[jjsheridan5]

Auto-erotic asphyxiation has probably killed more people in the same time frame.

The number of cases of auto-erotic asphyxiation are extremely unlikely to start rising exponentially. These kinds of attempts to trivialize Ebola are ridiculous. In a region of the world with one of the most immobile population bases in the world, a disease with a 70% fatality rate has managed to double every 2-4 weeks, over an extended period of time. While there are plenty of reasons to have hope, and to think that the rest of the world will fare substantially better, trivializing this out of an unwillingness, or, in Shepard Smith's case, inability, to address the potential mathematics of this, is not wise, is not correct, and is not the display of calm reason that many people seem to assume it is.

Of course 3 cases is "nothing" in the sense of the number of cases at the moment. Your comparison is simply a strawman, since no-one thinks otherwise. The question is: are our advantages going to outweigh our disadvantages (which do exist, and are non-trivial) when confronted with Ebola, or vice versa? What is scaring people isn't the 3 cases. What is scaring people is the mathematics, and the possibility that our advantages aren't as great or as relevant, as some people assume.

[discostu]

Actually my comparison was poking fun. The simple reality is we do this every few years. We panic about some “new” bug that in the long run has marginal real effect. We freak out about SARS, or West Nile, or Bird Flu, Swine flu and the fact is regular old everyday flu kills more than all of them COMBINED.

What is scaring people is that people like to get scared and the media makes money on scaring people. They play up this kind of crap for ratings, because crisis make people watch the “news”. And when there isn’t a crisis they make one. Remember shark attack summer, 2001? Been largely forgotten thanks to 9-11 but if you’ll cast your mind back there were all these news stories about shark attacks, it was crazy, like the sharks had gone nuts. Except they hadn’t gone nuts, shark attacks were about 50% of average that year, the only thing that actually changed was the nationals “news” decided to cover them. Did the same thing the following winter, all those train derailments, it was crazy, a lot of people thought it was terrorists. It turned out again to be the “news” decided to pay attention, a train derailment happens about every 36 hours in this country, makes for a handy news story.

And now here we are with ebola. People that know about this stuff have been predicting for DECADES that it would eventually get to America. It simply had to, the world is just too damn small, travel is too damn easy. And they also knew that when it hit the sector that would be hardest hit would be the medical workers, because they’re the ones who work closely with people oozing virus. But they were also pretty sure we’d handle it. We have better habits than Africa, we don’t transport corpses in cabs, we wash our hands, we have good medicine.

The mathematics are that it is probably going to kill fewer people in America than the regular ol boring flu. Of course the mathematics also are “news” networks don’t like that math, keeps people from tuning in, lowers their ad revenue. They need you scared, they need you tuning in for the latest breathless report of another “possible ebola” case somewhere. And then this will pass, and you’ll conveniently forget how grossly you were played, and a couple years from now the next “killer disease” will show up and you’ll tune in again.

Or I’m wrong and we’re all gonna die. Whatever.