Fear is a powerful emotion. Once unleashed, it can overwhelm our rational side and become an all-consuming beast. Today's headlines scream out warnings about potential dangers. Much of it is aimed at grabbing your attention to earn more advertising revenue. There are even some who hope to profit off our insecurities. Witness the story of a scavenger who claimed the "ebola.com" URL and wants to sell it now for $150,000! Entrepreneur tries to sell Ebola.com for $150,000 - Telegraph
We often lack objective evidence that will help us keep some of these potential threats in perspective. This article from Vox actually ranks a number of different threats to Americans. It is interesting to see the comparison of the threats that are hyped on the nightly news compared against actual results from other "everyday" occurrences that are, in fact, much more deadly. To give just one example pulled from the article, ebola has only sickened a handful of people and resulted in one high-profile death. By contrast, a severe flu epidemic in 2004 killed 48,000! Despite the disparity, the level of alarm was far less. Some of it may be due to the lesser effects of 24 hour news networks and social media back then. Much of it is due to the relative unknowns about ebola which make it much harder to comprehend.
One other example is the fact that about 40,000 Americans are seriously injured by falling furniture in their own homes! Cases of "tip-over" caused a little less than 30 deaths last year. That makes it a much more serious threat than ebola!
Here is a link to the full article: Threats to Americans, ranked (by actual threat instead of media hype) - Vox
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