For me, I don't think there is a magic number. But certainly, when something reaches "plague" status and/or has the potential to do so, taking immediate, radical measures to deal with the crisis is necessary. But when is fear legitimate? Does the presence of a "plague" so to speak (using the term colloquially, not scientifically) or the potential for one justify serious fear?
One would think, "of course!". But it is more complex than that.
For me the deciding factor is whether a disease is or has the potential of creating an epidemic or pandemic. Ebola is an epidemic. A lethal and scary one but one generally limited to highly populated countries that have poor, third world sanitation practices, including how they handle their dead and their toileting needs, etc.., and the only people who are truly at high risk are those who live in such countries that are affected by the disease, and the people who care for those stricken with the disease in a manner that involves repeated and heavy contact with bodily fluids.
Ebola will not become a pandemic, it appears clear, because many countries are not third world nations with poor sanitation and high populations and most countries have become educated - including poor, highly populated nations with limited sanitation - at containing and e5radicting the disease before it even becomes an epidemic.
Finally, I think those that hold the "honor" of telling the rest of us whether or not we have justifiable fears, are the experts and those with a higher capacity to understand and apply logic, to be frank.
But people have a right to feel and express the emotions they have. My concern arises when hysteria and illogical panic leads to violations of the rights of others or spreading that panic to others. This has happened repeatedly throughout history. Examples?
1. The Salem witch trials. Hysteria caused otherwise thinking people to accuse and violate the rights of others, to the point of torture and death.
2. The AIDS hysteria. There were repeated, strident calls for quarantining people with AIDS, solely due to unfounded panic. (What happened to that desire, by the way?)
http://articles.latimes.com/1989-07-09/opinion/op-5130_1_criminal-law/2
3. Japanese internment - also due to widespread, unfounded panic about Japanese Americans.
4. The Satanic cult hysteria of the 80's and 90's that led to many innocent people being imprisoned for crimes they did not commit.
The dangers were imaginary, but the consequences were not. http://www.slate.com/articles/healt...the_last_victims_of_satanic_ritual_abuse.html
4. The SARS hysteria.
Across the nation, anxiety and fear, generated by the news about the invisible and indeterminate contagion of the epidemic, were visible on the streets and corners of Chinatown communities in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia as well as in Boston and New York. Restaurants lost their clientele, and tourists stayed shy of the districts. Wedding banquets were cancelled, and the crowded Chinatown streets suddenly appeared deserted (Hopkins). As David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate, commented in The Wall Street Journal on April 28, “Just as the media recently gave us a . . . particularly intimate experience of war, we’re now getting a new and particularly fearsome experience of a public-health crisis with SARS – in which a media-transmitted epidemic of concern for personal safety outpaces the risk to public health of the actual virus” http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/spring_2005/zheng.htm
"SARS hysteria" has left a group of more than 30 Australians confined to a youth hostel in India, while two others are under observation in hospital.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2003-05-04/30-aussies-quarantined-in-sars-hysteria/1848272
There are so many examples of when fear overrides logic and has serious consequences.
I believe that we have a culture of fear in the United States and I think that's what is supporting the Ebola panic at present in America:
I want to reject that culture. As a person who has struggled with anxiety disorders my whole life, I understand the impact and danger of unfounded fears.
So yeah, no one has a right to tell others how to feel. But public policy should not be founded on hysteria and panic.
This is not what I feel the situation is, although the media would like us to believe so:
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