[irocnroll]

Originally Posted by DGthe3

Want to know how to not get Ebola?

Don't handle the bodily fluids of people with Ebola. This is hard to avoid (but manageable for the most part) if you are a treating an Ebola victim, and almost impossible to encounter unless you are treating an Ebola victim. This is assuming that you abide by traditional western customs, rather than say smearing the blood of deceased loved ones on your face as a way to honour them. Even then ... if they didn't have Ebola, you can go right ahead and do that & you won't catch Ebola. Might catch something else, like HIV, but not Ebola.

The threat Ebola presents is miniscule. There are probably hundreds of diseases in North America that are more likely to result in you dying than Ebola is. Yes, the mortality rate of Ebola is high, but the infection rate is tiny. Other diseases that much easier to catch, but you have a lower chance of dying from, will often have substantially higher death tolls.


All in all, there have been something like 10,000 people who have died from Eboloa since the first recorded outbreak. Malria hits that number pretty much every week. Tuberculosis kills roughly that many people every couple of days.

The real problem is fear. I would not be surprised if in North America & Europe more people get killed due to mass hysteria about an Ebola 'outbreak' than people who catch the disease in their home country. Whether it be getting into traffic accidents on the way to a big box store to stock up on supplies, or people just straight up murdering someone because they're infected (or at least, thought to be infected) and just about everything in between.

On the list of things to be afraid of dying from, unless you live in West Africa Ebola should rank somewhere below falling off a ladder or being stuck by lightning (and maybe slightly above being struck by lightning while on a ladder, by the way ... don't clean your gutters during a storm unless you want to win a Darwin award)

Thank you. 3 people out of 300+ million people in the US is nothing. Even Duncans family didnt contract the disease, nor did the people on his flight over here. This isnt as big a deal as the media is making it out to be. A little comparison of how likely it is to spread compared to others