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We need to take aggressive measures to stop it in Africa now; if it hits 500k or 1M by end of January, or makes it to India, forget it. I won't discuss my work, so suffice it to say that I was first introduced to filoviridae at the US Army Chemical school more than twenty years ago. Early in my career I did infectious disease and population dynamics modeling, as well as chemical agent modeling. Don't rely on my opinion, do the math yourself. Ro (number of people infected by each infected person) for this outbreak started at 1.5 initially, now it is stabilizing overall around 2+ (actually as high as 3.5 in some local regions of Liberia), with a case mortality > 50%-- using a basic SIRS model, the outcome is very clear. The beauty of epidemiological modeling is it isn't sensitive to the details of the mechanics of how the transmission is occuring, it only cares about the truth-- how fast is the disease actually spreading.

For all those who argue that personal sanitation makes Africa different-- there are subpopulations here that are similar; moreover, there are many other factors in the West that more than compensate. Mobility, massed people in close proximity (large schools, offices, public transportation)... don't underestimate that. Ebola doesn't care about your personal sanitation habits, it will spread by the weakest link, likely our children, pets, urgent care facilities, schools, public transportation, cube farms, homeless, urban immigrants...

Regional compartmentalization is trickier, but when the infected population gets high enough, people will flee. By boat, by foot, by hoof, by train, plane and automobile if they can-- at that point there will be no way to control this. In my opinion, even with the most conservative estimates of trans-national spread, every continent on earth will be significantly depopulated in two years if we don't stop this in Africa.

Excellent post, my thoughts in a nutshell.

High risk populations will include sex workers, active homosexuals and the loose hetero sexual “hook up cultures”(college students for example). A lot of folks are going to choose to be celibate in a hurry. Imagine Ebola getting loose in San Francisco...!