You cannot have both Public Health and neo-liberal economic policies.
I predicted an epidemic and it was not rocket science on my part.
Since the IMF pushed Friedman's bullshit in the 1970s we've seen vector borne epidemics like dengue, malaria chikungunya, as well as polio and now ebola in places where polio and malaria in particular had been wiped out as a direct result of global Public Health policies.

Add to that deforestation and our increasing exposure to some of the animals that spread disease.

http://www.theguardian.com/vital-signs/2014/oct/03/ebola-epidemic-bats-deforestation-west-africa-guinea-sierra-leone-liberia
<snip>
The world now knows in great detail how Thomas Eric Duncan, a man who just a few weeks ago showed admirable compassion for a sick, pregnant neighbor in Liberia, has become the first person to come down with Ebola in the United States.

What is less well known is how the virus came to West Africa to infect Duncan’s neighbor. Knowing and acting on that story is absolutely critical if we hope to contain future outbreaks of Ebola and other scary diseases before they turn into global headlines.

The Ebola epidemic in West Africa may have surprised most of the medical establishment – this is the first such outbreak in the region – but the risk had been steadily rising for at least a decade. The risk had grown so high, in fact, that this outbreak was almost inevitable and very possibly predictable.

All that was needed was to see the danger was a bat’s eye view of the region. Once blanketed with forests, West Africa has been skinned alive over the last decade. Guinea’s rainforests have been reduced by 80%, while Liberia has sold logging rights to over half its forests. Within the next few years Sierra Leone is on track to be completely deforested.

The bottom line is that there is no public health without environmental health. Deforestation didn’t cause this Ebola epidemic, but did make it much more likely. The region’s legacy of war and poverty, its beleaguered health care systems, and a series of bureaucratic fumbles fanned a small and isolated outbreak into a full-blown epidemic fire, which has already killed more people than all previous 25 known Ebola outbreaks put together.

Excellent article.
thank you, Malaise.

We either take care of everything on the planet or we self destruct.
Sadly we're paying for ignorance as an alternative to reason, education and science.

Really, really short sighted, wrong and now fatal.

The very same thing is happening here, has already happened actually.