<p>Just thought I would ask, bc it does scare me.</p>
<p>Are you referring to the Ebola cases? Dallas is a HUGE city. The odds that you would get ebola are minute. You’re much more likely to die from the flu (which is much easier to catch) or get hit by a car (there are a lot of them in Dallas). </p>
<p>I don’t think Ebola is a reason not to apply; but it could become a reason not to attend.</p>
<p>Oh, please. Thousands of people die from the flu every year in the U.S. Yet I hear people all the time say that they don’t want a flu shot. </p>
<p>Georgia scares me a lot more. Open carry guns allowed in bars! No restrictions anyplace. What about dorm rooms?</p>
<p>2 of my kids are there now. Haven’t worried at all about Ebola. (I do worry about them driving there, though. Driving in Dallas is scary!)</p>
<p>This is true. Auto accidents are going to kill way more people this year than Ebola. </p>
<p>The vast majority of people who get the flu and drive don’t die from it. I don’t see anything unserious about a concern about a mostly fatal communicable disease that has not been contained. </p>
<p>But the point is that the statistical chance of dying from either the flu or from a traffic accident is still higher than contracting Ebola in Dallas.</p>
<p>Today it is, yes.</p>
<p>There have been TWO cases in Dallas, one of the largest metro regions in the country. You might as well not apply to any school in the country given how frequent travel out of Dallas is. Just look at how many UT Austin and OU fans from all over the country came down there yesterday for the Red River Rivalry game.</p>
<p>I tend to agree, Bay. While I think it’s premature to write off Dallas ( How do you know the next patient won’t come into LAX, or wherever) I also think comparing it to the flu just because more people in this country have died from it is unfair. A college student is unlikely to die from the flu, we’ve all had the flu and know how to handle it. This new disease is different. While I don’t think we need to panic because we have a couple of cases on our shore, I don’t think anyone really knows how serious this will become, or how well prepared we are to contain it. Yet. We don’t even know how the first patient’s family will fare. It’s too soon to tell.</p>
<p>Exactly, whenhen. It is probably almost inevitable that an Ebola case is going to show up somewhere else, even though the hospitals in Nebraska and Atlanta that have dealt with other cases managed to avoid it so far. </p>
<p>I had to spend the week in Pittsburgh on business when Three Mile Island was on the apparent verge of a meltdown. We made sure we had return flights and went. That was a much more realistic fear.</p>
<p>If it’s due to the current ebola outbreak, I wouldn’t let that scare you. There aren’t enough cases for it to make it worrisome for you. Consider schools based on what they can offer you, so if Dallas is one of your top choices, then you should apply for sure</p>
<p>To be safe, it is probably best not to attend college anywhere in the country until this blows over. Dallas happened to be where the Ebola outbreak in the US began but it could really happen anywhere theoretically. What if the patient had landed in St. Louis or Los Angeles or Dulles Airport in Virginia?? A college environment is the perfect place for a low-transmission virus like Ebola to spread, especially in a dormitory environment where people are sharing close quarters and there is a high risk of fluid transmission!!</p>
<p>Of course I am being somewhat facetious here. Ebola is scary, no doubt about it. Would I shun Dallas necessarily? I admit that the issue does give me pause. I would not recommend letting it sway your decision too much; if the University of Dallas is your dream school I would still apply, but if you are between two schools that you love equally well but one has been ravaged by the plague and the other one hasn’t… well, in that case I would go with the school that it is NOT a mass grave.</p>
<p>I was in West Africa 3 weeks ago, Dallas last weekend, and probably Dallas next weekend. WhenHen, DmitriR and others are right. A total of 2 Ebola infected patients in a metropolitan area of 7 million. Wow, I am surprised anyone would be concerned about that when, as mentioned earlier, Influenza, meningitis, Staph infections kill so much more people. There are also guns in Dallas, they kill a lot of people too. No worries, live your life and apply to a school in Dallas.</p>
<p>I don’t know why people keep bringing up the flu, etc. Those are irrelevant because the incidence of them is probably similar everywhere. </p>
<p>I think people are saying that it is silly to worry about a disease that kills relatively few people and not about a disease that kills many times more. </p>
<p>On one hand, it seems silly to fear Ebola more than car crashes and the flu. On the other hand, Ebola is uniquely horrifying in the memory of humans because of the poor treatment options available – all doctors can do so far is treat symptoms and hope that you are one of the lucky ones – there’s no shot that they can give or even any extreme procedures like chemo. It might not be easy to catch but once you do catch it you are in the hands of God and that is scary to us modern Americans and Westerners who are used to at least having treatment options be theoretically possible for most of our ails. </p>
<p>Ebola, to us, sounds like a disease out of a horror movie rather than something that we can wrap our hands around. Maybe we should not be as scared as we are, but I am not surprised.</p>
<p>I think you shouldn’t attend any university which allows students to live in dorms who have opted out of childhood vaccinations for any reason other than a compromised immune system. But the anti-vaxxers (apparently, the upper middle class enclaves of Santa Monica, Brentwood, etc. are ground zero for the “opt out” crowd) won’t let that happen.</p>
<p>Car crashes (including drunk driving) and weather related disasters (e.g. the windstorm that took off a dorm roof last week in the Dallas area) all pose a greater physical risk at the moment in Dallas than Ebola. Maybe the risk level will be different in a year, but who knows.</p>
<p>You can get a vaccination against those diseases, blossom. There is no Ebola vaccine yet. </p>