Why it took American media 700 lives for them to highlight Ebola epidemic
What you need to know:
- My first Ebola experience was in Uganda in 2012 when Ebola hit the forest area near the Congo border.
- My second experience with a scary disease was in Beijing in 2009. My plane from Chicago had just landed and the pilot announced that none of us would be able to get off until Chinese health inspectors had checked all passengers.
News is what happens close to an editor.
That humorous adage is popular in media companies around the world. But it could easily reflect the American public’s engagement with the Ebola crisis, which is ravaging Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and Nigeria, and is slowly creeping to the upper level of the American conscience.
When I began monitoring the situation last spring, there was little mention of the crisis on mainstream American news sites. At the time, I was telling everyone who would listen that it could easily become a worldwide pandemic.
Today, the story is finally being discussed in America. But we may be too late to save ourselves.
The reason that we are engaged? American aid workers have contracted the disease in Africa. With the spread of Ebola to Nigeria and its direct flights to Asia, Europe and America, airports are now on the alert worldwide for sick passengers who originated in central Africa.
It took that case to catch the attention of America, but by that time, 700 had died in central Africa.
I have seen Ebola’s face, and it causes great fear wherever it appears. The disease can hide for up to three weeks in the body and then break out and kill in a matter of days.
That happened last week in Lagos, Nigeria, when an American contractor, who had been working in Liberia, collapsed after getting off a plane.
DOCTORS IN MOON SUITS
My first Ebola experience was in Uganda in 2012 when Ebola hit the forest area near the Congo border.
My apartment complex in Kampala was suddenly inundated one evening by European doctors carrying moon suits. They had come to isolate those exposed to the virus and to stamp it out. They succeeded.
During the battle, one of the victims was transported and isolated at a Kampala hospital. An international news company reported that the disease had come to the Ugandan capital, sparking fear that it might spread throughout East Africa.
My second experience with a scary disease was in Beijing in 2009. My plane from Chicago had just landed and the pilot announced that none of us would be able to get off until Chinese health inspectors had checked all passengers.
Sitting in the main cabin, I saw people dressed in moon suits working through the seated passengers. When they got to me, one pressed a temperature monitor to my forehead to see if I was suffering from a fever. Another asked if I had been ill in the last few days.
If one person in our plane had been found suffering from a fever, we would have all been transported to a quarantine area outside of the city to be monitored for two or three weeks.
We were cleared. Walking off the plane, I was tested again in the airport. At my hotel, the bellman gave me a thermometer and asked me to take my temperature.
The Chinese were not searching for Ebola. They were looking for a derivative of the SARS virus that severely harmed the nation’s economy over a decade ago. It was an example of how fear can change life dramatically.
America is withdrawing Peace Corps volunteers from western Africa. There have been panics in American emergency rooms over possible Ebola outbreaks. None of the scares turned out to be real.
The Ebola story was ignored too long. Now that it is in Nigeria, the question is not whether Ebola will arrive on American shores. The question is when.
How will American health authorities handle the crisis if Ebola emerges in one of our large cities?
