Anthropologists taking ebola ‘preppers’ with a grain of salt

With the closest known US cases of ebola diagnosed about 160 miles away in Dallas, Cary Griffin, from Huntsville, Texas is taking no chances.

If, as the former prison officer fears, the virus spreads to hundreds of people, Griffin is headed to the woods.

“I’ll do what the English royalty did to survive the bubonic plague,” Griffin said, referring to King Charles II’s flight to the countryside during the Great Plague of London in 1665-66. “I’m going into the country.”

Griffin, 27, is among a growing if loosely-defined segment of Americans, known as “preppers”, who plan, train and stockpile in preparation for a natural calamity or societal breakdown.

Preppers are at the extreme edge of concern over ebola, which has led to a series of false alarms driven by fear. Government efforts to stop the virus spreading from the three worst-hit West African countries, where more than 4,500 have died, include some travel restrictions and enhanced screening at airports.

Chad Huddleston, an anthropologist at the University of Southern Illinois at Edwardsville, who studies preppers, estimates their numbers in the US in the low hundreds of thousands. The virus was diagnosed in a Liberian visitor who was infected in his home country and two nurses who treated him at a Dallas, Texas hospital when he was dying and at his most contagious. Both nurses have been moved out of the state for treatment in hospitals equipped to treat ebola patients.

US preppers have their roots in Cold War-era civil defence programmes, said Vincent DeNiro, editor of Prepper & Shooter magazine.

The movement’s profile rose thanks in part to the National Geographic Channel TV show Doomsday Preppers

For many of them, gearing up for ebola has meant fortifying their stocks of freeze-dried food, water, filtration devices and hazardous material — or ‘hazmat’ — suits, which experts say can be useless if not taken off properly.

Some are also honing plans to meet teams of fellow survivalists at prearranged locations, or, like Griffin, who has no spouse or children, preparing to go it alone in the wilderness. Stockpiling has led to shortages of a range of survival gear, from food with a shelf-life in excess of 20 years to impermeable medical suits, say vendors.

Supplies such as hazmat suits and protective gloves are running low, said Richard Smith, general manager of The Survival Center, an online retailer in Washington state.

Many preppers, who have focused their planning on everything from solar storms and earthquakes to nuclear holocaust, are sceptical of government — a view that dovetails with concerns, voiced by lawmakers and medical experts, that US authorities mishandled the response to the virus when it emerged at a Texas hospital.

Bob Boike co-leads of a team of 32 preppers and their families in West Palm Beach Florida, with multiple secret locations provisioned to last them a year or more. “This is our insurance for if and when there is societal breakdown,” Boike said.