“Previous Ebola outbreaks had been quickly throttled, but that experience proved misleading and officials did not grasp the potential scale of the disaster. Their imaginations were unequal to the virulence of the pathogen.” How the world’s health organizations failed to stop the Ebola disaster.

+ As America focuses on Thomas Eric Duncan’s diagnosis in Dallas, Liberians are focused on the nine people who are dead or dying after having contact with the pregnant woman who gave him Ebola. And a nurse in Spain has become the first person known to have contracted Ebola outside of Africa.

+ “There’s a reason Ebola has crippled West Africa, where large swaths of a distrustful population deny its existence and local governments don’t have the tools to defeat it. And there’s a reason Nigeria, a country with a more muscular government, has been able to limit its outbreak. Conditions determine a disease’s survival rate — not lethality. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the origins of the HIV pandemic.”