As our regular followers know, we seek to enhance public discourse through questions, and questions about (and of) questions.

Fundamental to public discourse is sincerity, and positions espoused insincerely subvert trust, corrode cooperation and exact unmeasurable costs on those least able to afford the price. Whereas knowledge overcomes ignorance, insincerity is impervious to knowledge. Indeed, insincerity thrives on ignorance, which enables insincerity to pursue its prey.

A comment in yesterday’s Foreign Affairs should be required reading for those seeking election to office based on igniting and fanning fears of Ebola. The piece is titled “The Poor and the Sick” and a single quote within the piece from the co-director of the Yale Global Health Justice Partnership speaks volumes: “Exotic infections for Americans, often from far-away places, often Africa, strike fear into their hearts, but only once the pathogens have cleared customs.”

In a far more blunt way than my earlier piece (posted on this Blog on September 17, 2014 and available in the Archives section) on international reciprocity and the debt that we, as Americans, owe to Africa and Africans for our advances in infectious disease (a position I sourced to The New England Journal of Medicine), the piece in Foreign Affairs highlights the scourge of poverty and the reckonings of its disregard.