Weekend Column – Panic Time

Nov 4, 2014 by winjaw

We now have an Ebola handshake.

Okay, not exactly a handshake, but hang on and I’ll explain in a sec.

We have Samantha Powers to thank for this. No, I didn’t know who she was either. Ms. Powers is the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

There are photos of her demonstrating the Ebola handshake all over the web. One such photo includes said handshake with Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf during a news conference in the city of Monrovia. For the curious, Monrovia is the capital of Liberia, which is in West Africa.

I’m going out on a limb here and guess Ms. Powers will not be put under a 21-day quarantine when she returns. She’s a senior government official and all that, so there’s no way she could be exposed. Plus, she used the Ebola handshake, so we’re all good.

What I really want to know is how much time, money and actual thought went into developing the Ebola shake. It came from the federal government so you know 1. It required multiple studies. 2. A lot of money was wasted. 3. It’s stupid.

The Ebola handshake occurs when two people greet each other. Instead of shaking hands, they do this weird forearm or elbow “bump.” They actually “touch” forearms instead of shaking hands. I can only assume they touch elbows if the other person is a health care worker who might have come into contact with an Ebola patient. Sort of an extra precaution, I guess.

It looks absurd in photos. Sort of like someone doing the clucky chicken dance. What about a polite nod or bow?

Yes, Ebola is the new death watch and the world media is making sure we know. In fact, it’s basically all that’s being shown or written about.

Did you know there was a school shooting in the Seattle area earlier this week? A 15-year-old shot five of his schoolmates and then turned the gun on himself. The shooter, along with two of his friends, are dead. Three others are in critical condition.
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Let’s put that in perspective. More people – three times actually – have died from this one school shooting than have died from Ebola in the United States.

According to The Washington Post, which quoted a 2014 National Safety Council report using 2010 data, you are more likely to die from just about anything other than Ebola.

For Ebola, there’s a 1 in 309,629,415 chance you’ll die. You are much more likely to die from your pajamas catching on fire (1 in 77 million chance), falling out of bed (1 in 296,296 chance) or riding in an animal-drawn vehicle (1 in 2,623,978).

For those of you just dying to know, yes, pun intended, in 2010 four people were killed by flaming pajamas, 424 died in the bathtub, and 118 were killed in animal/vehicle accidents.

I’m not making light of Ebola. Nearly 5,000 people have died from it in Africa. But because of our vastly superior medical community, only one of nine Ebola patients in the U.S. have died.

My concern is we are not teaching about the actual risks and safety precautions needed. We, as in the media, need to step back and put this in perspective. As of now, we are in a national Freakout.

Remember Ryan White? He was the teenager who got infected with HIV from a blood transfusion. Teachers and parents demanded – and got – his expulsion because everyone knew that if they were in the same room with him, they’d catch it and die. He became the poster child for ignorance about diseases.

Now it’s Ebola. When will we learn?

Until next time.