tradition of service, it is important for our clinicians and investigators to be able to go where they can put their training and expertise to the highest, best use.” The inclusion of this last part indicates that many people were wondering why anybody even dared to venture out into the world. It was all eerily reminiscent of the extremely misguided public sentiment early on in the AIDS epidemic.

What strikes me as most funny is that these sentiments are the antithesis of a contagious illness. A virus is the least discriminating organism on the planet. No matter where you come from or what color you are, if you have a set of cells with functioning machinery, it will infect you. We shouldn’t be talking about putting up figurative (or literal) barriers to prevent “the outside” from infecting us with a disease. We shouldn’t be trying to point the finger at the researcher who chose to work in Liberia, or the impending shadows of migrant populations that might bring the disease, though this might be the easiest thing to do when the real culprit is invisible.

We should be talking about washing our hands and not biting our nails. We should be talking about a cure, not because the disease has spread to our country, but because it causes suffering and eventual death to everybody it inflicts, whether they live in a small village in West Africa or a big house in Dallas, Texas. This outbreak should show people why it’s important for those with “training and expertise” to travel to countries where proper health care starts with making sure patients have clean drinking water, not leave them questioning why anybody would choose to be a global citizen in the first place.

It is true that many of us are simply concerned onlookers who are just trying to avoid contracting a virulent disease. But it is also true that for others, the virus and its impending threat are a good cover for repressed xenophobia. This is sad, because more and more, we are becoming one world with a mixing of global cultures and to me, that is a beautiful thing to be embraced and advanced, even with all the complications it might bring.

Vijay