Although the Ebola crisis has remained ongoing, it has received no tangible attention in Western media since 2015. A compelling explanation for this phenomenon rests in colonial associations of race and disease, and the way in which those associations have become implicitly present today.
Nurses Caring for Children at the Height of the Ebola Epidemic. World Bank Photo Collection. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
In 2014-2015, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia experienced 11,300 fatal cases of the Ebola virus. While not comparable to the scope of the incidence rate in Africa, the handful of fatalities in the West sparked panic about the growing global public health crisis of Ebola. Following the first fatality due to Ebola in the United States, the crisis reached national and international news.
In reality, the outbreak of Ebola, although it has diminished since 2015, is far from being over: nearly 3300 new cases, including 2171 fatalities, have resulted from the Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the 12 months between October 2018 and October 2019 alone. Although incidence rates remain steady across Central and West Africa, concentrated especially in the DRC, with additional incidences possible in Tanzania, major media coverage in the West has dwindled to nearly nothing following 2015. The hypocrisy in media coverage in the West and especially the U.S. regarding Ebola is nuanced, and stems from a long history of biases that have developed and been reinforced throughout centuries.
That is to say, race has been implicitly coded over time into the way in which individuals conceive of hygiene, sanitation, and disease. Much of this coding arose from and became reinforced in colonialism: the colonized was marked “dirty, diseased.” In response, the colonizer labeled itself as a “savior.” Moreover, the concept of miasma, the leading Western theory of disease during the colonial era stipulated that disease originated from “foulness,” which—while not entirely incorrect, potentially misplacing correlation as causation— came to be shorthand for the treatment of the indigenous populations under the Western gaze. The concept of “foulness” was coded into the very identity of the colonized by the colonizer, as the status of the imperialist rested on the denigration of the colonized. It is these social relations which, then, are informative of the present social relations.
Consequently, centuries later, these attitudes have become baked into everyday life, translated over time from explicit positions into implicit biases. Even during the height of the crisis in 2014, attention has been brought to the phenomenon of the implicit white saviorism in the media reporting. The illustration in the West minimized the victims of Ebola in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone to numbers. In this way, the narrative implicated a diseased, “backwards” population in need of saving—implicitly posturing a parent-child relationship, rather than one of symmetrical foreign aid between states. This relationship creates an “us-other” distinction, such that when the virus reached the West the line between “us” and the “other” blurred. Once there were no longer instances of the Ebola virus in the West, the virus returned to its status of something belong to the “other,” directly reminiscent of the colonial attitudes regarding miasma and the colonizer’s role among the colonized.
Important to note, researchers have found that the cases in the most recent wave of Ebola in the Congo have disproportionately affected women. A dearth of medical research has found that the medical conditions of women, especially women of color, are minimized implicitly both in the medical profession and in general thought. This tendency towards minimization of marginalized groups further adds complexity to the issue of the asymmetry in coverage surrounding the Ebola outbreaks.
Certainly, this is not to say that anxiety over the proximity of the virus in the United States in 2015 is not partly explanatory of the brief surge and decline of Ebola’s salience in the media. However, the racialization in the framing of public health crises is crucial to understand the dynamics of outbreaks such as the one that has been ongoing. Although still a serious public health crisis, the Ebola virus largely disappeared from the media after its incidence in the West fell back to zero. This phenomenon has had concrete consequences: experts estimated that the incidence rate of fatal cases in the 2014-2015 crisis could have been reduced by 80% had response measures been instated two months ahead of when they were initiated. The responsiveness in public health crises is directly related to the salience of those crises: Westerners were simply less likely to label the Ebola outbreak a public health emergency until the virus was discovered in the West. The asymmetries in media coverage do not occur in a vacuum, however, and understanding their roots and implications is critical to their mitigation.
HALLIE GRIFFITHS is an undergraduate at the University of Virginia studying Foreign Affairs and Spanish. After graduation, she hopes to apply her passion for travel and social action toward a career in intelligence and policy analysis. Outside of the classroom, she can be found, quite literally, outside: backpacking, rock climbing, or skiing with her friends.