Jennifer O’Connell: Side effects of Ebola include hysteria and xenophobia

Underneath the western media’s over-reaction is the troubling suggestion that the hardest-hit African nations have brought Ebola on themselves

There is a disturbing new epidemic sweeping across the developed world. Its symptoms include nausea, sweating and an inability to watch a rolling news channel for more than 20 seconds without feeling compelled to fling yourself headlong into a hazmat suit. It is called Ebola scaremongering, and it is proving more virulent than any virus.

This is not to make light of Ebola, which, it goes without saying, is a very cruel and serious illness. According to the World Health Organisation, the mortality rate in the latest outbreak is 70 per cent. There is no vaccine and no proven cure, and death from Ebola is horrific beyond description. For the people of the west African nations worst stricken by the disease, it is a truly frightening epidemic.

But to listen to much of the recent news coverage, none of this is as terrifying as the prospect that it might spread beyond Africa. Here in the US, Fox News has – predictably, perhaps – been at the forefront of the battle against reason and perspective in its coverage of the Ebola crisis. Having exhausted the well of explainers on how to put on surgical gloves, the station’s pundits have recently been speculating about Ebola being “weaponised” by terrorists. “If you want to do the equivalent of a dirty bomb, all you need is a bag of [vomit],” one expert pronounced.

Alas, the scaremongering is not confined to the measured souls at Fox. The Daily Mirror, the Daily Mail, the New York Post and Sky News have all been guilty of running "Ebola! It might be on our shores (though in all likelihood it isn't yet)" headlines. The problem with such unashamed clickbaitery isn't merely that it makes those of us of a more hypochondriac bent sick with worry. (I say this as someone who recently watched CNN late at night and then woke her significant other at 4am to suggest a trip to Costco to bulk-buy bottled water and antibacterial wipes).

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It also contributes to public confusion about the illness, so that useful information, including the fact that you can only catch Ebola through direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person, gets buried. The WHO pointed last week to World Bank estimates that 90 per cent of the economic costs of any outbreak “come from irrational and disorganised efforts of the public to avoid infection”.

These irrational and disorganised efforts are often carried out by those who should know better, such as the attorney general of Louisiana, who recently announced his intention to file a restraining order to prevent the incinerated belongings of Ebola victim Thomas Eric Duncan being deposited in a landfill in the state.

More troubling still is a subtle but frequent undercurrent of much Ebola coverage: the implication that the people of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone somehow brought the epidemic on themselves, either by eating bushmeat, failing to seek medical advice quickly enough or by poor hygiene practices.

It’s not xenophobic to point out that there may be a link between the consumption of bushmeat and the spread of viruses such as Ebola, but it is xenophobic to suggest that the people of west Africa are responsible for the current epidemic of the disease – unless, of course, you’re also prepared to take responsibility for the deforestation that has led to the migration of the west African fruit bat population, or for the income inequality that has left people in those countries without a decent health system, not to mention the luxury of being fussy about what they eat.

Most sensible people now look back on early coverage of the Aids crisis and cringe at how hysterical, homophobic and misinformed much of it was. Yet some 30 years on, the coverage of the Ebola crisis may yet make the hysteria over Aids look like an under-reaction.

BEAR MEL GIBSON’S EXAMPLE IN MIND, MRS CLOONEY

Granted, there are more important things happening in the world right now, but can we just pause for a moment to consider the decision by the renowned human-rights lawyer and defender of the Parthenon marbles, Amal Alamuddin, to take the name of her new husband, that quite-good-actor chap?

The website of her law firm, Doughty Street Chambers, now lists her as Amal Clooney, prompting confusion and even outrage among some sections of the world’s media, which had her pegged as a raving feminist, on account of her having a career and everything. Is it a typo? A crack at some kind of postmodern irony? A declaration of her intent to subsume her identity into that of her husband and future children? Or did she just worry that there was someone somewhere on the planet who hadn’t heard she’d married George Clooney?

I say each to their own. Personally, I never considered adopting my husband's name when we married, even though it is more melodic and more unusual than my own. Three children later, I am grateful to have retained that tiny corner of pre-motherhood myself. There are days when it is all I can do to stop myself flouncing from the kitchen shouting, in the manner of Mel Gibson in Braveheart: "You can take my waistline, my night's sleep and my ability to have a shower in peace, you can scatter Lego across my floors and make me consider the merits of camping holidays, you can occupy my every waking thought and the comfiest spot on the sofa, but you'll never take away my surname."

Just putting it out there, Amal.