>This article is exactly WHY I am not legitimately concerned about a wide-spread infection in the Western world.
Leaving aside the moral argument of preventing huge numbers of innocent people from dying Ebola if we can, there are two reason we in the west should be concerned:
1. There is a serious risk that Ebola will mutate to become more infectious. It is very unlikely to become airborne (this is about as likely as pigs becoming airborne), but it could relatively easily mutate to slow down its kill speed. At the moment Ebola kills so quickly that there is little time for a patient to spread it to other people. Ebola is under huge selection pressure to slow down the disease progression in humans. We could see a strain arise that takes a month to kill you where you are asymptotically infectious for a couple of weeks. Model this sort of virus and things look far less rosy for us in the west. The more people we let Ebola infect the more likely that such a strain will arise.
2. Once the number of cases get very large (25,000 a day by Jan 2015 according to the CDC) this is going to start disrupting international trade as countries close their borders. We already saw the sort of recession that can result from disruptions to trade when this happened in the GFC and the Asian crisis in the 90s. With interest rates at or near zero in most countries there is not much that can be done to buffer us economically.
Leaving aside the moral argument of preventing huge numbers of innocent people from dying Ebola if we can, there are two reason we in the west should be concerned:
1. There is a serious risk that Ebola will mutate to become more infectious. It is very unlikely to become airborne (this is about as likely as pigs becoming airborne), but it could relatively easily mutate to slow down its kill speed. At the moment Ebola kills so quickly that there is little time for a patient to spread it to other people. Ebola is under huge selection pressure to slow down the disease progression in humans. We could see a strain arise that takes a month to kill you where you are asymptotically infectious for a couple of weeks. Model this sort of virus and things look far less rosy for us in the west. The more people we let Ebola infect the more likely that such a strain will arise.
2. Once the number of cases get very large (25,000 a day by Jan 2015 according to the CDC) this is going to start disrupting international trade as countries close their borders. We already saw the sort of recession that can result from disruptions to trade when this happened in the GFC and the Asian crisis in the 90s. With interest rates at or near zero in most countries there is not much that can be done to buffer us economically.