Ah, Ebola. The virus that once sent shivers down the spines of the chattering classes and prompted the World Health Organisation to declare a “public health emergency of international concern.” Now, it appears, the spectre has returned – not in the jungles of West Africa, but in the sprawling metropolises of Brazil. Two patients are being monitored, and British health authorities have dusted off their pandemic playbook. How quaint.
Let us not mince words: this is a test. A test of our medical infrastructure, our political resolve, and our collective ability to resist the siren call of hysteria. For if the past four years have taught us anything, it is that panic spreads faster than any pathogen. Social media becomes a vector of misinformation. Politicians grandstand. And the public, ever eager for a new crisis to consume, hoards toilet paper and clings to the latest news cycle.
But let us cast our minds back to a time before the internet, before the 24-hour news cycle, before we demanded instant answers from fallible experts. The Victorian era understood disease as a moral and spiritual ailment as much as a biological one. Cholera was a scourge of the poor, a punishment for bad sanitation and worse habits. Today, we have sanitised our discourse, but the underlying anxieties remain. We fear the unknown, the invisible enemy, the other.
So Brazil, with its chaotic governance and sprawling favelas, becomes a convenient stage for our nightmares. It is a country of contrasts: the Amazon, a cauldron of zoonotic diseases; the Olympic city of Rio, a playground for the global elite. And now, two patients. Do we lock our borders? Quarantine whole regions? Or do we, as the Romans would have done, offer sacrifices to the gods of public health and hope for the best?
I am not a doctor, nor an epidemiologist. But I am a student of history, and history tells us that plagues are never just medical events. They are mirrors. They reflect our fears, our prejudices, and our weaknesses. The British guidance, with its careful language and contingency plans, is a reminder that we live in an age of anxiety. We have conquered so much: polio, smallpox, even the common cold in some sense. Yet we remain vulnerable, fragile, humbled by a strand of RNA.
The irony, of course, is that while we fret about Ebola, we ignore the slow plagues that consume us daily: the obesity epidemic, the opioid crisis, the creeping despair of a disconnected populace. But those are familiar, comfortable tragedies. Ebola is exotic, dramatic, cinematic. It sells newspapers. It generates clicks. It makes us feel alive.
So let us watch. Let us read the updates. But let us also remember that the greatest pandemics are not those of the body, but of the mind. Our response to Ebola will reveal more about our society than any virologist could. Will we be calm and rational, or will we give in to the mob? Will we learn from our mistakes, or repeat them? The answer, I suspect, will be neither comforting nor surprising.
