The message in the Ebola epidemic

A brief story from the Agence France-Presse (AFP) wire caught my attention earlier this week: Peter Piot, a Belgian doctor who was one of the “discoverers” of the Ebola virus in 1976, described the circumstances of the epidemic rapidly spreading through West Africa as a ‘perfect storm.’

Piot’s comments followed an uncanny admission by the World Health Organization (WHO) earlier in the month that the Ebola spread—which the WHO has sought to downplay by repeatedly admonishing the media, until now, to refer to it as an “outbreak” instead of as an epidemic—is almost certainly larger than the 2,600 cases reported so far, perhaps “by a very considerable margin.”