Along with WHO declaring this Ebola outbreak an International Medical Emergency this Friday, one news article included a past comment by MSF that there were already 60 outbreak hotspots. There was no reference to when MSF made this statement. That number verifies that the Ebola virus has outrun available medical help. Just not enough medical help available.
If each hot spot has a minimal medical team of 2 doctors, say 4 nurses, 4 or 5 burial/clean up personel, that's about 600 total right there. That raises the question of who exactly is monitoring all the arrivals. The photos of airport screens pointing digital thermometers at passengers does not inspire confidence. I've also noticed in some photos that some screeners have mouth and nasal filter masks, plastic film gloves, sort of wife beater film bibs, but their forearms are bare. There are photos of public chlorine solution buckets for hand washing. The problem is they have turn faucets making the whole excercise seemingly futile.
Seems to me that draconian responses are inevitable given the current state of affairs.
Every simulation that's been run using real live politicians as actors (as well as the history of diseases like smallpox) demonstrate that, before a politician will make the CORRECT decision, the consequences of NOT MAKING that decision must have already occurred.
The airports in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia, and Ivory Coast should have been closed a week ago. If it were up to me, I would close Ghana/Togo/Benin/Burkina Faso and Bamako in Mali as well.
Why this has not been done is clear.
It is also clear that this will be done, but not until there are clusters in Arabia, Europe, and possibly South America with proof beyond a reasonable doubt of West African origin and dissemination by air travel.
Politicians JUST WILL NOT do the right thing until they are exposed by reality.
Two anecdotes from my career:
1) I was involved in a smallpox bioterrorism planning exercise in 2002. The politicians were debating about whether or not we needed judges on-call to sign isolation/quarantine orders after 4:30pm and on weekends. I told them I would need the army more than judges. When they asked why, I said, "To shoot exposed people who break the cordon". They thought it was a joke. It wasn't.
2) As part of the same exercise, I was doing logistics for mass vaccination AFTER an attack and confirmed spread. The then-governor was one of those "Because I can run a business, I can run the state" people. I had identified a local mall as the obvious mass vaccination site, but he wouldn't sign the (simulated) requisition orders. Why not? "Because we need people to keep shopping". Yes. Shopping. While smallpox was spreading explosively.
The modern world is not designed for epidemics of infectious disease. Things that would have been common-sense as recently as 1950 are now unthinkable.