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Re:CDC confirms first Ebola case diagnosed in US by orbifold on Wednesday October 01, 2014 @08:02AM (#8393861)
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.
Re:CDC confirms first Ebola case diagnosed in US by crpatino on Wednesday October 01, 2014 @12:16PM (#8395603)
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.