Summary

In Chapter 12, "Ebola: Out of Africa," Osterholm describes the most recent Ebola outbreak, which hit West Africa. In the past, Ebola has generally been confined to a few cases in jungle villages in Central and Eastern Africa. When it hit urban areas on the northwest coast in 2014, it exploded like wildfire. Regional health systems were overwhelmed, and the international community was not fully prepared to help - the response eventually got the virus under control, but only after it had hit epidemic proportions, and Osterholm says that if just a few people had acted differently, it could have become a pandemic. A smallpox eradication team that happened to have been in the area was able to switch their focus to Ebola containment. The disease almost spread to Nigeria, when an infected man arrived on a plane from Liberia only to collapse at the...