Yesterday, all day, the “ebola outbreak” in Dallas, Texas, consisting of one sick Liberian who came to the US, was the top national news story in this rapidly deteriorating country. People almost everywhere were talking seriously about this as a threat to their health and safety.
This is not a news story. The ebola outbreak in Africa is probably a news story, though it still kills way fewer people than, say, starvation or civil war or actual seemingly intractable threats to health and safety in developing nations. But ebola in the United States is not a threat and should not be a news story. There have been three cases of people in America with ebola. Zero people have died. No one has contracted ebola in the US. The two Americans who contracted ebola abroad were cured. The Liberian in America with ebola is receiving the most intensive health care and scrutiny of any person in the history of hospitals.
Ebola in the US is not a news story. It is not an occurrence. It is a distraction and the needless generation of fear, much like, say ISIS.
But hey, at least ISIS did kill two Americans before we declared it the greatest threat to American security in world history.
So here is a non-comprehensive list of things more likely to kill Americans than ebola. It’s probably also viable for ISIS, though a couple of the more obscure ones maybe be only comparably dangerous to Americans as ISIS. That latter danger is also going to increase since we sent a bunch of Americans to try to kill every man, woman, and child in Iraq and Syria.
List of Things More Likely to Kill Americans than Ebola:
- Spiders
Sharks
Police Officers
Scorpions
Falling Off of Ladders
Drowning in the Bathtub
Looking at Someone Else’s Gun
Bears
Frat Parties
Falling Off a Cliff while Hiking
Snakes
Dropping Electronics into the Sink
Spontaneous Combustion
Flesh-Eating Bacteria
Lightning
Lawn Mowers
Autoerotic Asphyxiation
Bees
Peanuts
Gluten
Dogs
Baseballs
Icicles
Jellyfish
Vending Machines
Roller Coasters
Falling Out of Bed
Pillows
And this is to say nothing of, say, actually dangerous things, like motor vehicles or smoking or alcohol or starvation or hospital mistakes, let alone things like heart disease and cancer and diabetes. So please. Please. Stop talking about ebola in the US. You might do something truly dangerous, like give yourself high blood pressure worrying about it.
