Ebola
Okie dokie. I've got my removable gloves, my sterile mask, my antibiotic wash, my plastic booties, my latex gown, my distilled water, my glass goggles, my antibiotic wash for my glass goggles, my plastic booties for my glass goggles, my disinfectant coated tent, my tent coated disinfectant, my exotic scab collection, and my industrial grade air purifier.
Can't be too prepared, y'know? Even Ebola comes prepared; you know its official name is Ebola Virus Disease? Redundancy, man. Redundancy.
E-bloody-bola? What the hell is that? The last 'E' thing you Westerners came here for was slaver-y. You white, er, suited men - I can't actually tell your ethnicity under all those white bin bags - can take your Conspiracy-bola and stick it up your rear.
No, sir, what you've got there is a bouncing little, 19,000 nucleotide long, hemorrhagic virus. The nasty mononegavirus has yet to master lighter than air flight, however it can be transmitted via basically every other form of contact. Direct physical, indirect physical, even fecal-oral if you bend that way. With a case fatality rate of up to 90%, Ebola is nothing if not thorough.
Just to make it clear to the laymen reading out there, the favorite pastime of Ebolavirus is being more fatal than a king cobra riding a bicycle made of anthrax...
Now you've got to see it from our perspective. You've got your complex sugars and Big Macs; the tastiest foods we have either possess the athletic ability of Usain Bolt or reside at the top of the highest tree in the forest. You call it 'bushmeat', I just call it meat.
I'm aware of our growing middle class in Africa, but the reason my children don't currently resemble Stephen Hawking is because a big lump of char-grilled fruit bat is staving off that imminent anemia.
And our burial ceremonies, forbidding us from washing our own loved ones after death? You even allow a shower in the cell of child molesters who can't muster a smile unless they've stolen all the pants from the local school. Why can't the woman who raised a village worth of kids have that final dignity?
I'm quite sorry, but we've got MSF, the CDC, the WHO, and the IRC all working on this. That's a Scrabble set worth of acronyms attempting to contain this virus before it turns all those zombie games into 'based on a true story'.
You know what it does? Your internals become externals. Or even puddles. Oh, oops, I trod in your liver. Turns out you need blood platelets more than you do a leg of cooked chimpanzee.
We're all quite sad West Africa is on the brink of civil conflict, but you've got to maintain the quarantine so the next mass extinction event doesn't come from something smaller than a bee's proverbials.
Wh- what is everyone looking at me for? Keep going, keep fighting. I wasn't going to use conflict to my advantage and sneak off on a loaded plane. Like, that ain't me at all. Nah, promise.
