I have to wonder if some of our behavior that protects us from infection is a cultural legacy from being survivors of some really bad pandemics in the past.
We won’t eat dead things unless we know they were killed while healthy. Africans eat dead animals they find in the forest.
There are other major behavior differences that would make a disease like Ebola have a difficult time establishing itself here the way it has in Africa.
Most definitely. Few remember the time around the Spanish flu epidemic.
Every summer there were epidemics of typhus, typhoid fever, German measles, measles, mumps, whooping cough, chicken pox, polio, tuberculosis, etc.
Every doctor carried around quarantine signs in their black bags. Upper middle class homes had small closet-like “sick rooms” for family members who were taken down.
Summer vacation camps for children came about as a way to get them to cooler places in summer and escape the epidemics. The smell of Carbolic acid (phenol) soap sanitizer was heavy around hospitals.
Around that time was when the US Public Health Service came into its own, as a normally benign agency that in time of a public health menace could turn entirely authoritarian, even dictatorial. A big job of theirs was to inspect ships from other countries arriving in ports, so they were issued naval officer uniforms and ranks, that sailors were more inclined to respect.
One of the better sources of the time was the writer Berton Roueché, who wrote on medical issues for The New Yorker magazine for about 50 years. He catapulted many public health stories into public view, and wrote several popular books that were compilations of his stories. They are very entertaining reads, even today, and are still in print.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berton_Rouech%C3%A9