Ebola is not the flu.

You cannot get it by breathing the same air as someone with it or by an infected person preparing food, so students need to calm down with the Ebola craze.

This new fear of Ebola is due to a person in the United States being diagnosed with Ebola. Many Americans fear that because one person here got it, everyone will. They fear that Ebola is going to be the death of the human population.

Ebola is not that easy to contract. The only way that you can actually get the disease is if you get an infected person’s vomit, blood or other bodily fluids in your mouth, eyes or an opening in your skin. So honestly, who is in direct contact with an affected person’s bodily fluid in this high school?  Unless you are making out with your ebola-infected significant other, or you are a vampire, you should not worry.

Not only is no one in high school going to come into contact with another person’s blood, they are especially not going to come in contact with an infected person’s blood because the only known cases in America are in Texas.  There are no reported cases in St. Louis or even Missouri. So calm down, no one is going to catch Ebola.

Another thing that is especially irritating to me is the fact that people make jokes about it. Ebola is a very serious medical condition; it has killed many people in Africa. So to make light of the situation by saying things like, “Oh, I have a headache, I have Ebola” you are making light of a situation that really should not be made light of.

The amount of people who have died in Africa brings up another point. Why do we only now care about Ebola? This has been a problem in Africa for many years, but Americans only care about it when it affects them.

This is the mentality that America often has. In World War II, we only got involved after we got bombed in Pearl Harbor.

So if we are going to care this much about Ebola, let’s care about where it is actually affected the most. In Africa. Let’s focus our attention on coming up with a cure there so that when an American comes back, they won’t be affected as well.

Ebola is soon going to die out in America, the last of the people are either going to be healed, or unfortunately, die. And then what? America is going to forget all about Ebola and not care and people in Africa will continue to die from it. Maybe America should take this current hype about it and come up with a cure that can affect the people who are most affected with it.