Ebola in Town

With all the panic surrounding Ebola over recent months, particularly in the U.S, one must ask is Ebola really a threat to the worlds leading power?

Over the past week alone, numerous reports have sprung up from across the nation in response to fears of Ebola. In Mississippi, a family had their their children removed from the local middle school on the grounds that its principal had recently traveled to Zambia—a nation in Africa, but not one to be affected by Ebola. Furthermore, certain colleges across the nation have sent rejection notices to a number of applicants originating from Nigeria on the basis that the institutions did not want to accept “international students from countries with confirmed Ebola cases.” However with less than 20 cases having been reported in the nation, the outbreak is effectively over for all intensive purposes.

Now one cannot solely blame the American public in regards to their bad case of Ebola hysteria, as they’re merely following the precedent of their leaders. Earlier this month New York Governor Andrew Cuomo raised his view that the U.S should “seriously consider” a travel ban on all West African countries hit by Ebola, while some of his less politically inclined colleagues went as far to raise the far-fetched proposition of an unknown terrorist group intentionally sending Ebola-infected refugees into the U.S. Frankly it’s hardly a surprise that a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll found that two-thirds of the American populous are concerned about a potential Ebola outbreak in the U.S.

In reality however they have no reason to be and two occurrences that took place earlier this week show why. On Monday WHO officials declared Nigeria to officially be “Ebola-free.” Meanwhile in Dallas, the first wave of patients being monitored having had come in contact with Thomas Eric Duncan, the first Ebola patient in the U.S., were also declared to be free of the disease.

As Africa’s most populous nation-home to 160 million people, news of Nigeria’s complete treatment was met with global exuberance. Nigeria’s public health system is far from the best in the world and epidemiologists had feared the worst in regards to Ebola spreading unchecked through large cities such as Lagos. Nevertheless, following the first few cases the nation was able to quell the endemic through sound preparedness, a quick move to declare a state of emergency, and an effective management of public anxiety. If a nation with a per-capita GDP of $2,700 proved itself more than capable of handling Ebola, how much more a nation possessing 19 times the GDP?

Nigeria’s success is also a reminder of the reality that if caught at the onset, Ebola is effectively quite simple to control, this being largely due to the fact that the disease remains extremely hard to circulate outside a hospital. For all the panic surrounding Ebola in the U.S, one must recognize that there has not yet been a single case transmitted from within the community. Those who might argue, that the nurses who contracted the disease from Duncan would stand as the exception would be wrong, as their exposure to the disease only highlights a flaw within the treatment protocol carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and this was fact was admitted by it’s director Dr. Tom Frieden. However as U.S. health officials now better understand the threat before them, there should be minimal of further infection.

The likelihood of a future case like Duncan’s remains extremely slim. With all the hype to ban commercial flight to and from West Africa, one must first recognize that the region is already barely connected to the U.S. With only 150 people arriving from the region to the U.S. everyday, this number has further reduced as many airlines have already begun suspending flights.

None of this in anyway should diminish the severity and scale of the challenge faced by the governments of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, where the disease runs rampant and all efforts to stop it seem to fall short. However, besides Nigeria, Senegal acts as the only other nation to have succumb to the outbreak but was declared Ebola-free this week. Nevertheless, Western Africa is where our efforts and concerns should lie, not in the U.S, where Ebola thankfully remains something people don’t have to care about.