Panic about Ebola in Africa – not here

Got Ebola yet? Early symptoms are very difficult to distinguish from either winter flu or, indeed, a particularly bad hangover. Bit feverish, aches and pains, sore throat and so on. Only when you start to bleed from the eyeballs should you worry a bit: that’s never happened before with Jack Daniels. It was the African bloke huddled up on the tube, I would reckon, the one who kept coughing. I knew I shouldn’t have sat near an African.

One or two clinical experts have been likening the Ebola virus to HIV. They seem to me similar more in a sociological sense. I remember those days when people avoided being in close proximity to homosexuals for reasons other than their appalling taste in music, or their moustaches. The mid-1980s were a time of frit panic and a concomitant nastiness directed towards a community which could genuinely, back then, be described by that now ubiquitous and debased word ‘vulnerable’. We are experiencing the same sort of panic right now and much of the same nastiness. If you doubt this, check out the reader comments on every story the Daily Mail runs about Ebola. Ban them all from coming anywhere near the country! Horrible, bat-munching savages. If they’re here, kick them out! And so on, ad infinitum.

The threat to the average Brit of contracting Ebola is substantially less than the risk of being hit by lightning, and will remain so, I suspect. Incidentally, the clinical comparison with HIV is of interest: both viruses are easily capable of mutating so as to become more effective. More effective for themselves, not out of viral malevolence, of course. Indeed the suspicion is that, like HIV, Ebola will become less and less lethal, eventually settling down at a death rate of around 5 per cent (by which time we may have an effective and quick vaccination, which we are some distance from acquiring at the moment).