When panic is the greater harm

A year has passed since our last major freakout began. A case of hemorrhagic fever had crossed borders and, last spring, was declared an outbreak in three West African countries by the World Health Organization (WHO). The word "Ebola" appeared on the front pages of newspapers like this one for the first time in April, 2014.

What followed was a year-long mass hysteria. Never mind that health authorities declared that the chances of an outbreak in Western countries, or even in wider Africa, was zero: North American parents pulled their children out of school. One charity declared it the "definitive humanitarian disaster of our generation." Almost half of Canadians told pollsters they believed "there will be a large outbreak of Ebola inside Canada within the next 12 months."

Ottawa was on the front lines of freaking out: Immigration Minister Chris Alexander, acting against the advice of the WHO, banned entry to Canada for any Africans from three affected countries (the ban remains in effect). South of the border, panic leapt into absurdity with big-name politicians calling for total bans on Africans and even Mexicans entering the United States.

And now we all feel a little embarrassed. This week the WHO declared that there have been no Ebola deaths in Liberia since March 27; that the world had seen only 30 new cases in the past week, all but nine in Guinea – in short, that the Ebola outbreak has ended. It was bad – more than 10,000 people died – but as an epidemic it never extended beyond three small, very poor countries. Rather than being the "global pandemic" of TV-news headlines, the outbreak showed that the world's health systems are mostly robust, resilient and successful.

The panic itself was another matter. It is possible that the public hysteria was more damaging, on these shores, than the thing we were hysterical about. Such mass panics are becoming more frequent and intense: If we had expected the rise of Twitter, Facebook and streaming news to provide a calming dose of instant, corrective on-the-ground reality, it seems to have had the opposite effect. The touchscreen in your pocket has become a furrowed-brow amanuensis whispering "Yes, now is the time to panic."

There is one positive consequence of such panics, and it was pointed out recently in the medical journal Neglected Tropical Diseases (whose name virtually gives away the story): "Finally, Ebola is seeing intense attention in terms of research and funding," the authors write. For other such diseases, they speculate, "the only hope for serious investment in reducing the incidence and impact of such diseases is via the [fear of] spread to developed countries." And not just diseases: The Y2K bug was a fallacy born of technological ignorance that was never going to kill anyone, but an extra investment in operating-system upgrades never hurts.

Unfortunately, there's a countervailing effect that negates all these benefits and then some: Hysterias stop us from fixing the things we really need to worry about. The best documentation of this tendency was assembled by David McCandless, a British data scientist, on his site Information Is Beautiful: He tracked a decade and a half of "media-inflamed fears," from the Y2K virus to the Ebola outbreak, passing through SARS, mad cow disease, bird flu, asteroid-collision fears, and such fully mythical hysterias as "killer WiFi" and vaccination-autism fallacies, and correlated them with the rate at which people died (or didn't) of the panic's subject.

What stands out is that our panics almost always lead our gaze away from actual dangers. While we were having conniptions over SARS (which took only a couple hundred lives over its entire course, yet caused several countries to impose travel bans on Canada, among other things) and asteroid collisions and bird flu, some 11,000 people were succumbing to killer wasps, which hardly got any mention, and in 2009 swine flu killed 19,000 people (almost twice as many as Ebola) while only causing a brief media panic largely limited to Britain.

And, third, when we panic we often come to the opposite of the needed conclusion. Ebola showed that international travel and hospitals are safe, but the panic gave millions the opposite sense. The panic around the Fukushima nuclear disaster was so widespread that many people still believe, falsely, that it spread radiation widely. In fact, it was a near-total vindication of nuclear power (the very worst-designed reactor faced the worst imaginable disaster under the worst circumstances and caused only localized harm). But the panic led to Germany's decision to eliminate nuclear power, severely damaging that country's previously stellar greenhouse-gas record: The panic, not the disaster, harmed the environment.

The only solution may be to remember, and learn from, our previous panics: Fear itself, it turns out, is not a small thing to fear.