Naive Optimism Won't Protect You From Ebola

Even after the arrival of Ebola in Texas, the national dialogue in the United States remains naive, overly optimistic and full of misleading assurances from elected officials and public health experts. What the public needs to know and understand is this: Ebola is a deadly virus and like all viruses it can and will mutate and change.

Right now the disease only spreads from person to person by bodily fluids but there is a possibility that could change and the disease could become airborne. If it does, we could face a public health challenge like we haven't seen in this country since smallpox or polio. Worse yet: even if Ebola doesn't mutate, there is a good chance that some other novel infectious disease that we know about now (or will find out about in the future) will cause a pandemic and result in a significant loss of life.

The public needs to be cognizant of these real and present dangers to calibrate their expectations about the limited capabilities of our health care and public health systems and to increase our community resilience to deal with these threats.

We currently have an overconfident view about the capabilities of our health care and public health systems in this country. This overconfidence comes in part due to willful ignorance and in part due to leaders who want the public to believe they've got things more under control than they actually do. The reality is that we have significantly underinvested in public health for decades.

Read the rest of the story HERE.

If you like what you see, please "Like" us on Facebook either here or here. Please follow us on Twitter here.