- John Moore, Getty Images Europe
- Aid workers stage an Ebola awareness event in Monrovia, Liberia.
The Reader‘s “Did you read about?” feature drew my attention Tuesday to an article that compares Ebola to Enterovirus D68 (which gives children respiratory problems and is occasionally fatal) as a public health menace, but refuses to panic over either. “In reality,” says James Surowiecki on the New Yorker website, “we’re worrying too much about both Ebola and EV-D68, and too little about an infectious disease that is much more likely to inflict serious damage on the U.S. I’m talking, of course, about the flu.”
The only reason the flu is even yesterday’s news is that once in a while a strain has come along—such as H1N1 in 2009—that looked to be so much more lethal than the usual that the public needed to be put on notice. But most risk isn’t news because people already get it. Maybe in our bones we don’t feel the risk of driving the way we feel the vastly smaller risk of taking a plane (an example Surowiecki mentions)—but in our heads we know pretty well what those risks are. There’s no particular point in reminding us every time we decide to go somewhere.
