3 ms·

I read a book about Ebola in West Africa 20 years ago or more ago so "entrenched" is very old news and "accelerating" is last month's news.

• hga 12y ago
  It's zoonotic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoonosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoonosis), and in fact rather poorly adapted to humans (kills us way too often and quickly, one big danger from this outbreak is that less lethal strains will develop). So it was "entrenched", or, rather, endemic in we guess fruit bats, the index case was a child in a household where some "bushmeat" was butchered, but not, until now, in human populations. Note this is believed to have started with one child who died on December 6th, 2013. Exponential growth since then, and nothing specifically foreseeable is going to change that any time soon. ADDED: if you assume, as many do, there are about 20,000 cumulative infections as of now, that equals a doubling rate of 3 per week (http://www.doubling-time.com/compute.php?lang=en http://www.doubling-time.com/compute.php?lang=en), which also matches some other estimates I've seen.