Flu may kill far more people every year than Ebola ever has, but unless we give a new variant a new name (swine flu, as it might be), it doesn’t raise as much concern. This may help explain why a November 2014 survey in the U.S. ranked Ebola as the third most urgent health problem facing the country—just below the cost of health care and ahead of cancer and heart disease. That fear was accompanied by widespread calls for travel bans, even though there’d been only two cases of Ebola transmission inside the United States, neither of which were fatal, and all experts were saying there was little risk of spread.
