Don't Worry Too Much About Ebola

• I was in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea from July to September 2013 - so a few months before the March 2014 Ebola outbreak.
• I’m currently in Niger. Next week I’m going to Benin. Then I’ll spend 2 weeks traversing Nigeria (where Ebola has just appeared) to Cameroon.
• I’m spending 4 years visiting all 54 African countries.

Should You Be Afraid of Ebola?
The outbreak does give me pause, but only for about 5 seconds. It’s easy to get excited about this outbreak, but it’s important to have perspective:

• Nearly 700 people have died have died in since March 2014 in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia.
• Annual auto fatalities in Guinea (1,956), Sierra Leone (1,323), Liberia (760) total 4,039. Let’s divide that figure in half (since the Ebola outbreak has been out for just under 6 months), we get about 2,000 auto deaths in those 3 countries every 6 months.
• Therefore, the average person in those three countries is 3 times more likely to die in a traffic related accident than by Ebola.
• Yet, almost nobody in those countries wear a seat belts (many cars don’t even have working seat belts).
• So if we want to save the most African lives, why don’t their governments mandate wearing seat belts and improving their road conditions?
• Nobody will worry about me going to Eritrea because it’s on Africa’s east coast (far from the outbreak). However, according to the WHO, Eritrea has the worst road fatality rate in the world (12 times worse than the UK and twice as deadly as Liberia). In other words, if I go to Eritrea, I’m 6 times more likely to die in car accident than to die of Ebola in Liberia.
• Another way of thinking about it: those three countries have 22 million people. “Only” 700 have died. Thus, Ebola has killed 0.00318% of the population. Your chance of dying from Ebola when you are in one of those 3 African countries is one in 31,428. That’s better odds than the lottery, but it won’t make me lose sleep.

Malaria vs. Ebola

Ebola’s Fatality Rate Myth

My advice 

• Don’t eat bush meat (or any meat, frankly).
• Don’t worry about visiting an Ebola-infected country.
• If you do, consider wearing plastic gloves.
• Either take anti-malarial medicine or always have the treatment for malaria with you.
• Wear seat belt whenever possible.