Outbreak concerns lead to abuse of Africans
Members of the West African community in New York complained on Wednesday that their children were being bullied at school and that businesses were losing money because of hysteria over Ebola.
Panic has gripped many US citizens since a Liberian citizen brought the killer virus into the country and died of the disease on October 8 in a Texas hospital.
Two nurses who treated him became infected, though they recovered, and a US doctor who returned to New York from treating Ebola patients in Guinea was diagnosed with the virus last week.
In the face of public panic, some US states and the Pentagon have imposed quarantine rules for people returning from Ebola-afflicted Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The African Advisory Council, a community group in New York, called a news conference in the city's Bronx borough, home to one of the largest African communities in the United States, to demand better education to end the fear.
"I need my community to be safe but also to be protected," said Bronx congressman Jose Serrano, likening the fear of Ebola to the ignorance and panic that once accompanied the emergence of AIDS.
Last week, two Senegalese boys were taunted about Ebola and assaulted at a school in the Bronx so badly they had to be hospitalized, community leaders said.
The boys had moved to New York three weeks earlier to join their father, a cabdriver who has lived in the United States for nearly 20 years.
Their father, Ousmane Drame, blamed the assault on "kids who know nothing".
"What happened to your children is unacceptable, as New Yorkers, as Americans, as human beings," Serrano said.
US President Barack Obama and officials in New York have repeatedly sought to sow calm, hailing medical workers battling Ebola as heroic and stressing that Ebola cannot be contracted through casual contact.
But community members say pervasive ignorance and fear-mongering in the media are putting their children at risk and jeopardizing their livelihoods.
(China Daily 10/31/2014 page12)
