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Ebola Halloween costumes all the rage as Obama names czar

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Looking for a Halloween costume that’s sure to go “viral”? Then check out the “Ebola containment suit” for sale at brandsonsale.com.

The $79.99 getup includes a white hazmat suit, a face shield, breathing mask, goggles and gloves. “You are sure to be prepared if any outbreak happens at your Halloween party,” the website says.

Get it? “Viral"? Or is it too soon for Ebola humor?

The suit and other deadly virus-themed costume ideas, like “Ebola nurse,” Ebola patient” and the sure to show up “clipboard man” – he’s the guy who escorted an Ebola patient onto a plane without protective gear - have critics clicking their tongues and wagging their fingers.

Clipboard man

They say wearing the costumes while thousands of people are dying from the disease is offensive and insensitive.

Kathryn Getek Soltis, a professor at Villanova University, told Time Magazine the costumes were disturbing. “It allows people to stay far from the situation and not to imagine the human suffering that’s actually occurring,” she said.

Philadelphia physician's assistant Maria McKenna said revelers should “just say no” to a costume connected to an infectious and usually fatal disease. She told the Associated Press: "Normally I think that irony and humor is funny, but this thing with the costumes, is it really that funny? I mean, Ebola's not even under control yet."

The website Bustle called it the “most offensive Halloween costume of the season.”

In a piece titled “Yes, The Ebola Halloween Costume Exists, In Case You Were Wondering, And It's Just As Disturbing As It Sounds” fashion and beauty reporter Olivia Muenter wrote: “Are we honestly so blinded by all the things that are acceptable on Halloween that we think poking fun at a worldwide epidemic that has killed thousands of people is acceptable in any context?”

But bad taste has always been the tricky part of Halloween. Last year blackface reared its ugly head, and this year, not everyone thinks the Ebola costume is so bad.

Kyle Smith of the New York Post said people are irreverent about Ebola because they are afraid of it.

“When we mock Ebola, we’re simply making fun of ourselves,” wrote Smith. “Since everybody dies, when we make fun of Ebola we’re just mocking our own fears of death,” Smith wrote.

Besides, said Smith, people wear all sorts of not so politically correct getups like the guys who dressed up as dead Steve Jobs and dead John Kennedy Jr.

The paper even declared on its front page that Ebola suits are the “hot” costumes this year.

'Hot' or not?

Maybe Ebola humor was inevitable. This trying week included the news that two Dallas nurses came down with the disease after treating the country’s first Ebola victim, that airline stocks are plummeting and that more people are being quarantined. Ebola scares happened at Southwestern College and at 30,000 feet, and Friday, President Barack Obama named an Ebola Czar who, naturally, already has a Twitter account.

'Ebola for Halloween sounded a lot funnier last week'

The CEO of the company selling the costume said earlier this week that he had only sold about a dozen of the suits.

Still, CEO Johnathon Weeks said, his company does not stray away from things that are current or controversial. He told The Atlantic that when all those miners were trapped in Chile, his company sold hundreds of yellow miner helmets.

What might be big this year? How about a toddler ISIS costume? "I can tell you it will come complete with a fake machine gun,” Weeks said.

There's still two weeks until Halloween. In the meantime, opinions about the propriety of the costume could fill a cauldron.

Some people said the disease shouldn't be in the discussion for Halloween costumes.Other people agreed with the critics but cracked jokes, anyway.And still others couldn't stop laughing.
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