 I'm Beverly Kirk with the Global Health Policy Center here with Dr. Steve Morrison. He is the Senior Vice President and Director of the Global Health Policy Center here at CSIS and we're talking about Ebola. The CDC says the Ebola outbreak in West Africa is now the worst in history. And talk about this, explain the broader significance of this outbreak and put it in some context if this is the worst ever. How does, you know, what about previous ones? This is the 11th or 12th outbreak dating back to the mid-70s, which was the first outbreak in then-Zaire. This is far and away the worst we've ever seen. It's over 1,200 people that have been affected by this, become ill, over 670 fatalities. It's also very unprecedented in that it began in Guinea. It jumped into two neighboring states in the last few days by virtue of an air flight. It jumped into Nigeria. So the scale and scope of it is two to three times the levels of anything we've seen. The fact that it's multi-country, that it's region-wide, and that it's spreading, and that we have been unable since this was first confirmed in March to really bring it under control. Are there special factors that are driving the way that it's spreading this time? Yes, there are. West Africa is a, these countries that are affected are a pocket of countries that have exceptionally weak health infrastructure. They're exceptionally poor, and they've had exceptionally poor governance and leadership. So that is very fundamental to the spread. The fact that this could ignite and spread so rapidly. Second is the proximity of the jungle to the urban populated, densely populated areas. And we don't know exactly what the reservoir is for Ebola, but it is emerging out of a jungle environment and it's jumping. Those are two of the principal factors that are driving this. It's showing us globally that while there have been significant gains in many countries in the world in building the capacities to surveil, to prevent, to detect outbreaks, to respond effectively to outbreaks, we have these important pockets like West Africa where those capacities do not exist and it creates a large vulnerability to this kind of wildfire. So how do you get it under control, since in some cases you have doctors who are also contracting this virus and people are panicking and NGO personnel are either being kept at bay or actually being attacked? It's going to take time and it's going to be difficult to get this under control, but we know what has to happen. We know that there needs to be a public communications program across this region to rebuild trust and to inform people and to get people to agree to cooperating in those that are ill or those that are dying, separating them. They have to be separated and isolated. There has to be a containment strategy and there has to be contact tracing. In other words, you have to isolate and contain and then you have to detect exactly who else was exposed and then work on that. And then you have to share data across the region. Those steps have to happen. The capacity is not there and things have gotten very, very difficult for the reasons that we've discussed. So this is not going to be fixed quickly. Right now it's pretty much out of control. The WHO has come in a few weeks ago and is establishing a regional center, a hub. CDC is bringing in additional teams in capacity. The governments within the region are on high alert and they are beginning to recognize that this is a threat to their basic stability and functionality. So we will see this arrested eventually, but it's going to be tough. So people in the United States, people in Europe, how worried should they be about this virus spreading out of Africa and into other parts of the world? Well, CDC, the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control in Atlanta, issued an alert today with respect to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. And what that says to Americans is that physicians have to be, people they need to be very vigilant. They need to be checking on those traveling from West Africa. They need to be familiar with the symptoms and they need to be ready and familiar with the isolation and containment procedures for if a person comes in who is sick. So that is an admission that it's possible that we could see someone who is ill get on a plane and come to a U.S. entry point. There's a 21-day gestation period for this. So if you could be ill, you could be asymptomatic, but come in and become symptomatic and become very contagious at that point. There is also another message that comes forward, which is that Americans don't need to panic about this because as long as the infection control procedures are in place at ports of entry and in hospitals and the like, they should be able to contain this. There were cholera outbreaks in Haiti after the earthquake and there were cases of cholera that came in by air into the United States and those were managed reasonably well and there's reason to believe that this could be done. But Ebola is a particularly terrifying disease. There's no vaccine. There is no cure. There is no vaccine and it's highly fatal, highly lethal. And so people are going to get afraid of this. And so what I think the challenge now is to make people vigilant and informed but not panicky about this. I think the threat to the United States is minimal, actually. But the threat to other countries in West Africa, like Nigeria, which now has had to shut down and decontaminate a hospital where a person from Nairobi, I mean from Monrovia came in who was sick and then died. That was a wake-up call around the reality that this is a threat to a country like Nigeria with 170 million people. And there are many other prosperous neighboring countries where there's a lot of migration back and forth. All right. Dr. Steve Morrison, thank you. Thank you.