In my head I’m driving deep into the Karoo (you could substitute Australian outback…depending on which plan gets triggered), the SUV’s packed high with ‘stuff’ and family, the sky’s blue and the sound track is either Natural Born Killers or True Detective, and I’m thinking that those mad ass cracker freaks that Doomsday Preppers series featured maybe weren’t that crazy…they’ll be the ones safe in their hermetically sealed bunkers full of baked beans, DVD’s and high powered rifles sitting out the virulent tornado that Ebola became. It’s only March 2015.

Road trips and movie sound track aside Ebola’s caught the world with its pants down. Scientists and those in the know are saying it’s the biggest things since HIV / Aids, and it’s going to be with us forever. Fuck, at least (assuming you weren’t infected through rape or a blood transfusion) you were engaged in pleasure or vice to get nailed. Now all you have to do is sit on the same seat that a carrier sweated on or have one sneeze on you and you’re either hemorrhaging through your eyes and anus (locked up in some isolation unit if you’re lucky, receiving ‘treatment’. And if you’re unlucky you’re being run out of your village into the jungle to certain death).

World leaders are saying ‘calmez vous, calmez vous’ and ‘the chances are remote that you’ll catch it in the west’, whilst two nurses in Texas get infected, in a hospital, wearing fucking contamination suits we’re told (“the patient was producing a high volume of bodily fluids” – read bleeding out of his eyes and his anus) and one of them, on the Ebola watch list, is allowed to fly on a commercial plane with 132 other people. And here in South Africa we can’t even get it together to point and shoot temperature checks of passengers returning from ground zero in West Africa.

A few months back the WHO put out the bowl for $500 million from developed nations to curb the spread and it went unanswered, whilst America and its allies were dropping million dollar bombs and sending in cruise missiles (at $1.9m a pop) to kill some (admittedly angry and militant) goat herders in Iraq and Syria, in their 10s and 20s (on a good day). The cost per head of this current campaign must be in the high hundreds of thousands and more likely a gnat’s chuff below a cool mill…what a dilemma. Spend a couple of hundred million to save millions and millions and prevent a situation where we all live and die in fear of an invisible virus, or spend hundreds of millions to kill a few fanatics. I know there’s probably an argument that the militants could grow into a very visible pandemic of nastiness and death…but at least there’s a semi-cure should it be required.

It’s got the makings of a perfect storm and I’m not looking forward to any of it one bit which is why I’ve got Google Maps open and I’m searching for the quickest route to isolation I can find…somewhere dry and dusty (imparting unpleasantness on the virus in the form of a quick dehydrated death), with few people to sneeze on me and my family…right now it’s looking like the middle of SA or the middle of Australia. Now please excuse me, I’ve got 3 years of baked beans to buy.