Ebola: Don't panic, Europe!

A black woman at a job center in Berlin says she is not feeling well because of a fever. She faints and collapses on the floor. Shortly after, dozens of police officers, firefighters and doctors arrive at the scene. The woman is taken to hospital while the job center remains cordoned off for hours with hundreds of people trapped inside.

"The information that someone has a fever, in combination with the word Africa" is sufficient at present to motivate a large-scale operation, the doctor in charge said afterwards.

Africa is not a symptom

I feel lucky to be living in a country where authorities would rather be safe than sorry. This is why I think a few too many officers at the large-scale operation in Berlin last Tuesday are not a bad thing per se. Yet, the fear of Ebola that goes along with it is exaggerated and unnecessary. Moreover, it is often coupled with a general suspicion of anyone who "looks" African and is running a temperature.

First of all, so far, Ebola has broken out in only four out of 54 African countries. Of the roughly 2,000 reported cases, each and everyone is a tragedy, but the numbers are small in comparison to diseases like influenza, which kills about half a million people every year. Secondly, unlike infections such as influenza, Ebola is not airborne. Transmission requires direct contact with bodily fluids such as blood.

Cruel but controllable

Yes, the disease is terrifying. Reading reports about the progression of Ebola with cramps and bleedings, which often result in death, make me shiver. There is reason to panic, not in Europe, but in the places where Ebola is wreaking havoc, while authorities remain rather helpless.

Like in West Point, the slum neighborhood of Liberia's capital Monrovia where residents are kept under quarantine, surrounded by police and army units, without proper medical services or even clean water. That is the real problem, a combination of poverty, moribund health care systems and overwhelmed authorities. Without these factors, the Ebola virus could not spread as fast as it does across Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

More support from Europe for local medical workers and awareness campaigns in the Ebola-stricken countries looks like the best way to quell the outbreak. Hysteria or a general fear of everyone and everything African clearly is not. The woman with the fever at the Berlin job center, by the way, was found to suffer from Malaria: the disease spread by mosquitoes that kills approximately 600,000 people every year.