All Ebola, All The Time

OK, now that two American nurses have been diagnosed with Ebola caught from treating a patient that showed up at their hospital for treatment, and especially since one traveled here to Northeast Ohio from Texas and back again on an airplane and visited family for several days, the media is blaring huge, scary headlines about it all, as if we're all going to die of Ebola because one person traveled here and back again and was slightly ill with a low grade fever when she left here to return home to Texas. Not to underestimate a very scary disease for which there is no apparent cure and that has a 70% fatality rate, but the two nurses who contracted this disease are in isolation in a hospital that is equipped to treat it. However, now that two Americans have contracted this disease from someone who brought it over here from Africa, the media is going into a fear frenzy and convincing us all that we should be very afraid and lock ourselves in our homes. Naturally, the whole thing has been politicized and everyone is pointing fingers and blaming each other over failures to contain this deadly virus, which does no good to help the situation. The mass panic that the media is scaring up is really getting tiresome because at this point, you stand a better chance of contracting the flu than you do of catching Ebola. You'd have to come into direct contact with a patient's blood, vomit, urine or other bodily fluids in order to catch it and that is highly unlikely. People also forget that this is the US and not Africa and we do have a health care infrastructure in place that they lack. They also lack clean drinking water and sanitation. something else that puts the US at an advantage for containing this disease. Yes, hospitals lack the training and protocol to handle patients, because Big Insurance pretty much runs our health care system. When you have cubicle flunkies who are 18 year old High School graduates making our health care decisions for us instead of trained doctors, nurses and other professionals, you know that something is desperately wrong with our system. Still, I don't think that there is anything over which to panic at the moment and I wish that the media would just kindly calm down and stop breathlessly sounding as if we're all going to catch Ebola and die from it any day now. You stand a far better chance of catching the flu than you do of coming down with Ebola. So enough, already. Go get a flu shot and remember to wash your hands frequently. Because you're not going to get Ebola.