There is a potentially deadly disease afoot in America, with no known cure and terrifying consequences for those infected.

Ebola? Well, yes, but another bug has had far more wide-ranging consequences. Since an outbreak began in late summer, the enterovirus has sent thousands of people, primarily children, to hospitals in 43 states and the District of Columbia. One strain, enterovirus D68, has apparently caused polio-like symptoms in some patients, leaving them unable to move their limbs. Four people who recently died tested positive for the disease, although the link between the virus and the deaths is unclear, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

You might not know all that from the news media’s reporting over the past few weeks. The enterovirus certainly hasn’t been ignored, but it’s a mere footnote compared with the oceanic volumes devoted to Ebola, a disease that has devastated parts of West Africa but has only one confirmed case diagnosed in the US.

For the most part, the reporting on medical aspects of the disease has been straightforward and responsible, with many stories emphasizing the relatively low risks of infection. A few commentaries, meanwhile, have lapsed into xenophobia about the African sources of the disease. One Fox News pundit, Andrea Tantaros, offered this analysis last week: “In these countries they don’t believe in traditional medical care. So someone could get off a flight and seek treatment from a witch doctor who practices Santeria,” an Afro-Caribbean religion that includes ritual animal sacrifice.

But even when the reporting is accurate, the sheer tonage of it raises a question about proportion and relative risk: Why is Ebola a media superstar when other diseases — say, enterovirus or the common flu — have more far-reaching and even deadlier consequences in this country?

The question is a familiar one to people involved in spreading the word about public-health threats. News reporting, they say, typically underplays some risks and overplays others. Mundane behaviors — smoking, overeating — don’t rate sustained media coverage yet are linked to preventable diseases that kill tens of thousands annually. Ordinary viruses, such as the flu, take a huge toll as well but don’t rate screaming headlines.

Social-science research has shown that intensive news reporting on certain diseases can distort public perceptions of their severity and the chances of contracting them. In a 2008 experiment at McMaster University in Ontario that was updated last year, researchers asked undergraduates and medical students their impressions of 10 infectious diseases. Five of the diseases (anthrax, SARS, West Nile virus, Lyme disease and avian flu) had received relatively more news media coverage than a second group of five.

Result: The “high-media frequency” diseases were rated as more serious than the more obscure diseases by both the undergraduates and the medical students. Both groups overestimated the chances they would get one of the better-reported diseases.

But that’s not to say that the media is “over-covering” a particular threat, said Meredith Young, the lead researcher on the studies, who now works at Montreal’s McGill University. “It really only is in hindsight that we can say whether a potential threat was over- or under-covered in the media and what the ‘real’ risk was of that particular infectious disease,” she wrote in an email. That is, “did the threat materialize? Or did the media coverage help to prevent the threat” by warning of a potential contagion and mobilizing preventive action?

Ebola’s preeminence in the news media probably has much to do with the primal fear it inspires and the popular-culture context from which it comes. While Ebola isn’t widespread or common, those who get it are at grave risk; the mortality rate is upward of 70 percent.

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THE ASSOCIATED PRESS