4 Totally Ebola-Free Things That Americans Are Terrified Will Give Them Ebola
As Americans continue to grapple with public anxiety over the handful of Ebola cases confirmed in the country, polling shows that people here are becomingincreasingly concerned about catching the virus themselves. Those fears about about Ebola are triggering a kind of mass hypochondria, as U.S. residents are growing nervous about people and places that don’t actually pose a great risk to their health:
1. Food
Public anxiety about the potential spread of Ebola is leading some people to avoid certain restaurants, even though they likely wouldn’t be able to catch Ebola there unless an infected person spit or vomited in their food. The owner of a restaurant in Minnesota, for example, says she’s been losing business over the past few weeks because she serves Liberian cuisine. She even went so far as to cover up the word “African” on her restaurant’s sign this past week. “This African name that brought people in before, is now hurting me,” owner Kellita Whisnant told local affiliate KMSP-TV. “I want people to know my beef is from Minnesota.”
And in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio attempted to ease public fears this weekend by eating at the meatball restaurant that served a Doctors Without Borders volunteer in the days before he was officially diagnosed with Ebola. The virus isn’t contagious before people display symptoms, and Dr. Craig Spencer ate those meatballs before he fell ill.
2. Local businesses
The doctor being treated for Ebola in New York also visited a bowling alley, The Gutter, right before he got sick. There was a lot of concern about the fact that Spencer went bowling; jokes about Spencer’s “ebowling” trip went viral, and plenty of people suggested he was being irresponsible by leaving his apartment.
But, since Ebola is transmitted through direct contact with a symptomatic person’s bodily fluids, it’s highly unlikely that it could be transmitted while bowling. Health officials inspected The Gutter and confirmed that there wereno fluids inside. The owners of the establishment did a thorough cleaning and re-opened to the public; to prove that it’s safe, several city officials bowled there on Saturday.
Similarly, there was mass panic in one Ohio community after news broke that the first nurse who was diagnosed with Ebola — who has since beat the virus— shopped there before falling ill. The owners temporarily closed the shop and did a thorough cleaning, even though health officials told them that wasn’t necessary. Still, the stigma associated with Ebola has affected business. “I had a customer ask me yesterday, ‘Is my dress covered in Ebola?’ ” Anna Younker, the shop owner, told People Magazine last week. “Someone told me that I should take all the dresses and burn them.”
3. Safari vacations
As the Ebola outbreak continues to ravage Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea — three countries located in Western Africa — tourists are choosing to avoid the entire continent altogether. The safari industry is taking a huge hit, with some travel companies saying they’ve seen a 70 percent decline in business this fall.
Ashish Sanghrajka, the president of Big Five Tours & Expeditions, recently told the Los Angeles Times that the tourism to Africa’s great wildlife destinations is “in free-fall” as travelers are canceling their safaris “in droves.” Zimbabwe has already lost an estimated six million dollars so far this season. According to the Associated Press, even some trips to Egypt and Morocco have been scrapped.
Confusion over African geography is keeping tourists away even though safari trips are mostly located in Eastern Africa, thousands of miles away from the heart of the epidemic, in countries where there have not been any reported Ebola cases. “It does not make sense,” Joao Oliveira, the founder of It Started in Africa, which organizes safaris in Kenya and Tanzania, told CNN. “You would not cancel your vacation in Paris because there are conflicts in the Middle East or in Ukraine. If something nasty was happening in Alaska, you’d still go to New York.”
4. Immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for years
The mass anxiety over the Ebola epidemic has led to a rise in xenophobia and racial stereotypes that’s affecting the African immigrants living here in the United States. Although many of the Liberian immigrants here haven’t set foot in their home country for years, they’re suddenly experiencing discriminationfrom the Americans who are worried they’ll somehow transmit Ebola. West Africans say they’re being stigmatized and ostracized simply because people are concerned about the virus.
There have been countless examples of this dynamic over the past several weeks. A community college in Texas stopped accepting perfectly healthy students who are originally from Nigeria. Liberian immigrants have beenrefused service at restaurants. U.S. universities have canceled at least two speeches by Liberians. In Pennsylvania, a Guinean high school soccer player was greeted with chants of “Ebola, Ebola” from players on the other team. The organizations that work with a lot of African immigrants are now having troublefinding enough volunteers.
“We’re getting to the point where all Africans in the community are going to be stigmatized,” Chioma Azi, who works with the African Cultural Alliance of North America and whose family is from Uganda, told a CBS affiliate in Philadelphia. “My own grandmother was denied medical treatment by her own doctor, who treated her for 15 years. They told her they couldn’t treat anyone who was coming from Africa.”
