Ebola: The Devastation of Irrational Panic

The latest news now is that a U.S. doctor who has returned from West Africa has come down with Ebola in New York. I turned on TV news last night after a break from it and they were talking about Ebola, still, or again. I don’t know which because I’ve tuned out of TV news for the most part. It’s so tiresome, such a constant battering assault on the senses. And it has virtually nothing to do with staying informed.

A corporation is legally mandated to seek to maximize shareholder value at all times. A corporation is a profit-seeking mechanism (not a person, sorry) with one purpose and one purpose only. So when the 24-hour news stations discovered in the wake of 9/11 that having the nation gripped in fear was the best thing that ever happened to their ratings, there was little choice but to try to reproduce that situation as much as possible. They became addicted to the high ratings, the revenues generated by the ratings and what caused the high ratings: fear.

There is a reason why the major media like fear so much. It generates profits.

Not that they won’t gladly take high ratings that come with anything more positive, a visit by the Pope, for example, or the Super Bowl. But nothing pumps up those ratings like fear.

Now the Home of the Brave has become the Land of the Fearful. We are frightened of everything, everything it seems but what we really should be frightened of.

What Is Really Killing Americans?

Seven people are shot and three are killed every hour of every day by guns in the U.S. It could happen to you almost any time anywhere in the U.S. There’s no way of predicting where or when the next shooting will take place. It’s a constant threat, but it’s so ubiquitous it’s hard to focus on it. And politically the situation is blocked and never changes. It seems there is nothing to be done about it, so nothing is done about it and we just live with it. Three gun murders an hour day in and day out.

Deaths from car accidents have been on the decline lately and there were only 30,800 in 2012, according to the latest figures from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The World Health Organization estimates that there are from 3 to 5 million cases of severe illness from flu in the world every year and between 250,000 and 500,000 deaths.

The Centers for Disease Control list the leading causes of death with heart disease at the top, killing nearly 600,000 people in 2010, the last year CDC has data for. Cancer claims nearly as many. The list continues with chronic lower respiratory diseases, 142,943; stroke, 128,932; accidents, 126,438; Alzheimer's disease, 84,974; diabetes, 73,831; influenza and pneumonia, 53,826; nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis, 45,591; and suicide, 39,518.

Meanwhile there have been about 4,000 deaths from Ebola in West Africa during the current epidemic there and one so far in the U.S.

Why on earth are we so obsessed with it?

Media Burn

Granted, the world outside the TV tube is not the same as the world as it appears on the tube. When the first case of Ebola appeared in Dallas and the ABC news anchor reported that “Dallas is a city gripped in fear tonight,” I did not believe that if I had been in Dallas that night that I would have really experienced “a city gripped in fear.”

If I had been there engaged in the normal activities of a visitor or a conference attendee, perhaps enjoying a drink or a meal with friends, I doubt that we would have all been seized with fear that night. And I doubt that many Dallas residents were particularly thrown off their normal activities, even though the news made it sound like everyone in the city was petrified with fear.

As my colleague Barry Kaufman pointed out yesterday during a panel discussion on Ebola, there is a fairly widespread understanding of how the media work, and not everyone is taken in by every word issuing forth from CNN or Fox. In fact I don’t doubt that a large number of Americans realize that the major news stations are not to be taken fully seriously, or at least that one should approach them with one’s critical faculties fully engaged.

But unfortunately, even if most American travelers know to take the media fear mongering with a grain of salt, the fact remains that tour operators are reporting devastating cancellation rates and a drop in bookings that can only be called catastrophic.

The panic has been devastating to the industry and it doesn’t seem to help much that there are voices who are pointing out that Senegal is closer to New York (3,818 miles) than it is to Nairobi, Kenya, (3,865 miles), Johannesburg, South Africa (4,159 miles) or Cape Town, South Africa (4,100 miles). New York is closer to the epidemic by actual miles, but when you consider the effect of the airline routes connecting remote parts of the world, those distances become even less relevant.

Suddenly this irrational panic has thrown the entire travel industry economy of Africa into a tailspin, costing millions in lost revenue. We hear about millions moving here or there in the world economy all the time, but those numbers often have a tangible meaning.

Ashish Sanghrajka, president of Big Five Tours, pointed out in a column on Travel Pulse that many of these tourism revenues go to support the livelihoods of local residents of the destination countries. And beyond that they help to prevent the assault against such animals as rhinos and elephants, which are slaughtered across Africa daily for their horns, a big business that threatens to drive the animals to extinction.

Tourism = Conservation

Many tourism providers in Africa are motivated more by conservation and environmental protection than they are by making money. Many of the private reserves are maintained by people for whom making money was not an issue, people who already had enough money and wanted to invest it in a way that would help to preserve the wilderness areas of Africa that are under constant attack by profit-seeking killers.

Many of them have set up their enterprises knowing that tourism is the only way known to generate the kinds of resources it takes to take care of these precious areas.

These tourism enterprises know that they must make a profit to continue doing what they do to save the vanishing wilderness and its wildlife. Without making a profit, they can’t do it.

This is part of what falls through the cracks when the economic bottom falls out of the industry.

It’s still true that many Americans don’t know that Africa is really made up of many countries over a vast geographic area. The failure of Americans as a whole to comprehend that Africa is many times the size of the U.S., large enough to contain the U.S., Europe, China, Canada and more all at once, is an old joke by now. But it is no joke when it leads to such devastation over a panic that has virtually no basis in rationality.

There’s not much we can do to counter the enormous influence of the news channels but to raise our own voices and keep raising them in calls for rationality.

The Ebola epidemic of 2014 will soon be behind us and forgotten, replaced by the next media frenzy. Maybe then we can turn our attention to real problems.

Follow @CogswellTravelP