Aaron Carroll brought my attention to some alarming but unsurprising information, “As of this week, 45 children have died of influenza-related illness so far this season.” Further, during the last week of 2014, influenza and pneumonia accounted for 8% of all deaths. That’s above the “epidemic threshold” for that time of the year. So the flu is especially nasty right now. Carroll thinks we should all get flu shots and he is attacking the current claim that they are “only” 23% effective, “I’d like a list of all medicines people take, diets they go on, behaviors they change, devices they employ, and procedures they undergo which are better than 23% effective.” So get your flu shot — I can’t afford to lose any readers!

But that’s not what I want to talk about here. I want to talk about why it is that people don’t care about a disease that has killed 45 children so far this season, but they freaked out because one guy died of Ebola. There are a number of issues, of course. For example, the media care about unusual stories. “One man dies of Ebola” is interesting, “lots of kids die of the flu” is not. But the media largely reflect their audiences. And so I think the fundamental issue has to do with purity.

Influenza is our disease. Ebola is their disease. Of course, this isn’t true. Both these diseases move around the global. But the perception is that Ebola is foreign. So the fear is not about death, but rather the manner of death. Death by influenza is just one of those unfortunate things that kills our kids and parents. But Ebola is like a terrorist attack. It doesn’t belong in America. It is like a knife jabbing at us from the country of Africa. (Yes, that was a joke!)

You are probably familiar with those tests where you have to associate positive and negative words with different groups to test your subconscious bias. Not long ago, I took one related to young and old people and found that I am biased quite a bit in favor of old people — unlike our society generally. But many years ago, I took this kind of test regarding the countries Japan, China, and India. I was surprised that subconsciously, I had the lowest opinion of India. It seemed strange, given how many great friends and colleagues I’ve had from India. But once I thought about it, I realized that my default image of India was of this rather dirty place. This is unfair, but that’s what’s so terrible about our brains: we aren’t in nearly as much control as we think.

It seems to me that people have this same kind of subconscious bias against Africa. I’m sure if I took the same test comparing Africa with Asia, I would end up with a strong bias toward Asia and against Africa. So it just makes sense that a virus coming from Africa would cause a far more irrational fear than a virus that came from Asia. It is more or less the same thing as the constant conservative push to make laws banning Sharia law. I don’t think most people even know what Sharia law is. But it, like Ebola, is an impurity from, as Ricky Gervais says in Ghost Town, “a scary country.”