Here’s how to remain cheerful in the face of such a multitude of scares

I don’t think I can remember a time when there have been so many scares about. They come at us from every direction, and even sometimes from out of the blue, with names we’ve never heard before. Take Isis, for example, or maybe Isil (there’s not even now a consensus on what to call it). Yet neither name was known to any normal, newspaper-reading person until it was already in control of half the Middle East and beheading western hostages at will. Now the Prime Minister says that we must bomb the Islamic State in Iraq because it threatens our security at home. How can such a powerful and terrifying organisation appear on the scene so suddenly and without warning?

Ebola is not such a novelty — the virus was first identified in 1976 — but the idea that we are all threatened by it is new enough. In the 37 years between that of its discovery and 2013, the World Health Organisation reported 1,716 cases of Ebola, all of them in Africa.