Americans do not wipe their ass' with their hands or crap in open ditches. Good freaking grief.
Some of us have seen enough “oh, most likely nothing will happen” turn into “OMGWTFBBQ” to warrant making noisy dire predictions in the hopes that doing so will help motivate warding off the problem (which, yes, has worked in the past - see “Y2K bug” among others).
Yeah, Ebola will likely come to nothing. A handful will die an agonizing horrible death, a few more will suffer but survive, and most of us will go on yelling about the sky falling whilst living normalcy bias.
A few decades ago another highly preventable terminal disease went pandemic to the point of gaining its own civil rights. Don’t underestimate how unsanitary a lot of people can be.