This evening's Drudge ebola headline link is...
CDC: Ebola Scare For MillionsThe Ebola epidemic in West Africa, already ghastly, could get worse by orders of magnitude, killing hundreds of thousands of people and embedding itself in the human population for years to come, according to two worst-case scenarios from scientists studying the historic outbreak.
The virus could potentially infect 1.4 million people in Liberia and Sierra Leone by the end of January, according to a statistical forecast by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published Tuesday. That number came just hours after a report in the New England Journal of Medicine warned that the epidemic might never be fully controlled and that the virus could become endemic, crippling civic life in the affected countries and presenting an ongoing threat of spreading elsewhere.
These dire scenarios from highly respected medical sources were framed, however, by optimism from U.S. officials that an accelerated response can and will contain the outbreak in the weeks and months ahead.
So, as I highlighted above, this would be the pessimist point of view...that what we are seeing is pretty much hopeless and doomed to spiral out of control.
I'm not so sure that this is what will happen. I'm not so sure that it is inevitable that without extraordinary human intervention (super quarantines, etc.) this thing is not stoppable.
From what I have read about previous ebola outbreaks the disease's progress seems to reach a breaking point and it just stops. No one knows why but it just does. And then it disappears back into whatever hole that it hides in until, just as mysteriously, it pops up again.
If this time it's different, if this time it doesn't just stop of its own accord, then I have to believe that it will be due to someone(s) exercising their choice to spread it purposefully...as a weapon of chaos.
I can see it getting loose in a third world mega city. These mega cities are more populous than ever now with several million people living in something akin to "Soylent Green" type conditions (think Mexico City, Rio De Janeiro, Dhaka, etc.). This is the perfect storm scenario for any infectious disease. Ebola is not much different (and in not being airborne it isn't worse) than many other communicable diseases at least as far as its ability to spread goes. Where it does stand out is 1) how little of it is needed to infect, 2) how horrid it is after the symptoms appear and 3) how high its mortality rate is. It scares the sh*t out of people for a lot of very good reasons. Personally, I don't want to go anywhere near something that can swell my testicles up to the size of peaches and then make them explode. In a big city this could be very bad.
At any rate, I suppose we will know sooner rather than later whether this is hysteria or the real thing. I mean, take AGW, for instance...the doom predictions for that are decades out and most of the world will forget all about them before that date arrives. But, with this we only have to wait until January or February of next year. That's not very far out. This thing will either do nothing or it will be horrible beyond belief or something in between. Something in between, though, will still be pretty awful.
And if it does become "weaponized" by way of a biological suicide "bomber" it could end up in the US or in the EU and then we are into a whole other scenario.