West needs faster action to deal with Ebola spread

In the late 1960s, US Surgeon General William H. Stewart said it was “time to close the book on infectious diseases” and “declare the war against pestilence won.”

So much has happened in recent decades—with the era-dication of small pox, the development of vaccines against polio and other diseases, and the emergence of new antibiotics—that the war against infectious diseases seemed won. The      AIDS epidemic would prove how tragically wrong that declaration was, and now in West Africa an epidemic of Ebola virus is out of control.