It's Monday, March 13th, 2017, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds. I'm Indrae Viscontas.

And I'm Kishorehari. Each week, we bring you a new in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.

We endeavor to endeavor, and why it all matters.

You can find us online at motherjones.com or inquiringshow.telmer.com.

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Back on episode 46, we talked to Tara Smith, who's an epidemiologist and Ebola expert on why the threat of infection in the U.S. was overblown.

And to accompany that episode, Chris Mooney, who was co-host at the time, wrote an online piece highlighting some of Donald Trump's tweets in August of 2014, including these three.

He said, doctors have already died treating Ebola and we should not be importing the disease to

our homeland. He also tweeted, our government now imports illegal immigrants and deadly diseases.

Our leaders are inept. And finally, the bigger problem

with Ebola is all of the people coming into the U.S. from West Africa who may be infected with

the disease and then in caps, stop flights, exclamation point. So there's a few problems there.

West Africa isn't where Ebola's from. Let's start there.

Let's not blame Ebola epidemics on immigrants.

Yes.

But isn't it true that didn't doctors die in the process of treating Ebola?

Yes, they did.

And in fact, we are going to, on today's episode, talk to an doctor who was there on the

front lines, but also back in episode 57, we talked to Dr. Dan Kelly, who is an infectious

disease doc, who was in Sierra Leone at the time. This was in October of 2014, treating patients on

the ground. And he said the same thing. That, you know, essentially, yes, this is very serious. Yes, this situation is very serious. But that, you know, the worry is not so much of these doctors coming back and infecting people in the U.S. The worry is about eradicating things on the ground.

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