The Attention Span of an Underachieving Knat

A few weeks ago – perhaps no more than a month, on every TV news program there was extensive coverage of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. We saw pictures of health workers dressed in their alien looking protective outfits, scenes of West Africans collecting bodies and various medical people talking about the need for more help from the west. If you watched the news, it was immediately obvious that there was a medical crisis that was not going to go away on its own. There were reports that the disease was spreading at an almost exponential rate and that we (the collective rich nations of the world) needed to something. And needed to do it now. Of course that point was not new. Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) had been saying that since the late spring. We just had not been listening. It wasn’t newsworthy enough.

More recently much of what little news there has been on the Ebola outbreak has been focused on how the developed countries of the west have been dealing with the public’s media induced paranoid fears of getting the disease. Canada has, for example, in spite of condemnation from world health organizations, has created quarantine rules that are harsh and not at all relevant to the prevention of the disease spreading.  But there are no more pictures on our TV screens of people dressed in strange yellow suits or dead bodies being buried in mass graves. A stranger to our world would perhaps believe that the lack of news would indicate that we are well on the way to eradicating the problem on a worldwide basis. Unfortunately that naïve and sheltered being would be wrong.

According the most recent morbidity and mortality report from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the problem has not gone away. As of yesterday over 14,000 people have been diagnosed and over 5000 people have died. While the number of new cases is 100 fewer than the previous reporting period, we are a long way from having any sort of control of the virus and its spread.

While I can appreciate the fact that those who produce and write the news assume that the average Canadian has the attention span of an underachieving knat, there are some of us who in fact can focus of something for an extended period of time. There are some of us who actually want to know what is going on in the world. The Ebola crisis has not gone away. In all likelihood it is not going to go away anytime soon. It will not go away without our investment of time, money and people.   It is, unfortunately a reality of the world that we live in that we will not invest in those things unless we are reminded and yes nagged and nagged until we collectively agree to do the right thing.