What's scarier? Ebola or those doughnuts you eat every morning for breakfast?
Ebola, of course. Ebola is a disease that involves lots of bleeding, vomiting and diarrhea before an almost-certain death. Whereas doughnuts are delicious, sweet pastries.
But which one is more likely to kill you? The doughnuts, of course.
Ebola, while usually fatal, is very rare, especially outside of West Africa . So far, there have been only about 10,000 cases worldwide.
But doughnuts (and other unhealthy foods stuffed with the fats, sugar and carbs that we gorge on night and day) can cause obesity, which kills hundreds of thousands of Americans and causes hundreds of billions of dollars of economic damage every year.
Two cases of Ebola, one in Dallas and the other in New York , have all of America in full-tilt freak-out mode. But hundreds of millions of cases of preventable cancer, heart disease, mental illness, diabetes and respiratory disease are basically ignored. They don't get 24/7 coverage on cable news. We don't get breaking news updates every time there's a diagnosis of a new case of lung cancer or diabetes, or every time someone is cured.
I get it. Ebola is a frightening disease. It's not particularly easy to catch, but it is spreading. It is not under control. Those who get it usually die a very painful death, a death that could have been prevented with a $2 latex glove, or with more effective tracking and quarantining.
All the fear has done some good: U.S. public-health authorities seem to be (finally) taking this seriously after months of false bravado about how Ebola could never happen here, because America.
We aren't prepared, and now everyone knows it.
The authorities are finally starting to provide the equipment and training that front-line nurses and doctors need. They are ramping up efforts to track possible infections and to quarantine those who might spread it further.
The public-health experts know exactly how to stop Ebola, and, now that the world's attention is focused on them, they may actually do what they've always known what's necessary to prevent thousands of deaths. It can be done. We just need the will.
Stopping Ebola is relatively easy compared with reducing the millions of needless deaths from diseases far deadlier than Ebola, such as heart disease, HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, diabetes, cancer, hypertension and influenza.
Half of all American adults have a chronic illness such as heart disease, hypertension, diabetes and cancer. And that's no surprise: More than half of all adults fail to get enough exercise. About a third of adults are obese. About a fifth smoke and about a fifth regularly go on a binge of boozing.
Every year, about 2.5 million Americans die, most from preventable diseases. So far this year, one person in America has died of Ebola.
DISEASE DEATHS IN 2011
Heart disease 596,339
Cancer 575,313
Chronic lower respiratory diseases 143,382
Stroke 128,931
Accidents 122,777
Alzheimer's 84,691
Diabetes 73,282
Influenza and pneumonia 53,667
Nephritis and other kidney diseases 45,731
Suicide 38,285
According to the Centers for Disease Control , the top 10 killers in America are heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory disease, stroke, accidents, diabetes, flu and pneumonia, kidney disease and suicide.
Many of these deaths could be prevented if people would just do four things: Get up off the couch and exercise, eat healthy food, stop smoking and stop drinking too much alcohol. Getting vaccinated for flu, measles and pertussis would help too.
While the largest burden of these diseases is on the patient and the family, there is also a tremendous economic and social loss as well. According to a study by the Milken Institute , the economic cost of chronic disease in the U.S. will be $2.7 trillion in 2015. The total cost includes direct costs of caring and treating people and the lost productivity due to shortened lives and inability to work at 100% effort.
Obviously, we can't completely eliminate those diseases, but the Milken Institute figured that reasonable efforts to reduce the risk factors would add $900 billion to U.S. gross domestic product by 2023. GDP could be 18% higher than the base case by 2050.
In Africa and other low-income nations around the world, the problems are a little different. Infectious diseases are killing millions of people every year, and keeping their economies poor. HIV killed about 1.6 million people last year. TB killed 1.5 million. Malaria killed 627,000. Malaria alone is estimated to reduce economic growth by about 1.3 percentage points every year.
Other tropical diseases take a toll. More than a billion people, for instance, are infected with roundworm, schistosomiasis, elephantiasis and other parasites that can be easily and cheaply controlled. These diseases disable workers and keep children out of school. Eliminating these chronic parasites would be a boon to their economies.
Where is the outrage about river blindness?
Ebola is a nasty bug. The CDC estimates there could be a million cases by January if current trends continue. Hundreds of thousands could die. The World Bank estimates that the Ebola outbreak could cost West Africa $33 billion this year and next, mostly due to foregone economic activity. The GDP of Liberia -- a place I know and love -- could shrink by 5.2%.
I'm not trying to minimize the risks or costs of Ebola; they are huge.
But we Americans have a lot bigger things to worry about if we want to stay healthy. Unfortunately, things like getting more exercise or stopping smoking are hard. Whereas it's really easy to panic about Ebola.
One encouraging fact: You can't get the carbs in a doughnut from airborne transmission; you have to eat it.
AI
