When Ebola Turns to 'Fearbola'
We must pay attention to the mistakes of history, some wise person once said, so we can do a better job of making them in the future. That's how I feel during the current Ebola crisis when I see how well we Americans seem to be repeating the mistakes of the AIDS epidemic.
I thought we learned something, for example, from the case of Ryan White, who was forced to leave his Indiana middle school after he was diagnosed with AIDS in 1984 after a tainted blood transfusion. Doctors said he posed no risk to other students, but because AIDS was so poorly understood and, therefore, frightening at the time, many parents and teachers rallied against his attendance.
In August 1990, four months after his death, his name is memorialized in the The Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act, the country's largest federally funded program for low-income, uninsured and under-insured people living with HIV/AIDS.
Today the development of effective anti-viral cocktails makes us less likely to get hysterical about AIDS, but we have Ebola to get hysterical about.
We have, for example, the case of Michel du Cille, a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post photojournalist. He found himself suddenly disinvited from a Syracuse University journalism conference after he returned from an assignment photographing the Ebola crisis in Liberia.
Du Cille did not have Ebola. His own 21 days of watchful waiting as the virus' incubation period passed, came to an end as the conference was about to begin last week. But, as a disappointed du Cille said in an interview with News Photographer magazine, the university "decided to jump in with the mass hysteria."
The same might be said about Navarro College. The two-year school near Dallas decided to reject at least two Nigerian applicants under a new ban against "international students from countries with confirmed Ebola cases," the rejection letter said.
Since Texas also has had confirmed Ebola cases, observed Nigerian-American Idris Bello, the Texas resident who tweeted the letter to the world -- should colleges in other states start rejecting their applicants, too? Good question.
Haven't we learned anything from our earlier mistakes about epidemics? In the AIDS frenzy of the 1980s, I diagnosed an "informtion deficiency syndrome" in the public. I am seeing similar symptoms appear now in what late-night comedian Seth Meyers calls "fearbola":
1. "NMP": a condition that makes people shrug off early news as "not my problem."
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