I read through the comments here, and read through the article, and I guess it's hard for people who mostly deal with first-world problems to wrap their minds a

I read through the comments here, and read through the article, and I guess it's hard for people who mostly deal with first-world problems to wrap their minds around what it's like to live in a much poorer place. "West Africa was ill-equipped for an Ebola disaster because civil war and chronic poverty had undermined local health systems and there were few doctors and nurses. Health workers in the region had never experienced an Ebola outbreak and didn't know what they were seeing in those first critical months." Yes. The ebola virus had previously appeared in other parts of Africa, and previous outbreaks have always fizzled out. There are so many urgent health problems in west Africa that at first ebola didn't look like it needed an all-hands-on-deck response. One part of that "there were few doctors and nurses" in west Africa has to do with the brain drain. People with medical training in west Africa are well positioned to emigrate to other countries. In the six years of my late dad's life when he was completely paralyzed from the neck down, one of the long-term care facilities where he stayed for quite a while was staffed mostly by Liberian immigrants, with various job classifications. The Liberian immigrant community here in Minnesota (and the Tibetan immigrant community, and several other groups of immigrants) is mostly employed in hospital and nursing home work, with the more skilled immigrants of course making MUCH better incomes than they could in their home countries. Our gain is another country's loss in the short term. (Eventually, interchange of people through immigration helps both the sending and receiving countries, because ideas and trade ties flow both ways, but those networks take time to build up, and freedom and stability in the developing country to have best effect.) The stark differences between life in a barely developing country and life in a developed country are hard for people to imagine if they haven't experienced them. Not many participants here on Hacker News have first-hand experience with this.