ebollocks

The fact that there's a man close to death from ebola in a Dallas hospital is all Uncle Sam's fault. Mark Steyn says so, so it must be true.

America's favorite right-wing Canadian blowhard blames the situation on US border security.  In his view, those cheery folks that you meet when you enter the country are too busy looking out for Kinder Surprise eggs and illicit bagpipes (really!) to spot a real threat like ebola when it's staring them in the face.

Except it wasn't staring them in the face, was it?  When Thomas Duncan approached the immigration desk at Dulles, he wasn't showing any symptoms, and he wasn't yet infectious. Steyn comes up with all sorts of other reasons why he should have been refused admission, but truth to tell, he presented as a perfectly normal traveller on a routine family visit.  For much the same reason, you can't really blame United Airlines.  There was no reason to turn Duncan away when he checked in for his transatlantic flight in Brussels.

Texas Health Presbyterian hospital in Dallas, well that's another matter, though the startling incompetence or negligence shown there doesn't seem to trouble Mark Steyn.  That's surprising, because a few years ago, when the SARS outbreak took a nasty toll in Toronto, Steyn was quick to blame the medics.  Well, not the medics exactly: Steyn blamed Canada's "socialized" medical system for creating the conditions in which SARS could spread within the supposedly hygienic walls of a hospital.  But Texas Health Presbyterian isn't "socialized", of course, so Steyn has had to direct his vitriol elsewhere, and it's the poor old border agents who are getting it in the neck this time.  

Steyn's not the only one going gaga over ebola.  CNN, never shy about spreading panic, rigged out a shouty doctor named Gilbert Mobley in a hazmat suit and sent him into the terminal at Atlanta airport before interviewing him on air.  Mobley baldly accused the Center for Disease Control of lying about the risks the virus poses to Americans. Bizarrely, he claimed that dealing with the Thomas Duncan case had overwhelmed the health authorities in Dallas, before warning darkly about how bad things could get if ebola spread to a third world country such as Mexico.

That's no doubt true in theory, but is it sufficiently likely in practice to justify scaring people?  The number of people travelling between the affected countries and Mexico or anywhere else in Central America must be microscopically small.  Thomas Duncan made a deliberate choice to travel to the US when he knew he had come into contact with ebola, on the assumption (wrong, as it now appears) that he'd have access to good medical care there if he in fact came down with the disease.  It's unlikely he, or anyone else back in Liberia contemplating a similar journey, weighed up the merits of flying to Mexico City or Guatemala City instead.

CNN was careful to advise its viewers that Mobley is not an expert on ebola.  No surprise there: those good folks are putting their own health on the line in an effort to get the disease under control, so they're far too busy to take part in distasteful stunts at the world's busiest airport.