Once the news came that at least one of the Americans infected with the Ebola virus was going to be brought to Atlanta’s Emory University Hospital for treatment, just like clockwork Twitter went off in panic. America’s resident real estate genius Donald Trump let loose with a series of tweets which were epic in their fear and stupidity. Sample:
Ebola patient will be brought to the U.S. in a few days – now I know for sure that our leaders are incompetent. KEEP THEM OUT OF HERE!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 1, 2014
Now look, Donald and all you other gutless wonders who took to the Twitter machine to show off your ignorance, unless you’re planning to go to West Africa to help, or you’re planning to go to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta to treat Dr. Brantly or Ms. Writebol, you have no chance of contracting this disease. It is spread only through bodily fluids like vomit, blood, or feces. Unless you’re planning to invade the isolation room in which the two patients (Americans, by the way, who have a right to return to their home country) will be treated, you won’t touch them. Likewise, unless you travel to Guinea, Sierra Leone or Liberia to help treat the living or bury the dead, you won’t be infected.
This is yet another example of too many Americans being told by one of our political parties for years and years that scientists lie (see the climate change argument) and can’t be trusted, and that government can’t do anything right and shouldn’t be trusted either (see Reagan: “Government is the problem”). They have stopped thinking for themselves. All the facts about how the disease is transmitted are known and have been known for more than twenty years, as are the methods of treating it (isolation, constant hydration).
As Jim Wright said in a Facebook post earlier today, measles, a disease for which we have a proven vaccine, killed 122,000 people worldwide in 2012. That’s 330 deaths per day, 14 deaths per hour. Or take influenza. WHO estimates “Worldwide, these annual [flu] epidemics are estimated to result in about 3 to 5 million cases of severe illness, and about 250 000 to 500 000 deaths.”
I’ll worry about measles and flu for a long time before I worry about Ebola.
As a matter of cold fact, I heard in one of the broadcasts on NPR that you can also contract Ebola from an infected patient’s sweat. It isn’t only vomit, blood, and feces. That doesn’t invalidate either your point about any risk to The Donald (he should have some kind of risk to deal with!), or the fact that measles (and whooping cough, of which the anti-vaxxers have provided California with a little epidemic) are much more likely threats than Ebola.
I hedged. I said “fluids like vomit,” etc.
You should have seen Twitter. The idiotic fear and anger directed at the people who decided to bring these two people home was unbelievable. I didn’t show one of Trump’s uglier ones:
“The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back. People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences!”