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Why Does a Dog Move Us More Than Dying People?

Priorities During Crisis

Ebola hemorrhagic fever doesn’t have a name or a face that we can relate to, or at least it didn’t until Thomas Duncan died Oct. 1 in Texas days after flying in from Liberia. It is believed that Duncan contracted the virus while performing an act of kindness: helping a pregnant 19-year-old woman into a cab so that she could get to a hospital.

The greatest scandal of the Ebola outbreak is that, at this moment, the best that the world has to offer the people at its epicenter is to advise them to stop being so kind.

No hugging, no kissing, no touching of the sick or the dead. A recent story in the New York Times told of a Liberian woman with Ebola who died after giving birth and the pain of the survivors and staff, who didn’t know how to safely care for her newborn, who might be infected. Still, most of us don’t know any patients with Ebola, or anyone who has died from the viral infection. We know of the disease that has killed nearly 4,000 West Africans as something on the television, something that we find really scary. But it was not Duncan who caught the imagination of millions around the world last week. It was instead a four-legged victim of this plague. Teresa Romero Ramos, a Spanish nurse’s aide who contracted Ebola while caring for a missionary infected in Africa, had a rescue dog named Excalibur. Teresa and her husband, Javier, obviously loved Excalibur very much. He shared their home, which led authorities to worry that the animal might become a vector for the illness. When Spanish health officials announced they were going to euthanize Excalibur, the social media savvy Javier broadcast a YouTube appeal to the public to save the pooch. The online tsunami that followed included a petition on Change.org that attracted more than 400,000 signatures to their unsuccessful appeal for clemency.
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