Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 111, No. 83, Ed. 1 Friday, October 24, 2014 Page: 5 of 27
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Denton Record-Chronicle
EBOLA
Friday, October 24, 2014
5A
Ebola fear impacts many Americans' lives
Tony Gutierrez/AP file photo
In this Oct. 2 photo, three children on their way home from school stop to peer through the
gate down at a building at The Ivy Apartments in Dallas where a man diagnosed with having
the Ebola virus was staying with family at the complex.
By Seth Borenstein
AP Science Writer
WASHINGTON - Ebola is
giving Americans a crash course
in fear.
Yet, they’re incredibly less
likely to get the disease than to
get sick worrying about it.
First, the reality check: More
Americans have married Kim
Kardashian — three — than
contracted Ebola in the U.S. The
two Dallas nurses who came
down with Ebola were infected
while treating a Liberian man,
who became infected in West
Africa.
Still, schools have been
closed, people shunned and
members of Congress have de-
manded travel bans and other
dramatic action — even though
health officials keep stressing
that the disease is only spread
through direct contact with
bodily fluids from an infected
person, and the risk to Ameri-
cans is extremely low.
That’s because Ebola pushes
every fear button in our in-
stincts, making us react more
emotionally than rationally, ex-
perts say.
“The worry that people are
being subjected to as a result of
the hysteria around this is prob-
ably doing more damage than
the actual disease,” said E. Alison
Holman, a professor at the Uni-
versity of California, Irvine, who
studied the health effects of pop-
ulations worried after watching
coverage of the Sept. U attacks,
the Boston Marathon bombing
and Iraq war. “Frankly flu is
more serious.”
Impact of fear
Holman found in studies
published by the American
Medical Association that the
people who spent more time
watching television coverage on
the Sept. U attacks — and re-
ported fear and anxiety — were
three times as likely to report
new heart problems. The more
coverage they watched, the more
physical ailments they reported,
she said.
Similarly, after the Boston
Marathon bombing, people who
watched six hours or more of
coverage reported far more
stress than those who watched
less, Holman said. That was true
even for those at the bombing.
Bruce McEwen, a neurosci-
entist who studies stress at
Rockefeller University in New
York, said the fear can lead peo-
ple to change their lifestyle,
making them isolate them-
selves, lose sleep, stop exercis-
ing, change their diet for the
worse and drink or smoke.
“It’s likely to cause them
problems down the road even if
there is no direct infection,”
McEwen said.
Good fear versus bad fear
There are two types of fear
that can almost come down to
good fear and bad fear.
The good fear is the type we
look for around Halloween in
haunted houses or on roller
coaster rides at amusement
parks.
It’s short, intense, gets our
juices going and removes bore-
dom, said Vanderbilt University
psychiatry professor David Zald.
“There’s a benefit of being
afraid. In controlled situations,
many of us enjoy briefly being
afraid,” Zald said. “It can whip
our attention to the here and
now like nothing else.”
There’s a sense of mastery or
bravery that comes out of walk-
ing out alive from a haunted
house or giant roller coaster,
Zald said.
That type of acute-but-short
stress actually makes our im-
mune system work better, McE-
wen said.
But long-term exposure to
stress has the reverse effect on
the immune system. That’s
when it elevates our blood pres-
sure and contributes to heart
disease.
Understanding risk of fear
One of the major unknown
problems with risk and fear is
that the public doesn’t under-
stand how at risk they are from
worry, not disease. “It’ll do far
more damage than the disease,”
said David Ropeik, who teaches
risk perception and communi-
cation and has written two
books on risk.
Doctors and government of-
ficials tell us not to worry and
how hard it is to get Ebola,
which is re-assuring, Ropeik
said. But “all the alarms are fill-
ing up on our radar screens,” and
we give more weight to the
alarms because of the fear of
death, he said.
Ebola pushes “all those fear
buttons” because it is new and
foreign, said George Gray, direc-
tor of the Center for Risk Science
and Public Health at George
Washington University.
Part of it is just the fear of the
unknown, said Mark Schuster,
professor of pediatrics at Har-
vard Medical School. “It’s not a
name that’s familiar. It doesn’t
sound like an English word. It
comes from another continent.”
Americans who say they
don’t quite understand how
Ebola is transmitted report be-
ing more worried than those
who say they do, according to an
Associated Press-GfK Poll con-
ducted in the past week and re-
leased Wednesday.
Overall, 58 percent of those
who acknowledge they don’t un-
derstand Ebola very well say
they are concerned it will spread
widely in the U.S., compared to
46 percent of those who say they
understand Ebola transmission.
We fear what we can’t con-
trol. People often fear the far less
deadly plane travel than driving
because they aren’t in control.
Seeing trained medical profes-
sionals catch the disease despite
protective gear only adds to the
fear, Zald said.
Instead of using dry statistics
such as 1 in 150 million, compar-
ing your chances of contracting
Ebola in America to that of mar-
rying Kim Kardashian helps
people understand and visualize
risk better, Zald and Schuster
said.
Mistakes and wrong state-
ments by public health officials
and politicization of the issue
only make fear and public trust
worse, said Baruch Fischhoff, a
professor of decision sciences at
Carnegie Mellon University.
Add wall-to-wall coverage
that makes Ebola easy to pic-
ture.
“You create this hysteria
about Ebola and unfounded
fear, and people get all worried,”
Holman said.
Ropeik said, thinking about
how worrying can make us sick
may put Ebola more in perspec-
tive: “We need to fear the danger
of getting risk wrong.... Chronic
worry is really bad for our
health.”
Fear of cremation leaves
many Ebola beds empty
Abbas Dulleh/AP
In this photo taken Wednesday, a carpenter makes new cas-
kets for sale in New Kru in Monrovia, Liberia.
By Jonathan Paye-layleh
Associated Press
MONROVIA, Liberia -
Even as Liberians fall ill and die
of Ebola, more than half the
beds in treatment centers in the
capital remain empty, an unin-
tended consequence of the gov-
ernment’s order that the bodies
of all suspected Ebola victims in
Monrovia be cremated.
Cremation violates Liberi-
ans’ values and cultural practices
and the order has so disturbed
people in the West African na-
tion that the sick are often kept
at home and, if they die, are se-
cretly buried, increasing the risk
of more infections
President Ellen Johnson Sir-
leaf issued the cremation decree
for Monrovia and the surround-
ing area in August, and the gov-
ernment has brought in a cre-
matorium and hired experts.
The order came after people in
neighborhoods of the capital re-
sisted burials of hundreds of
Ebola victims near their homes.
Since then, a recent analysis
of space at Ebola treatment cen-
ters shows that of742 beds avail-
able, more than half — 391
were vacant, said Assistant
Health Minister Tolbert Nyen-
swah, who heads the govern-
ment’s Ebola response.
“For fear of cremation, do not
stay home to die,” Nyenswah ad-
monished Liberians at a news
conference last week.
In her statement declaring
the state of emergency and the
cremation order, Sirleaf ac-
knowledged the edict runs con-
trary to national tradition. “Ebo-
la has attacked our way of life,”
she said.
That way of life includes hon-
oring deceased ancestors.
On the second Wednesday of
March each year, Liberians flock
to cemeteries to honor their de-
ceased loved ones on a public
holiday known as National Dec-
oration Day, scrubbing the
headstones of relatives, clearing
away brush from graves and
decorating them with flowers
and other mementos.
In many parts of Liberia, tra-
dition has also called for rela-
tives to handle the bodies of
loved ones before burial. Bodies
are kept in the home for days or
weeks, during which time peo-
ple honor their loved ones by
dancing around the corpse,
washing it and cutting and
braiding the hair. Before burial,
church congregations also pray
over the body.
Since the latest outbreak of
Ebola, these burial customs have
been ordered halted when it
comes to victims of the deadly
virus because of the dangers
they pose. The Ebola virus is
spread through the body fluids
of an infected person and can
endure in corpses, posing a dan-
ger to those who handle them.
Guidelines issued by the
Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention in the United States
call for the bodies of Ebola vic-
tims to be handled only by those
trained in handling infected hu-
man remains who are wearing
the proper protective equip-
ment.
Bodies should be wrapped in
plastic shrouds, then cremated
or promptly buried in hermeti-
cally sealed caskets, the CDC
says.
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Texas official: Most hospitals
can’t handle Ebola patients
By Will Weissert
Associated Press
AUSTIN - Texas’ top
health official said Thursday
that most hospitals can’t han-
dle Ebola patients and that
they should instead be treated
at specialized care centers — a
break with past federal asser-
tions that nearly any American
hospital can cope with the vi-
rus.
During the first public
hearing of a 17-member state
task force created after Ebola
killed a Liberian man visiting
Dallas and infected two nurses
treating him, members heard
conflicting testimony from
health experts about the mer-
its of creating treatment cen-
ters specifically equipped for
Ebola around Texas and the
nation.
But Texas Health Commis-
sioner David Lakey said, “I
think this is the switch in strat-
egy that has taken place be-
cause of this event.”
“Prior to this event, the na-
tional strategy was that com-
munity hospitals would be
able to care for individuals,”
Lakey said, “and I think our
experience with individuals
here shows that that strategy
needs to change and that you
really need to have some facil-
ity ready throughout the state
of Texas and nationwide for
these individuals to be sent to
where folks are specifically
trained for this.”
Texas’ task force has desig-
nated two state hospitals as
specialized Ebola centers.
In addition, the task force
called for creating a “second
layer” of regional hospitals to
care for Ebola patients if both
are full.
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Parks, Scott K. Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 111, No. 83, Ed. 1 Friday, October 24, 2014, newspaper, October 24, 2014; Denton, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1124985/m1/5/?q=%22~1~1~1%22~1&rotate=270: accessed July 16, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; .