last week, after six months of dawdling and ignoring repeated pleas from Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières, the world finally decided that the Ebola epidemic raging through West Africa demanded a massive, coordinated counterattack. First, President Barack Obama announced on Sept. 16 an enormous ramp-up of the U.S. government’s response, including sending in 3,000 military troops and redirecting $500 million from the Defense Department toward the effort. Two days later, the United Nations Security Council unanimously agreed that Ebola now “constitutes a threat to international peace and security” and demanded an urgent response from member states. Several other countries pledged to send in more supplies and health care workers, as nongovernmental organizations like Partners in Health joined MSF to build clinics and provide care.
But talking the talk and walking the walk—or in this case, running the run—are critically different things. New cases of Ebola in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea are doubling every three weeks. Officially reported cases to date number nearly 6,000, with about half dying, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the actual figures likely are triple that because so many infected people never seek care. CDC modelers suggest in a new publication that if words don’t lead to action and nothing changes, 1.4 million people could be infected by mid-January 2015. Simple math suggests that slowing the spread will require an emergency health care response unlike anything the world has ever mounted.