Ebolaphobia

The reaction of western politicians to the ebola outbreak is little short of criminally irresponsible. Cameron, Obama, and Kerry have all been whipping up public fear & anxiety recently with pronouncements that can only exacerbate matters. The disease has been compared to smallpox, and HIV and dire predictions made about potential numbers of cases, and horrific predictions about numbers of deaths. You'd think wouldn't you that they'd take 5 minutes to educate themselves about the condition before shooting off their big ignorant mouths.

Lets put things into perspective. Firstly Ebola is not remotely comparable to smallpox, for the simple reason that it's not spread through the air. The recent case where an infected person traveled by air has resulted in a massive exercise in contact tracing, but in reality the only passenger at significant risk of contracting Ebola would be the person sat next to her infected. The rest have about as much chance of catching it as if it were Hep B we were talking about. They'd need to actually come into contact with secretions.

And it's not remotely comparable to HIV either. HIV is asymptomatic for months or years before becoming apparent, and infected individuals live for years. They represent a large pool of people who can pass on the infection. With Ebola you're only able to infect others for a very short window of time, about three weeks, and then you either recover or die.

And with the best that western medical care has to offer mortality can be as low as 20%.

So medieviel scenarios of plague are not realistic. Not remotely

And our politicians should be reassuring us of that rather than needlessly inflaming the situation. Twats!