From the WHO website: "Health-care staff fear for their lives. To date, more than 170 health-care workers have been infected"
http://www.who.int/csr/disease/ebola/overview-august-2014/en...
From the wikipedia article:
"The virus may be acquired upon contact with blood or bodily fluids of an infected animal (commonly monkeys or fruit bats).[1] Spread through the air has not been documented in the natural environment."
Something about this story isn't adding up if you combine multiple legitimate sources. So you can only catch it via bodily fluid (like AIDS). But if you wear the health care worker space suit and bleach and burn everything, then you're probably gonna die.
My theory is its converting into an air-transmission disease. In that case, a military quarantine sounds quite wise. (edited to add, my point being that if its known not to be caused by a civil engineering fixable problem like mosquitos or infected sewage or whatever, then human guards closing the borders to humans is the wisest possible solution, and if we're not being given the whole story which is probably true, this would indicate that what is known, to folks other than us, is that it is definitely not civil-engineering-fixable like if it was spread by contaminated water or vampire bats or wtf. Which is a mildly interesting analysis.)
In submitting too fast punishment mode:
cwal37 is quite possibly correct. I am attempting to find death stats from the numerous historical outbreaks. Presumably "20% of the dead being medical workers" should apply in past outbreaks.
cwal37 - Update: from CDC MMWR wrt the Uganda '00 outbreak, with lower tech and less experience the Gulu district of Uganda had 393 total cases of which 22 were health care workers. So the infection percentage of healthcare workers under slightly worse conditions was documented at about 5.6%. The stat for this time around is 170 medical workers some time ago vs a CDC reported 1848 confirmed cases or about 9%.
There are several ways to interpret these stats. One is that the rate is increasing despite experience and technology getting better. Maybe. Another is the reported number of infected might be half or less of total infected. Maybe. If you assume "about 1 in 20 infected will be health care workers" from historical experience, then 170 infected workers would imply the total number actually infected as of some time ago is closer to 3500 or so rather than the official count of 1800 or so.
So that's the numbers. I continue to research to figure out which of many possible interpretations is most likely.
"That is straight up fear-mongering." LOL if I wanted to do that, I could do a better job. "Its all obama's fault" "Buy overpriced ammo from me" "I'm getting a commission on these MREs" etc.
disputin - I see I have been scooped by zerohedge. Embarrassing because I often scan zerohedge headlines. On the other hand a bunch of stock traders are not going to have much of anything intelligent to say about non-economic issues, beyond being pretty good at making "isn't that odd" connections, like this post.