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ISIS vs. Ebola - by Hugh Gusterson
http://thebulletin.org/isis-vs-ebola7753
ISIS vs. Ebola
Hugh Gusterson
10/23/2014 - 22:29
An anthropologist, Gusterson is a professor of anthropology and sociology at George Mason University. His expertise is in nuclear culture, international security, and the anthropology of science....
Which is the greater threat to the United States and the world: ISIS or Ebola?
ISIS and Ebola hit the news at more or less the same time.
<snip>
The United States is now planning to send up to 400 military personnel to West Africa and spend $750 million over six months—less than 10 percent of what it is spending on the ISIS campaign.
<snip>
Until Thomas Eric Duncan travelled from Liberia to Dallas, where he infected two nurses with Ebola before dying of the disease, ISIS and Ebola were framed in US public discourse in contrasting ways. Despite having killed only two Americans in a faraway desert, ISIS was seen as a clear and present danger to the United States that warranted a massive mobilization of financial and military resources. (Incidentally, as University of Arizona instructor Musa al-Gharbi points out, Mexican drug cartels also decapitate many victims, and have killed almost 300 Americans, but are not seen as a threat to the United States in the way ISIS is, presumably because they are not Muslim.) Ebola was, on the other hand, seen as a problem local to West Africa.
<snip>
We read a lot in the media about Africans’ supposedly irrational beliefs about Ebola. But I am struck by a kind of magical thinking among Americans who cling to the belief that, in a globalized world, they will be immune to eruptions of infectious disease in countries with collapsed public health systems as if they had nothing to do with us. If there is a single lesson about security, it is that it is indivisible. We cannot be truly safe from an epidemic if thousands of others are dying from it, even if they are on a different continent. Viruses cross borders more easily than terrorists.
The number of Ebola cases in Africa is doubling every three weeks. The New York Times reports that unless the West gives massive aid, experts fear a new infection rate of 10,000 cases per month in West Africa, with the total number of dead rising to as many as 1.4 million by early 2015. Remember that, with only 4,500 dead by official counts, Ebola has already made it to Europe and the United States. Now we are anticipating more than three hundred times as many dead, unless strong preventive action is taken. This increases the likelihood that individual cases of Ebola will recurrently appear in the United States, requiring strenuous programs of biocontainment, waste incineration, and epidemiological tracking to stop them from spreading. But even if, unlike SARS and avian flu, Ebola can be kept out of the bloodstream of international tourism, commerce, and refugee movements, think of the human catastrophe that 1.4 million Africans dying painful, lonely deaths represents. When 800,000 Rwandans died in 1994, we called it genocide and wondered how the Clinton administration could have done nothing as the massacre unfolded. Will the Obama administration now stand idly by as twice as many Africans are massacred by a virus that can be stopped not at our borders, but only at the source?
ISIS vs. Ebola
Hugh Gusterson
10/23/2014 - 22:29
An anthropologist, Gusterson is a professor of anthropology and sociology at George Mason University. His expertise is in nuclear culture, international security, and the anthropology of science....
Which is the greater threat to the United States and the world: ISIS or Ebola?
ISIS and Ebola hit the news at more or less the same time.
<snip>
The United States is now planning to send up to 400 military personnel to West Africa and spend $750 million over six months—less than 10 percent of what it is spending on the ISIS campaign.
<snip>
Until Thomas Eric Duncan travelled from Liberia to Dallas, where he infected two nurses with Ebola before dying of the disease, ISIS and Ebola were framed in US public discourse in contrasting ways. Despite having killed only two Americans in a faraway desert, ISIS was seen as a clear and present danger to the United States that warranted a massive mobilization of financial and military resources. (Incidentally, as University of Arizona instructor Musa al-Gharbi points out, Mexican drug cartels also decapitate many victims, and have killed almost 300 Americans, but are not seen as a threat to the United States in the way ISIS is, presumably because they are not Muslim.) Ebola was, on the other hand, seen as a problem local to West Africa.
<snip>
We read a lot in the media about Africans’ supposedly irrational beliefs about Ebola. But I am struck by a kind of magical thinking among Americans who cling to the belief that, in a globalized world, they will be immune to eruptions of infectious disease in countries with collapsed public health systems as if they had nothing to do with us. If there is a single lesson about security, it is that it is indivisible. We cannot be truly safe from an epidemic if thousands of others are dying from it, even if they are on a different continent. Viruses cross borders more easily than terrorists.
The number of Ebola cases in Africa is doubling every three weeks. The New York Times reports that unless the West gives massive aid, experts fear a new infection rate of 10,000 cases per month in West Africa, with the total number of dead rising to as many as 1.4 million by early 2015. Remember that, with only 4,500 dead by official counts, Ebola has already made it to Europe and the United States. Now we are anticipating more than three hundred times as many dead, unless strong preventive action is taken. This increases the likelihood that individual cases of Ebola will recurrently appear in the United States, requiring strenuous programs of biocontainment, waste incineration, and epidemiological tracking to stop them from spreading. But even if, unlike SARS and avian flu, Ebola can be kept out of the bloodstream of international tourism, commerce, and refugee movements, think of the human catastrophe that 1.4 million Africans dying painful, lonely deaths represents. When 800,000 Rwandans died in 1994, we called it genocide and wondered how the Clinton administration could have done nothing as the massacre unfolded. Will the Obama administration now stand idly by as twice as many Africans are massacred by a virus that can be stopped not at our borders, but only at the source?
