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What the Heck?

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THE Ebola virus is undoubtedly one of the most talked about pandemics at the moment. Having infected 13,752 people and claimed the lives of 4951 people, Ebola has rightfully earned its place as a virus to be feared.
I won’t go into the specifics of how the virus affects the body, a little Google search can tell you that it is not a pleasant virus to be infected with. What I do want to discuss is the double standards of how the Western media have chosen to portray victims of Ebola and how they continue to feed the narrative that Africa is a dark dangerous continent that is riddled with poverty and disease.
The international media have gone into frenzy about it with reports ranging from how easy it is to contract the virus, how all flights from Africa should be banned to speculating where the virus came from. South Carolina GOP executive director Todd Kincannon has even gone as far to say that people carrying Ebola in the US should “be humanely put down” with response to the story of Thomas Duncan, the Liberian man who was unknowingly infected with the virus and travelled to America.
A 26-year-old Guinean woman Fataomata Sompare, was violently attacked on a bus in Italy for supposedly carrying the Ebola virus because she was from Africa. Just last week we reported that some of our very own soccer players from Namibia were ridiculed and verbally harassed upon arrival to the Homeless World Cup in Chile, never mind that Namibia is currently Ebola free. There have even been some misguided entrepreneurs in America who are selling everything from jewellery with the Ebola strain motif on it, to selling ‘sexy Ebola nurse’ Halloween costumes.
This Ebola outbreak has brought out some of the ugliest sides in people and highlighted some of the negative press on how they choose to go about reporting on the disease and its effects.
From speculating that the Ebola outbreak came from “West Africans’ affinity for bush meat” in particular monkey meat, never mind the fact that Africans aren’t the only ones to eat wild game or other primates, for that matter. The Western media doesn’t seem to notice its double standards to calling their wild game like rabbit, deer game, yet when Africans eat wild meat, it is dubbed “bush meat”.
The way in which the West has portrayed African or black Ebola victims in their news stories compared to the way the portray Western Ebola victims is worlds apart. While Africans are portrayed as helpless lifeless bodies that are doomed to such a fate because of our supposed dietary preferences, the western victims are portrayed as martyrs, heroes and saints who have only become infected by Ebola by trying to help “ the poor helpless African who doesn’t know any better”.
In this Ebola outbreak the villains are the Africans who should be banned from travelling to the West and bringing their “bush disease” while the Westerners are our saving grace who are coming to Africa to help us from ourselves and working on a cure, without any mention of the Liberian doctors and scientists who themselves are too working in labs trying to understand this strain of the virus.
Ebola does not discriminate, Ebola is deadly, but we should not allow others the opportunity to dehumanise our fellow Africans because of this virus.


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