It was somewhat disconcerting, then, to hear that a case of Ebola – a disease I thought I would only ever encounter in my nightmares - had been transmitted in Spain. That’s partly because I was there last week – in Valencia, which did in fact have an Ebola alert, thankfully false. And although every rational fibre in my body told me there was absolutely no chance I had come into contact with the disease, I’ll admit to a small moment of concern - fear can be an extremely powerful emotion that addles one's thinking, and all the more so if you have read ‘Bite’, a great thriller written by our erstwhile contributor Nick Louth which explores a frighteningly similar subject matter.
Given that I have absolutely zero experience or knowledge of the pathology of tropical diseases I will not profess to know whether the Ebola outbreak in West Africa is something we genuinely need to worry about in the West. Certainly we have not worried about it much over the last 9 months, when the latest outbreak which has now killed over 3,000 people began in Guinea.
And yet news that a Spanish nurse had fallen ill has sent markets into a frenzy. Shares in Iberia owner IAG sank 7 per cent, along with other travel shares. Even our usually reserved sister newspaper couldn’t contain itself: “Spain struggles to contain Ebola” it said on the front page, which seems somewhat sensational given that so far only one worker, who was treating Ebola afflicted patients, is known to have been infected.
My wife, upon hearing of the events in Spain, even pondered whether we should cancel our forthcoming trip to Nice. I reminded her that we had, in fact, been to Asia during the Sars outbreak in late 2002 (admittedly I was more reckless back then). And it’s the comparison with Sars that interests me most. That too caused major panic that for a while rocked markets, particularly those in the East, as fears rose that millions would become infected. In the end there were less than 1,000 fatalities, and markets continued their merry dance upwards. There is one notable difference, however: back then markets were starting to recover from post dot com lows, rather than sitting precariously at long term highs. So even if Ebola, like Sars, turns out to be more panic than pandemic, it has the potential to wreak a lot more financial havoc.
