Newsweek's Monkey Meat Ebola Fearmongering

[Judi Lynn]

Newsweek's Monkey Meat Ebola Fearmongering
By Peter Hart
Aug 28 2014

It's 2014, and a national magazine has a cover story about how African immigrants might spread a deadly virus in the United States, thanks to the peculiar and unsanitary food they eat. The cover image is a photo of a chimpanzee.

Yes, this really happened.

"A Back Door For Ebola: Smuggled Bushmeat Could Spark a US Epidemic" read the headline on the August 29 Newsweek, a profoundly shocking image and message that immediately drew criticism like this:

Africa is a Country @AfricasaCountry
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When clickbait, racism and dog whistling to white American readers meet on @Newsweek cover; see @dadakim's tweets pic.twitter.com/6T3J2SGtkk

7:36 AM - 23 Aug 2014

141 Retweets 36 favorites

But the problems of the piece were bigger than just the cover. The piece is built around the idea that illegally imported "bushmeat"–what we would call "wild game" if it were being eaten in the United States–could carry the deadly Ebola virus.

Newsweek's Gerard Flynn and Susan Scutti note that "social media have been ablaze with fearmongering," and they include as evidence a "highly publicized tweet from Donald Trump."

But is there any evidence that imported meat could actually carry Ebola? On that score, Newsweek comes up empty. The article cites a "memo obtained by Newsweek that circulated among customs officers and agriculture specialists in 2007 [that] noted that bushmeat is 'a potential vector of diseases such as Monkeypox, Ebola Virus, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and other communicable diseases.'" Who produced this seven-year-old memo? Newsweek doesn't say.

More:
http://www.fair.org/blog/2014/08/28/newsweeks-monkey-meat-ebola-fearmongering/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=newsweeks-monkey-meat-ebola-fearmongering

[MFM008]

1. do we know

that it doesnt cause ebola?

[Warpy]

2. No, eating vector species is generally regarded is whee it came from

Just like HIV did. It was just waiting for roads and cities to break out of limited outbreaks in small villages.

However, good luck finding bushmeat anywhere but Safeway International in Washington DC. The most exotic the meat around here gets is local game like elk and buffalo.

As usual, Republicans are running around like Chicken Little over absolutely nothing.

It's not coming from frozen monkey meat in Safeway in one city in this country. It is more likely to come with returning missionaries and businessmen.

[geek tragedy]

3. imported illegal African bush meat is a thing here? fiction writers nt

[1StrongBlackMan]

4. Isn't this narrative ...

the same as the "monkey-meat" narrative that ran during the '80s, regarding HIV/AIDS?

[quadrature]

5. just for fun, lets start another war

(sarcasm)
.
hubris time.
just for fun,
lets start another war.

Libya, Egypt, Syria
what could possibly go wrong?