Malaria has a steady death rate. It's obviously a serious issue that doesn't get enough attention in the West, but immediate action will affect it only marginally.

The issue with Ebola isn't how many people it's killed so far (although the number is already tragic), but the number of deaths it can potentially cause. If left entirely unchecked at this point, it would kill over a million people in the next year. A half assed response limits it to hundreds of thousands, while a solid response limits it to tens of thousands (conceptually, numbers pulled out of ass but reasonable, I'd argue).

Outbreaks grow exponentially unless contained; the point of fast action is to prevent or curtail the exponential growth.

Last week, the total number of cases was ~6500. One month ago it was ~3000. Two months ago it was ~1300. How do you call a process that duplicates itself every fixed unit of time (in this case, every ~3 weeks)?

Of course, we should not fall into panic. Many factors will affect what ends up being the total effect of this outbreak in the mid to long term. But dismissing it as a non issue because "there are just a few thousand cases" misses the point completely.

Hm so that would mean assuming this rate of exponential growth that in ~150 days there would be ~ 1 million cases and roughly a year to reach 100 million. I wonder how well they can model travel patterns, then you could write down an ode for the disease on say a country level and couple them.

I am not saying that this will grow exponentially for ever. For what I know, disease expansion is modeled with a sigmoid curve: exponential at first, then slows down once a saturation level in the population is reached.

According to Wikipedia, the total population of the 3 most affected countries - Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone - is roughly 20 millions. So there is at least that upper bound.

The real risk of pandemia comes from the fact that as the number of cases grows, the more likely it is that some of those cases travel through a porous border into other countries which lack the infrastructure and professional discipline to contain new outbreaks. If/when that is the case, each new region will start its own sigmoidal worth.

Well the sigmoid curve you are referring to would be for the case that patients who have contracted the virus and survived would be immune or die. In an SIR model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidemi...) that takes death rate and population number into account you would then expect a disease to either reach a disease free equilibrium or a endemic equilibrium. What I was suggesting is to couple those equations on the country level by modelling travel patterns (flow of Suscebtible Recovered Infected across borders), the result would most likely be that western countries would be able to reach a disease free equilibrium, as they have better recovery rates and lower infection rates, whereas ebola would remain endemic in africa.

Thanks, I was not aware of the SIR model.

Regarding your original question... if you can identify individual regions where the model can be applied, maybe you could use Markov chains to model the transitions between states in each region. I am not qualified enough to do that, but I imagine that the result would be a few endemic nodes where the disease is always present (with different degrees of intensity over time) and from where outbreaks get sporadically "exported" to disease free nodes.

I will stop being concerned about Ebola as soon as I start seeing this log-scale graph start bending down hard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Evolution_of_the_2014_Ebol...

And note the WHO already did bend the curve down once before, back when there were only a couple hundred cases, and then they lost control again. Not confidence-inspiring.

It's not that they lost control per se: when the hard detective work of determining the cause was done, it was already rather late in the game. The foreigners showed up in force but the locals refused to cooperate, hiding it until it couldn't be hidden, at which point it was too late for those three counties, and very possibly a very large part of West Africa or worse.

Donations are always tricky and effectively allocating resources to aid is hard … but can you at least recognise that similarly sized catastrophes get much more attention and money?

More than 3,000 people dead, potentially more, and many of the affected places don’t have enough resources to deal with it in a satisfactory manner. That’s the situation here. This could have been controlled better, probably.

Recently an arsonist alledgedly set fire to a dog shelter in the UK.

They raised over £1m in a few days.

> The blaze, which was tackled by more than 30 firefighters, killed about 60 animals.

> Within 24 hours, more than £1m pounds had been raised to help around 150 surviving dogs.

This happened while Ebola was happening.

Dogs are both cuter and easier for us English to relate to than Africans.

So what? Those are completely different situations. One is a human doing intentional harm to a bunch of innocent creatures. The other is mother nature vs. mankind. One tugs at the heartstrings, fills us with protective emotions for the poor doggies. The other is just another natural disaster. "Thank goodness it didn't happen to me", we think. I don't find this surprising or depressing.

> I don't find this surprising or depressing.

What? It might not be surprising, but how is it not depressing?

I don't see it as depressing or heartening—it's just the way we humans tend to react to things. Why do you find it depressing?