The Worry You Can Conquer

WASHINGTON -- If you are worried about contracting Ebola, I have two suggestions. First, stop. Second, get a flu shot.

On the first: If you live in the United States, your chances of getting Ebola are vanishingly small -- even if you are a health care worker, or a journalist who travels to Africa to report on the epidemic.

That is not to diminish the significance of the problem. For Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the virus represents a public health catastrophe, one with dire implications for the continent and beyond. For the United States, it represents a serious challenge to public health protocols -- a reminder about the interconnectedness of the planet in an age of jet travel and a wake-up call about the perils of laxity in the face of a deadly disease.

But as Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health usefully tried to point out on numerous talk shows, there is an important distinction between stopping an Ebola outbreak (which has been done successfully in the United States) and preventing an individual infection.

"We're still quite confident because of our ability to reach out, do the contact tracing, and isolate people who are infected, that we won't have a public outbreak," Fauci said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "That's a different thing than an individual health care worker unfortunately getting infected."

It is human nature, reinforced by journalistic instinct, to ignore this context. We worry about the plane crash and suppress the far more likely, and therefore far more terrifying prospect, of the bad driver down the block. We ignore the mundane tragedy of predictable and in many cases preventable deaths -- from smoking, from gunshots, from the side effects of obesity -- in favor of the newer, newsier threat.

This may have been good statistics and bad parenting, but when my children worried about being killed by terrorists in the aftermath of 9/11, I advised them to fear driving on the Beltway. Being alert to the possibility of the black swan event doesn't mean ignoring the far more likely reality.

My profession, to put it mildly, doesn't help matters. This is both ingrained response and business imperative. The news is the man who bites the dog. There are no viewers for the plane that doesn't fall from the sky. The adage, "If it bleeds, it leads," is terrifyingly apt when it comes to hemorrhagic fever. So we swarm to Dallas, interview neighbors, tweet breaking news bulletins. We are serving the public but also disserving it.

People get riled up, for little rational reason. They and some of their politicians clamor to restrict entry from Ebola-infected countries, which could be counter-productive, and to step up screenings of travelers, which makes people feel safer without being much safer.

Which brings us to your flu shot -- something that could actually protect you from a serious illness.

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