As reported in this news story, "'Clearly there was a breach in protocol. We have the ability to prevent the spread of Ebola by caring safely for patients,' [Th

As reported in this news story, "'Clearly there was a breach in protocol. We have the ability to prevent the spread of Ebola by caring safely for patients,' [Thomas Frieden, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] said in an interview Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation. "Frieden also promised that protocols at the hospital would be reexamined to find out how the disease was apparently transmitted." Other patients with quite advanced cases of ebola, who were on the brink of death, have been successfully treated in United States hospitals without any health care workers in those hospitals being infected so far. The Dallas hospital where this latest incident happened will definitely have to review its infection control protocols, but we know already that other United States hospitals are doing things right. Terrifying news like this came out when SARS was first spreading around the world in 2003. SARS is especially easy to transmit from one person to another because it is an airborne virus. No doubt there will be other cases of ebola infection spreading in the developed world, even in hospital settings, now that the first few cases have been discovered. But SARS transmission decreased a lot once people in China started taking precautions like self-isolation and masks to cover coughs. West Africa has a lower availability of equipment, supplies, trained personnel, and even information today than rural China had in 2003, but with sufficient outside help the transmission of ebola can also decrease a lot, until numbers of new cases start falling instead of rising.