Media reacts to the Ebola epidemic

by: André Carrilho (frequent Vanity Fair contributor)

As Huffington Post journalist Emily Thomas points out, "the first Ebola patient to be diagnosed in the U.S. died Wednesday. Three days earlier, government health officials in Sierra Leone reported 121 Ebola deaths in a single day. But Western media made little mention of the latter."
This piece is powerful because it shows how ignorant we are, as a nation. Carrilho states that the purpose of his illustration is to show how the media "seems to treat epidemics differently, depending on where they occur, and to whom." I remember until American doctors were diagnosed with the disease, Ebola was largely faceless. We'd see jokes about Ebola, on social media such as Twitter, or just casually within conversations. The thousands of people in Africa suffering and dying from the disease went largely overlooked, barely noticed. It almost seems as if the disease didn't acquire it's legitimacy until an American suffered from it.