Tackling the Next Plague: Recommendations from the Ebola Crisis to Prevent and Deal with Epidemics

itself. This was as true of the Black Death as it was of Ebola.

Despite Ebola’s confinement to three countries thousands of miles away, opinion polls in October 2014 suggested that half of the U.S. population believed that a family member would become infected.

Fear can legitimize interventions, but managing it effectively is crucial to contain the disease, particularly as pandemics/epidemics tend to be destabilizing. They undermine confidence in key figures in society and understanding of who is responsible.

Information has a key role, but timing and content are important.

It can be counterproductive if overhyped, as it was in the reporting of the one Ebola case in Dallas. There is also often a gap between the understanding of the epidemiology of a disease and the public conversation. To some extent, a pandemic is a product of globalized fear: the concept didn’t exist before the end of the 19th century, when news coverage became more immediate.

Inflaming Tensions Epidemics rely on the movement of people and goods. Plague was carried across trade routes from Constantinople into Europe, while ships plying the Atlantic brought cholera during the 1830s.

Air travel facilitated the spread of Ebola.

But controlling the movement of people to curb the spread of infection is politically, socially and economically contentious. An epidemic can inflame existing social or racial tensions, undermining social cohesion and increasing distrust of the government.

Cholera illustrates this. In Russia, the Tsarist authoritarian government had already seeded distrust, so people believed it was responsible for spreading the infection. When the authorities used quarantine and military force to control the situation, there was a backlash. A similar situation arose a few years later in Paris, then in the throes of a revolution.

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