So Brazil has two suspected Ebola cases, and the UK Border Force is in a tizzy. How very 2014. One almost expects to see a headline about Victorian cholera ships or the Black Death docking at Gravesend.
The modern West, with all its gleaming labs and global health organisations, still jumps at shadows. Remember the panic over SARS? Swine flu?
The great toilet paper shortage of 2020? We are a civilisation that has mastered the atom and the genome, yet we quiver at the thought of a virus with a 50% fatality rate. But let us not be too smug.
The fear is rational, if overblown. Ebola is a dreadful disease, and the spectre of a pandemic is real. Yet the response is always the same: border screenings, isolation wards, and PR campaigns urging calm.
Brazil, a nation of 200 million, has two patients under observation. The UK prepares its border force. This is not the Fall of Rome; it is the hyperventilating of a decadent age that has forgotten what real plagues look like.
The 1918 influenza killed 50 million. The Black Death wiped out a third of Europe. Today, we have the WHO, CDC, and daily press briefings.
The real crisis is not Ebola but the atrophy of our collective nerve. We have become a people who cannot face a fever without demanding a state of emergency. So watch Brazil.
Watch Britain. And then ask yourself: is this vigilance or hysteria?
