Quotes on Ebola

Media outlets that are exploiting Ebola because they want a sensational story and politicians using it to their own ends ought to be ashamed.

No travel ban or quarantine will seal a country completely. Even if travel could be reduced by eighty per cent-itself a feat-models predict that new transmissions would be delayed only a few weeks. Worse, it would only drive an increase in the number of cases at the source. Health-care workers who have fallen ill would not be able to get out for treatment, and the international health personnel needed to quell the outbreak would no longer be able to go in.

More people are killed by stray bullets every day in America than have been killed by Ebola here. More are dying because of poverty and hunger.

What works most effectively for quelling disease outbreaks like Ebola is not quarantining huge populations. What works is focusing on and isolating the sick and those in direct contact with them as they are at highest risk of infection. This strategy worked with SARS, and it worked during the H1N1 flu pandemic.

Somehow we got used to death, and then we dehumanised it. We account for conflicts in figures. Ebola is 13,500 infected, 5,000 people have died... People are losing their sense of empathy, their sense of wanting to do something.