Another Ebola Case

With Dallas reeling and the rest of us watching worriedly, a second health care worker is diagnosed with Ebola. It's scary and the fear is it will be much worse before it gets better. But it will get better, at least in the modern world. Dr. William Schaffner the eminent Chair of Preventive Medicine at Vanderbilt Medical Center just reassured me that ZMapp, the experimental cocktail of 3 synthetic antibodies is looking very promising in frantic testing and, assuming things stay on track, should be ready for wide-spread distribution by the end of the year. In the meantime, the use of plasma taken from the blood of Ebola survivors also seems to be working to cure the infected. Also, work on a vaccine is moving along at a similarly rapid pace. That's the best way to make Ebola obsolete. Whichever company, government or educational institution is first to get these products to the market will score a fortune, which is as it should be. Dr. Schaffner concludes there will be no Ebola epidemic in the USA or the developed world. But it is a different story in West Africa and environs where he fears many tens of thousands will die before effective treatments are made available. He also questions why aside from us, the Chinese and the Cubans no other big industrialized nations are rushing to help quash this outbreak at its source. Doesn't selfish, socialist Europe suck? As with most crises, they wait for us to fix it, then bum a ride.