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Look: Ebola is nowhere near the scariest disease out there right now, nor is it the most difficult to control. Swine flu killed 12,000 Americans in 2009, which is three times as many people who have died in all of Africa during this latest Ebola outbreak, so why weren't we talking about travel bans for infected areas then? Maybe because the U.S. has never instituted a travel ban for a specific country, ever. But even swine flu got more media attention than enterovirus D68, which may have killed seven people in the United States, and has been detected throughout the majority of the U.S., but isn't yet fully understood and doesn't even have a fucking name. Oh, and there's also the fact that measles has spiked for the first time in over a decade.

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But all these illnesses pale in comparison to MRSA and other antibiotic-resistant illnesses. A disease like that -- which is resistant or immune to our most powerful drugs -- has the potential to send us back to a pre-antibiotic world. That means that any infection, no matter how small, has the potential to kill you -- and there's not a goddamn thing any doctor can do about it.

I'm pretty sure I know why no one gives a shit about MRSA. Antibiotic-resistant illnesses were created by the overuse of antibiotics, by people who try to treat everything from headaches to the flu with antibiotics, even though antibiotics don't do anything to viruses. But we're not freaking out about those end-of-the-world scenarios because the people responsible -- the people who could afford to overuse expensive antibiotics -- are predominantly rich, white, and by definition meticulously clean. Those people sound awesome. Way better than dirty, dirty Africans, right? They look like zombies!