Handling The Risk of Ebola

Good essay.

Worry about Ebola (or anything) manifests physically as what's known as a fight, flight, or freeze response. Biological systems ramp up or down to focus the body's resources on the threat at hand. Heart rate and blood pressure increase, immune function is suppressed (after an initial burst), brain chemistry changes, and the normal functioning of the digestive system is interrupted, among other effects. Like fear itself, these changes are protective in the short term. But when they persist, the changes prompted by chronic stress -- defined as stress beyond the normal hassles of life, lasting at least one to two weeks -- are associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease (the leading cause of death in America); increased likelihood and severity of clinical depression (suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in America); depressed memory formation and recall; impaired fertility; reduced bone growth; and gastrointestinal disorders.
Perhaps most insidious of all, by suppressing our immune systems, chronic stress makes us more likely to catch infectious diseases, or suffer more­ -- or die­ -- from diseases that a healthy immune system would be better able to control. The fear of Ebola may well have an impact on the breadth and severity of how many people get sick, or die, from influenza this flu season. (The CDC reports that, either directly or indirectly, influenza kills between 3,000 and 49,000 people per year.)
There is no question that America's physical, economic, and social health is far more at risk from the fear of Ebola than from the virus itself.

The State of Louisiana is prohibiting researchers who have recently been to Ebola-infected countries from attending a conference on tropical medicine. So now we're at a point where our fear of Ebola is inhibiting scientific research into treating and curing Ebola.