Alphonso Toweh was riding a bus when a man sitting next to him politely asked where he was from.
“Liberia,” said Toweh, a writer from Monrovia who is visiting the Washington area, home to the nation’s second-largest population of African immigrants.
“At that point, the man went far from me,” he said. “He did not want to come close to me. People, once they know you are Liberian — people assume you have the virus in your body, which is not the case.”
Irrational fears about the deadly Ebola virus are running rampant across the country and the Washington region even as health officials try to quell them with assurances that the virus is transmitted only by contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person who is symptomatic. The fears have been fueled by the death of a Liberian man with Ebola at a Dallas hospital last week and the news that two nurses who cared for him now have the virus. One of those nurses flew from Cleveland to Dallas with a 99.5-degree fever before being diagnosed, potentially exposing the other 132 passengers to the virus.
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