Originally Posted By: MartinFocazio
I travel frequently. If Ebola goes airborne, the biggest thing you have to fear is not catching Ebola, it's global economic collapse and the attendant hardships that come with that.

Here's why. In Western societies, for the most part, we get the idea behind germs and airborne transmission of disease, so we can and will take radical steps to prevent transmission to the degree we can. We have better science, infrastructure, communications and (to a degree) a population with a better understanding of disease prevention (well maybe not the anti-vax crowd, but like the Shakers, that's a self-limiting population).
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I'm not worried about North America in all of this, I am worried about the 4th world - the parts of the world where young, uneducated, and underemployed people are accumulating in vast numbers without much in the way of economic prospects or political power. These are people who can (and are) easily swayed into violent means of attaining what feels like power and direction, and charismatic leaders emerge in crisis to leverage their cult of personality to attain their own vision of how the world should work - from IS to Boku Haram, the flavor of the 2000's is radical Islamists stepping in to provide what feels like social order, economic stability and, most of all, power to a powerless class.

Ebola may, along with wiping out thousands of people, wipe out the remains of the semblance of progress towards a pluralistic, secular democratic culture that had been attained in West Africa and the Middle East during the cold war and slightly beyond.
Martin, I'm glad you are back. I have always appreciated your level headed, common sense posts.

I agree with you that it is fairly unlikely that we will see epidemic scale ebola in North America, for all the reasons you have stated. While it is probable that some infected people will enter the country, and probably infect a few other people, those outbreaks are likely to be rapidly contained. By way of example, the plague (the "Black Death" which devastated Europe in the 14th to 17th centuries) is still present in N America. Periodically individuals are infected from bats and other animals, yet those outbreaks are rapdily contained and seldom spread to other individuals. I totally agree that the big risk to us in the 1st World will be from damage to the worldwide economic system, and social unrest leading to terroism in the rest of the world.
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"Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more."
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