Quarantine is one of the BEST ways to stop a disease's spread. These countries don't have the medical infrastructure to risk NOT implementing quarantine.
Even the foreign aid medical infrastructure is inadequate, not enough resources and too overworked to maintain proper isolation protocol, hence all the foreign aid workers getting infected.
Think about how many folk in Europe or the US are against vaccination, or think that big pharma is trying to wipe out everyone.
Now consider how many people are of those opinions in areas that have historically been governed by unbelievably brutal European empires that treated people living there like livestock.
I strongly suspect that a lot more people survive ebola than we hear about because they stay hidden at home with only the hardedst hit cases risk going to the hospital.
So it is more like "Year after year, you have some people get sick, some die, some live. One day somebody gets sick and dies fast and painfully. A few weeks later the rest of their tribe/family is dead or dying. A few weeks after that, the space aliens start coming in, but people continue to die."
The best way, the only acceptable way, is to have medicine for the decease. We have some that we just aren't putting into trials because we aren't sure that it won't kill them - when they are going to die anyway in an absolutely horrible way.
Quarantine is also the only reliable way to prevent the spreading of a disease, and really the only way we have to deal with a disease like ebola which has no known cure. It sucks for the healthy ones in the quarantined zone, but allowing anyone to leave the zone while in the middle of an outbreak risks far more lives.
Note - we aren't talking about smallpox/typhus/flu - ebola is pretty hard to get. As long as you don't touch the body or its fluids, you aren't going to get ebola.
It's also only a death warrant if the people in the quarantine zones don't observe proper safety. If my city (in the U.S.) had an outbreak of ebola, I'd stay home, and barring someone purposely trying to infect me, I'd be safe. Ebola is not an evil spirit that infects everyone in the quarantine area who doesn't flee. Even if it were a more easily transmissible strain of ebola, if you're not in a housing unit sharing air with people who are infected, you're pretty safe.
Certainly true - but, it's important to note that ebola is not airborne. You can safely sit beside someone with ebola, and as long as they don't throw up on you, and you don't touch any body fluids - you are also pretty safe.
Do you consider that acceptable?
I do not consider compassion with victims misguided.
I don't live with the delusion that there has to be an acceptable solution to every problem - there isn't even one for those 40000 people on that mountain in Kurdistan - but that doesn't mean we shouldn't acknowledge that it is a shitty solution and work towards getting an acceptable one.
What now?
Do you risk thousand (possibly millions)? Or billions?
This does not make it ethically or morally acceptable to create more victims.
You are expecting a perfect solution. There isn't one. We must accept and live with the least bad solution.
But we don't have any right now, so wishing that reality was different from how it actually is doesn't help us to deal with the short term problem. We can work on deveoping and producing medicine, but while we wait for results we also need a strategy to managing the outbreak right now at the local level.
Incidentally I don't agree that we're signing the death warrant for anyone in there. Those people are already at a high risk of death, but we can still treat them even while they're isolated.
Both are, thankfully, reasonably difficult to transmit, though conditions of poverty, with close proximity and contact, as well as poor sanitation, increase the likelihood of transmission.
Camus' The Plague has already been mentioned in this thread. I'd strongly recommend reading it.