Panic about Ebola in Africa – not here

Got Ebola yet? Early symptoms are very difficult to distinguish from either winter flu or, indeed, a particularly bad hangover. Bit feverish, aches and pains, sore throat and so on. Only when you start to bleed from the eyeballs should you worry a bit: that’s never happened before with Jack Daniels. It was the African bloke huddled up on the tube, I would reckon, the one who kept coughing. I knew I shouldn’t have sat near an African.

One or two clinical experts have been likening the Ebola virus to HIV. They seem to me similar more in a sociological sense. I remember those days when people avoided being in close proximity to homosexuals for reasons other than their appalling taste in music, or their moustaches. The mid-1980s were a time of frit panic and a concomitant nastiness directed towards a community which could genuinely, back then, be described by that now ubiquitous and debased word ‘vulnerable’.