“The greatest peacetime challenge the world has ever faced”

That would be Ebola, according to the director of the World Health Organization, a plague that is raging out of control, with projections that it will kill 1.4 million people by January.  Right now, the disease is confined to Africa, but surely it won’t stay there.

From Julia Belluz, The worst-case scenario for Ebola – Vox.

Before this year, Ebola was a disease relegated to remote villages in Africa. Even public health officials didn’t worry about it spreading very far. Until recently, they would probably tell you that the virus typically burned out after ravaging only a handful of people.

But then came 2014.

This year has, in many ways, rewritten the Ebola rulebook. We’re in the middle of an unprecedented, nightmarish epidemic that has spread from a rural rainforest region in West Africa to large urban centers. The World Health Organization’s director has called it “the greatest peacetime challenge” the world has ever faced, with the number of cases doubling each week.

Now, health care officials are starting to talk about a worst-case scenario for Ebola. The World Health Organization projects that 20,000 people will be infected in November. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, meanwhile, projects 1.4 million people could be infected by January, assuming that Ebola cases continue to increase exponentially and are underreported by a factor of 2.5.

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