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There once was a time when HIV was just another African disease and we were pretty darned convinced that it posed no danger to us. Plus it was a gay disease so as long as you weren't gay or, if you were, you wore a condom, you were safe from the Human immunodeficiency virus-nothing to worry about. It all panned out a little differently.

Well, wearing a condom won't protect you from the ebola virus and it doesn't care about your sexual orientation and it has reached us. Oh, and what's more, there's a well organized terrorist organization that wants to spread it it across America. I wouldn't be surprised if there were even better organized forces than ISIS out there that would love to see Ebola wreaking havoc throughout this country as well.

So I'll go ahead and make a prediction: if we do not implement AGGRESSIVE measures to stop it, Ebola will take root in America just like HIV did. whether or not it infects and kills as many Americans as HIV has remains to be seen.

There once was a time when HIV was just another African disease and we were pretty darned convinced that it posed no danger to us. Plus it was a gay disease so as long as you weren’t gay or, if you were, you wore a condom, you were safe from the Human immunodeficiency virus-nothing to worry about. It all panned out a little differently.

Not really. I’ve followed it closely since it was called GRID. I’ve never been concerned about it.

I’m not concerned about Ebola. Yet.

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.