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Ebola in U.S.: Accurate communication is crucial, says Duke professor

Now that an Ebola diagnosis has occurred for the first time in the United States, people should avoid unnecessary panic by considering the facts and not overreacting, says a Duke expert on contagions.

"It’s not surprising that a case of Ebola has appeared in the U.S. We’re part of a global network," says Priscilla Wald, an English professor at Duke who has extensively examined the intersection of myth and medicine as they relate to contagions. "Now it is no longer 'over there'; the line between 'us' and 'them' has been breached."

The key now is how the incident and whatever comes next is communicated, she says.

"Why should Ebola, which is not easily transmitted, inspire so much more fear than, for example, the flu?" she says. "Statistics on the relative danger of both do not seem to matter. That’s why we have to look to the way we communicate about these matters.

"We have to think about the associations that are triggered in the public imagination by the images that popular fiction and film, as well as the media, have made familiar. We have to think about how they inspire irrational panic, and about how they deflect attention from the larger source of the problem."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday confirmed the first case of Ebola to be diagnosed in the United States. The agency said the man had traveled to Dallas from Liberia and did not develop symptoms some four days after arriving back in the country on Sept. 20. He was being treated at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas.

The CDC said in a press release that medical and public health professionals across the country have prepared to respond to a potential case of Ebola. And officials in Texas and from the CDC were working to identify people who had close personal contact with the ill person.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Wednesday that some school-age children had been in contact with the ill person, and that officials had identified the children and were monitoring them for symptoms, CNN reported.

Wald says the core issue behind the outbreak is global poverty.

"The story that never gets told is about the relationship of the illness to global poverty and about how addressing the underlying problem is not only possible, but sensible," says Wald, author of “Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative.”

"We can’t let a crisis mentality keep us from thinking rationally."