Oh my God Ebola! Hopefully you’re at home, working yourself up into a theremin thrum of terror at the though of disgorging your insides onto your outsides, while scrubbing your hands with sanitizer laced with rat poison.

Mzansi, of course, remains untouched by the Ebola outbreak, unless one considers the numberless package tours and conferences that have been cancelled because Ebola is an African disease, and we apparently border Liberia. Hysteria in South Africa has been relatively unhysterical, and that’s probably because we only have so much hysteria to go around. On returning from a recent trip to Central Africa, though, I was skeefed closely—but not too closely—by those I encountered, all of whom were poised to drop and roll should I explode all over Spur and become our very own Patient Zero.

But Americans! The only thing they’re more terrified of is actual terrorists, who these days aren’t actually terrorists but gangster bank robbers who want their own country in which to shoot rockets off of bakkies. In poll after poll, we’re told ‘Merica, that this once mighty pioneer nation, cannot leave the house due to the twin threats posed by IS and Ebola.

And yet by my count, those two scourges have killed three Americans out of a population of 310 million. What else has killed three Americans? Since I began writing this piece, at least three Americans have been shot and killed by handguns. The Takata airbag brand has killed three Americans, and in one case caused police to assume that a crash victim had been stabbed to death because shrapnel from her safety device had sliced her neck open. Death kills, friends, and something has to get you in the end. But political debates in the United States have flouted the idea of blocking incoming flights from Liberia, a country America invented. Even Fox News had to put the breaks on, and remind Americans that being this afraid, while awesome for ratings, is just unseemly. (Please watch the video. It’s hilarious).

So why the irrational, lunatic fear?

I have some answers. First of all, Ebola is borne across the sea by the Other. This hasn’t been a great year for race relations in the United States, what with the Ferguson thing and the plain fact that a young black American male is about a gazillion times more likely to die at the hands of police than he is from an Ebola-stricken IS insurgent. In Ebola’s case, it’s hard to not think that the disease isn’t the disease, but the people with the disease are the disease.

Second of all, when your government acts like a bunch of panicky teens drinking micro-sips of crème de mente from the parental liquor cabinet, it’s hard to feel confident in their decision-making. The appointment of an Ebola Czar, who is apparently not an Ebola Czar but the leader of a task force of 30 ministering to the two cases, does seem like overkill. Don’t the Americans have a Centre of Disease Control? Ah, but no one trusts them, because Americans don’t trust government, and therefore watch the TV while vacuum wrapped in saran with a military assault weapon on their laps.

Third, Ebola is horrible. With this, there can be no disagreement. The frontline workers in the three nations hardest hit by the disease are the Champions of the Universe. They are dealing with patients that expel more than ten litres of infected liquid from their bodies a day. More tragically, they watch the life seep out of these people, and are seeing entire communities being wiped away. Most of these health workers, to say nothing of the residents who have dodged the disease, look like they’ve kissed the wolf and for good reason: they’ve witnessed death in bulk.

But…

Four: there is no meaningful perspective, and we swim in a sea of misinformation. The World Health Organisation is famous for its vagueness, and its CE recently noted that Ebola is “the most severe acute public health emergency in modern times,” which is a statement that doesn’t really mean anything, or doesn’t mean what its meant to mean. The worst case scenario is that there will be up to 10,000 or so new victims a week by December, and that many more have already died that the 4,500 on the books. Which is freaking terrible. But by WHO’s own estimates, malaria killed between 473 000 and 789 000 people in 2012, most of those children.

Or how about these numbers, newly included in a press release by Good Governance Africa, titled “Dirty water kills hundreds of thousands”? According to GGA, in 2013, “Nearly 320,000 children under the age of five died of easily preventable and treatable diarrhoeal diseases.” Now this is more of a chronic “public health emergency” and less of an acute one, which means that it isn’t sexy. That said, the 320,000 children who died in 2012 for no decent reason will represent a far bigger death toll than Ebola will claim before it is vaccinated into harmlessness. And yet, no one seems to care. That’s because a rich white person can’t catch cholera or malaria or shit-laced water while flying first class from Paris to New York. (And nor, should I add, can they catch Ebola, but we’ll leave that one for now).

Interestingly, the same thing that caused the Ebola outbreak kills kids in genocidal numbers every year: “The spread of diarrhoeal diseases is directly related to a lack of access to clean water and sanitation, medication and healthcare services.” Which is another way of saying that many African countries remain too disorganized, dysfunctional and disinterested to keep their people safe from medieval diseases, and that all the donor dollars in the world don’t amount to much because healthcare outcomes are almost always linked to top-down governance. When countries snap to it—Nigeria, Senegal—a disease as voracious as Ebola is rapidly brought to heel. Something about a virus focuses the mind.

But shouldn’t those other numbers focus the mind too? Shouldn’t we demand from our governments that something be done to reduce them to relatively negligible Ebola-like figures?

Malaria has never been a media darling. Nor has cholera. Some diseases get all the love, or, more importantly, all the fear. That fear is based on contagiousness, on how easily it travels to places where the high-born live. If the disease doesn’t travel, then it’s here to stay. DM