Scary Businessweek Cover Warns Ebola is Coming
Posted on September 24, 2014
Businessweek has a scary cover out this week. The bloodstained words on the cover of the latest issue of Bloomberg Businessweek warn "Ebola is Coming." Businessweek also published an article here about how the U.S. messed up in the battle against Ebola and why we lack a countermeasure against the virus, which is spreading out of control in three west African nations. Essentially, Ebola was not made a priority by the U.S. government and not enough money was thrown at coming up with a vaccine.
Crawford Kilian, who maintains a popular blog tracking the latest viral outbreaks, discusses the Businessweek cover with its bloody worded warning in a recent post. He thinks the cover looks too much like a horror movie and could detract from the serious nature of the outbreak. Kilian certainly has a good point. He says, "But its cover art is also reminiscent of countless chainsaw-massacre movies; it seems to portray Ebola as just another entertaining horror show, if watching faraway poor black people suffer and die is your idea of entertainment."
On the other hand it may not be easy to get some busy commuters to read about the Ebola outbreak in Africa without frightening cover art like this. Many remained unaware of the deadly, but little know virus, until Richard Preston's nonfiction thriller, The Hot Zone, became a bestseller in 1994. To get people to pick up a book or a magazine sometimes you need to shock them into it. Ebola outbreaks began as early as 1976 but the name of the virus did not really get into the mainstream until Preston's book. Now the virus is potentially a global threat if it cannot be contained in the west African countries it is causing increasing death and havoc in.