Knox — Exotic plagues rarely the scariest things we face

Jack Knox was once a newspaper reporter and editor in Kamloops who now writes for the Victoria Times-Colonist.

COLUMN — She found me stuffing shells into the shotgun.This caused her to cock an eyebrow. “Spider in the kitchen?”

I shook my head. “Ebola in Texas. I’m shooting the neighbours, just to be safe.”

 She paused. “Make sure to aim for their brains.”

My turn to pause. “No, you’re thinking of zombies.”

Well, we had a healthy chuckle about that. (And BTW: new season of The Walking Dead begins next weekend. So excited!)

The moment of levity was a welcome respite from the grim reality that the Ebolapocalypse is upon us, with one (1) case of the disease diagnosed in North America. Better stockpile the backyard bunker, dear, the plague will surely be getting off the plane at YYJ by Thursday.

On the other hand, I have in the past been accused — with lamentable justification — of overreacting to the exotic health scare du jour.

It was in 2001 that I chased the dog out of the house, just in case he tracked in that year’s hoof-and-mouth disease outbreak. In 2002, it was the mid-Island discovery of Cryptococcus neoformans, an airborne fungus, that had me rolling up the windows and holding my breath every time I drove past Parksville.

Then came SARS and mad cow disease in 2003, West Nile virus in 2004, the avian flu in 2005 and H1N1 in 2009, when the vaccination lines were so long you would think they were handing out a free iPhone with every inoculation.

It’s not just diseases, either. Terrorism, killer bees, falling space junk, zombie apocalypse — my freak-out factor is in direct opposition to the actual likelihood of falling prey to the threat.

Remember Y2K when computers and, therefore, civilization were going to crash at the dawn of the new millennium? Fretting about that is how we ended up with the backyard bunker (along with a $30,000 Visa bill for canned food, liquor and ammo).

Then, a year later, I forced the evacuation of the airport when mistaking some Tim Hortons doughnut dust for anthrax spores.

In my defence, I’m not alone. Note that during the 2001 anthrax scare a suspicious envelope emptied the premier’s office, another closed a building at Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt and an unidentified white powder kept the Queen of Nanaimo tied up at Saltspring Island (because, as you know, the Ganges outdoor market was right at the top of Osama’s to-terrorize list). Oh, and anthrax never was found in Canada.

Likewise, while Canada’s brush with SARS was limited mostly to Toronto in 2003, U.S. tourists avoided our entire country like, well, the plague. Asians were shunned like Obama at a Tea Party barbecue.

We really ramped up the hysteria for the H1N1 pandemic. The Project for Excellence in Journalism found that at one point in 2009, swine flu stories took up 43 per cent of U.S. network news air time. Egypt slaughtered 300,000 pigs even though you can’t get the disease from eating pork. Afghanistan’s only pig, a zoo animal in Kabul, was quarantined.

So, what actually kills us? The SARS flare-up did claim 44 Canadians, while the H1N1 pandemic was cited in more than 400 deaths here. However, that compares with the 4,000 to 8,000 of us who die of the garden variety flu every year.

Or, for broader context, the 48,000 who expire from heart disease or the 13,000 who croak from a stroke, according to Statistics Canada’s most recent annual figures. Ebola isn’t going to kill us. French fries and beached-whaling on the couch are going to kill us.

Meanwhile, the stuff that scientists say should be sending us dashing for the Prozac elicits little more than a yawn. It was reported last week that more than half the world’s wildlife has disappeared in the past 40 years, thanks to unsustainable demands put on our natural resources. Then there’s global warming, the threat so alarming that it makes our eyes glaze over whenever somebody brings it up.

Ebola is a terrible disease. So are tuberculosis and malaria, which kill hundreds of thousands of people a year. If you’re really worried about them spreading, give to the Red Cross.

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