I spent the better part of the last eight months backpacking around Africa with my boyfriend. We left the United States in March, the same month that the current Ebola epidemic in Western Africa was officially recognized. Our friends and family back home, many of whom were already concerned about our travel plans, became increasingly anxious about our perceived proximity to Ebola. We did everything that we could to assure them that we weren’t worried about Ebola, and they shouldn’t be either.
Why weren’t we worried? First, as I’m sure many of us have heard since the first cases of Ebola began appearing in the United States, Ebola isn’t all that easy to contract. To be infected, one must come into contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person during the period that said person is contagious, and those bodily fluids have to have a way of entering one’s body. According to the World Health Organization, “Ebola … spreads through human-to-human transmission via direct contact (through broken skin or mucous membranes) with the blood, secretions, organs or other bodily fluids of infected people, and with surfaces and materials (e.g. bedding, clothing) contaminated with these fluids.”1
As travelers, the risk of us coming into this sort of close contact with someone who is infected with Ebola is slight. As a matter of course, we avoid coming into contact with a stranger’s blood and bodily fluids even without the threat of Ebola – both at home and on the road, and especially in some of the countries we visited in Africa, where a tragic percentage of the population is infected with HIV/AIDS.
Second, and of more import, is the fact that we were far from the countries in Western Africa struggling with Ebola outbreaks. It can be hard to conceptualize just how large the continent of Africa is because most maps use the Mercator projection, which distorts landmasses to show them on a flat plane. On these maps, Africa and Greenland appear to be the same size, when Africa is actually fourteen times larger than Greenland.2
While Africa might look moderately sized on a map, it is actually about the same size as the United States, China, India, and a good chunk of Europe combined. During our travels in Southern and East Africa, we were nearly as far away from Ebola-infected countries as our friends back home. For example, Malawi is approximately 3,400 miles from Guinea, while New York is approximately 4,400 miles from Guinea.
Moreover, even though we might have been slightly physically closer to Ebola-infected countries than our family and friends in the United States, we were arguably farther away from contact. Why? There simply isn’t that much travel between the countries that we were visiting and the countries involved in the Ebola epidemic. The distances are great and intra-continent travel can be expensive. My impression is that it is more likely for citizens in Western African countries to have ties to the United States (such as family members living there) than for them to have such ties to, say, Tanzania. This may have been why the conversations we had about Ebola with locals in Southern and East Africa were never about fear, but instead about sympathy for the victims and their families.
It wasn’t until we reached Ethiopia that we heard locals talking about Ebola with concern that it might come within their borders. The owner of our hostel in Addis Ababa, while driving us from the airport, asked us whether we had been subjected to any Ebola screening upon landing (we had not) and expressed that many people were concerned that Ethiopian Airlines was still flying to and from Western Africa. The concern may have been greater in Ethiopia because the airport in Addis Ababa is a hub for international travel.
As far as I am aware, there have been no reported cases of Ebola in Ethiopia. In fact, there have been no reported cases in any of the countries we visited during our months-long tour through Africa. The closest is the Democratic Republic of the Congo – a country which we did not even visit, but were close to while in Gisenyi, Rwanda – and that outbreak isn’t even linked to the Western Africa epidemic.3 Of course, as we all know, there have been a handful of confirmed cases of Ebola in the United States – including one in New York City, where I am currently located. There’s some irony in the fact that we are closer to Ebola at home than we ever were in Africa.
1 Source: World Health Organization Ebola virus disease fact sheet
2 Source: The true true size of Africa, The Economist
3 Source: CDC – 2014 Ebola Outbreak in Democratic Republic of the Congo
Image credit: Eneas De Troya