Just like in the early days of AIDS, ignorance and misinformation
about Ebola are widespread — and dangerous
His voice had an air of genuine concern, and from his tone I could tell he was talking to someone close to him, maybe a girlfriend or family member. (I am not someone who routinely eavesdrops on private conversations, but due to the open layout of our office, it’s hard to ignore sometimes.)
“You had better shelter in place for now,” he told the person on the other end of the line. And you would imagine it was something like what police call an “active shooter” situation.
Scary stuff. So what caused the alarm?
Seems his family lived in Lewisville, and they were concerned about the news reports of an “Ebola outbreak” infesting Dallas.
Never mind the fact that Lewisville is almost 25 miles from the hospital where the sole confirmed patient with the Ebola virus was being treated. The news media and social media had turned the situation into a scene out of The Andromeda Strain.
The media wanted people to be worried, even a little panicked. After all, it had been a slow news week, and the graphics departments came up with cool stuff to hype this story.
I understand irrational fear. During the first days of the AIDS epidemic, I saw families being kicked out of churches because one of their family members had contracted HIV. I saw funeral homes refuse to bury people who had died from AIDS, and even hospitals turn away suspected cases.
Their fear was based on misinformation or in some cases just a plain lack of it. During the early days of AIDS we weren’t sure how it was transmitted, and rumors of infections occurring via everything from casual contact to mosquito bites ran rampant.
It was an unknown disease.
Fast forward to today.
As of this writing, we have one confirmed case of Ebola in the United States, a hemorrhagic fever that has spread in parts of western Africa and is both virulent and potentially deadly.
We know this because it is a known disease, and there is a large body of research that shows precisely how it is transmitted and how long it takes to incubate.
For example, it takes direct exposure to body fluids such as vomit, urine, feces or blood to transmit the disease, and the patient is only contagious once the symptoms show up.
How do I know this? I used the exotic technology of Google and Wikipedia to “tease the facts out” of hundreds of well-written articles explaining exactly how the stuff is transmitted and how to avoid transmission.
It is indeed nasty stuff, but it can be easily avoided and a 25 mile radius is not necessary to contain it.
I tried to explain this to my friend, but my explanations were met with skepticism and a doubtful “Well, I don’t know.”
That statement was indeed true; he truly did not know. But 15 minutes and an Internet browser could have informed him.
But he instead chose to believe the wacky posts on the Book of Faces and Twitter than a real authority, like a college hospital website or the Centers for Disease Control.
His skepticism and willingness to believe rumors rather than search out facts are the same thing the LGBT community faced at the dawn of AIDS. People chose to believe their friends or celebrities, rather than someone who actually knew the truth.
The same syndrome holds true for the anti-vaccination folks who put their children’s lives in the hands of Jenny McCarthy instead of the hands of their own physician: “She just seems so passionate and concerned, it must be true.”
We are alive in the age of “truthiness,” that word coined by Stephen Colbert for statements that just feel right without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination or facts.
It’s much the same as the argument against same-sex marriage — “It will destroy the marriage institution completely!” Seems like straight marriage has been destroying that institution pretty well without the help of LGBT people.
So just so you understand, I do not think Ebola is a joke. It is a serious disease, and like any disease, it needs to be treated with caution and intelligence.
And though the hospital made a few missteps when first presented with the patient, things seem to be much more controlled now. And though I live only a few blocks from the hospital and right across the street from one of the schools the children who were exposed attend, I am not wearing a hazmat suit and gloves to walk through my neighborhood.
We successfully navigated the early days of HIV/AIDS, and I firmly believe we will get through this as well.
We in the LGBT community have a lot of lessons we could teach our city when it comes to compassion and common sense. Though I will not be surprised if there are more cases of Ebola diagnosed in the cluster of people who were really at risk, I think the proper response is to be a compassionate and calm voice in the roar of mindless panic.
Hardy Haberman is a longtime local LGBT activist and board member for the Woodhull Freedom Alliance. His blog is at DungeonDiary.blogspot.com.
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition October 10, 2014.