“Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.”
— Albert Camus, “The Plague”, 1947
Back in August, as the Ebola outbreak was gaining momentum, government officials in Liberia decided to quarantine one of the poorer sections of the capital city of Monrovia at gunpoint.
Public-health experts had warned strongly against the move, saying it would make the situation worse. Based on decades of experience, they predicted that the thousands of people within the area would find a way to evade the quarantine, making it harder rather than easier to track Ebola. They also warned that people within the quarantined area would lose hope and cease taking steps to protect themselves against the disease.
But Liberian officials were eager to respond to public fear and prove that they were taking “common sense” steps to stop the disease. For largely political reasons, they imposed the quarantine anyway, and just as public-health officials had predicted, it backfired. People who might have stayed at home instead tried to flee; crowded, desperate conditions inside the quarantine zone made transmission easier. As a result, Liberian leaders were forced to end the 21-day quarantine 10 days after it was imposed.
The lesson? Letting politics drive policy in a public-health crisis is a bad idea.
Then there’s the damage done by rumors and other misinformation, including media irresponsibility. Last month, Liberia’s top newspaper published a story claiming that Ebola had been invented by the U.S. government and introduced to Africa through vaccines, increasing distrust of Westerners. Families have been reluctant to surrender ill family members for care by authorities because of false stories that patients were being killed outright. And in outlying areas, there’s still a belief that Ebola is spread through witchcraft.
In disease outbreaks, fear and misinformation are almost as dangerous as the disease itself. That’s true not just of Liberia and other areas hard-hit by Ebola, but here at home as well. It’s been ridiculous to watch American politicians and media figures claim that they know how to handle Ebola better than do the men and women who have spent their entire adult lives fighting such diseases.
This week, for example, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly announced that ““It’s MY job to keep (the outbreak) small; It’s MY job to look out for the folks.” As our self-appointed Ebola czar, O’Reilly went on to accuse Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control, of not telling the truth about how Ebola is really spread. “Resign!” O’Reilly yelled indignantly into the camera. “Have a little dignity, Frieden! Have a little dignity! You’re misleading the American public!”
Now, given a choice between an expert in infectious diseases and a preening, self-aggrandizing blowhard, the decision seems pretty easy. It gets easier still if you recall that 30 years ago, the CDC was likewise attacked for opposing a quarantine of all AIDS patients and for claiming that AIDS could not be spread by mosquitoes and by air. Although it was a closer call back then than it should have been, the forces of fear did not carry the day over science. They should not do so now.
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