Another View: As ‘endemic’ Ebola looms, developing effective treatment must become public, private priority

The CDC projects up to 1.4 million cases by February, but not a single drug or vaccine is ready. Everything about the Ebola epidemic in West Africa has been worst-case – the scope, the toll, the response. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published projections Tuesday with an upper range of 550,000 to 1.4 million cases by the end of January. The World Health Organization, which earlier estimated 20,000 cases overall, now predicts that number will be reached by early November. A note of caution was contained in a report by the WHO Ebola Response Team, published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The team warned that there is a possibility that the disease “will become endemic among the human population of West Africa.” With a case fatality rate of 70 percent, that could mean a long period of death and illness among populations of millions. Good public health practices –...