Healthcare worker was wearing CDC approved protective gear.

[distantearlywarning]

25. Some of them believe

that the doctors were wading barefoot through piles of feces with cuts on their feet.

You can only get it through direct contact with someone else's poop and you have to have an open wound - this is what we have been told by DU'ers who are very concerned that people not "panic" (i.e., have discussions about Ebola). They couldn't possibly be wrong, could they?

Or, let's see - that it's harder to get than HIV (because health care workers are TOTALLY in grave danger of coming down with HIV when they spend time in an HIV-positive patient's room or when they touch an HIV-positive patient's stuff and then touch their face.)

Or, that Ebola is so hard to get that nobody should ever worry about being in the same space as a symptomatic Ebola patient, but also that the only reason gloved, shielded, and gowned nurses have contracted it is because they failed to follow every step of a complex medical protocol to the letter (See? Nothing for the average non-gloved, non-shielded, and non-gowned citizen to worry about!)

Just for the record, I am not the slightest bit concerned about personally getting Ebola. My hair is not on fire, there is no screaming or shouting, I spend days on end not thinking about Ebola at all. I am not buying an Ebola kit from natural news (or whatever that dumb woo woo website is), and I would be perfectly fine taking a business trip to Dallas if I were asked to go there. Also, yes, I got my flu shot this year. However, I also have never believed that denial, downplaying actual risk so we can feel better emotionally, or refusing to even discuss things is a good way to prepare for possible negative outcomes. Let's talk about Ebola some more, before more cases arrive on our shores, so that we are better prepared to deal with it as a society than we were with the Dallas case. Let's talk about Ebola some more, so that we can get more momentum toward dealing with the problem in Africa, before it infects 1.4 million people (the epidemiologists' forecast for the next few months)*. Let's not just whistle past the graveyard and assume it will all work out fine because "Ebola is so hard to get".

*Someone on Discussionist (of all places) made the analogy about the Ebola epidemic that we are like people living in a house a few streets over from a wildfire. Right now the fire (in Africa) is small, but a couple of sparks still drifted over our way (here in the US) and we had to run and put them out before they started a fire on their own. Luckily, we have sophisticated fire containment measures over here on our street, so it's not a big deal yet. However, if we wait and refuse to do anything about the fire a few streets over, eventually it will grow bigger and bigger. And the bigger it gets, the more sparks will drift over our way. Eventually we will be spending a lot of time and resources running around having to put out all the sparks that are landing in our yard, and the likelihood grows that we will miss one and it will start a real fire on our street too. It would be much better to just loan some of our fire-fighting equipment to our neighbors now to prevent having to deal with all those sparks later.