Download Fear of Ebola Closes Schools and Shapes Politics

Fear of Ebola Closes Schools and Shapes Politics
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
In the month since a Liberian man infected with Ebola traveled to Dallas, where he later died,
the nation has marinated in a murky soup of understandable concern, wild misinformation,
political opportunism and garden-variety panic.
Within the escalating debate over how to manage potential threats to public health – muddled
by what is widely viewed as a bungled effort by government officials and the Dallas hospital
that managed the first case of Ebola diagnosed in the United States – the line between
vigilance and hysteria can be as blurry as the edges of a watercolor painting.
A crowd of parents last week pulled their children out of a Mississippi middle school after
learning that its principal had traveled to Zambia, an African nation untouched by the disease.
On the eve of midterm elections with control of the United States Senate at stake, politicians
from both parties are calling for the end of commercial air traffic between the United States
and some African countries, even though most public health experts and the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention said a shutdown would compound rather than alleviate the
risks.
Carolyn Smith of Louisville, Ky., last week took a rare break from sequestering herself at
home to take her fiancé to a doctor’s appointment. She said she was reluctant to leave her
house after hearing that a nurse from the Dallas hospital had flown to Cleveland, over
300 miles from her home. “We’re not really going anywhere if we can help it,” Ms. Smith, 50,
said.
The panic in some way mirrors what followed the anthrax attacks of 2001 and the West Nile
virus outbreak in New York City in 1999. But fed by social media and the 24-hour news cycle,
the first American experience with Ebola has become a lesson in the ways things that go viral
electronically can be as potent and frightening as those that do so biologically. The result has
ignited a national deliberation about the conflicts between public health interest, civil liberties
and common sense.
“This is sort of comparable to when people were killed in terror attacks,” said Roxane Cohen
Silver, a professor of psychology in the department of psychology and social behavior at the
University of California, Irvine.
Ms. Silver studied and wrote about people who heavily consumed media after the bombings
at the Boston Marathon in 2013 and “what we found is that individuals who were exposed to a
great deal of media within the first week reported more acute stress than did people who were
actually at the marathon.”
In his work on panic in various disasters, Anthony Mawson, a visiting professor in the School
of Health Sciences at Jackson State University in Mississippi, found that while physical
danger is presumed to lead to mass panic, in actual physical emergencies “expressions of
mutual aid are common and often predominate.” But the threat of an illness that has infected
only two people in the United States appears to have had the opposite effect, inciting a
widespread desire to hide and shut things down.
“Obviously there’s fear,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in an interview Sunday on ABC. He said fear of the disease
is dramatically outstripping current risks. “We always get caught when we say zero,” he said.
“Nothing is zero. It’s extraordinarily low, much less than the risk of many other things which
happens to them in their lives.”
The health care system, which has urged calm, has at times sent mixed messages that can
promote fear. “There are two elements to trust,” said Baruch Fischhoff, a professor of decision
sciences at Carnegie Mellon. “One is competence and one is honesty. The hospital in Dallas
changed its story three times. So while most people know there are very few cases and this is
not an easily transmissible virus, they also know the human system for managing this is
imperfect, and they don’t know whether they are getting the straight story about it.”
Republicans, finding both public health and political messages, have made a similar case
against the government response.