I somehow seem to miss a sense of urgency, probably because any suggestion that Ebola is a potential catastrophe would emphasise that Obama has been tragically incompetent. So what are we to make of Matt Ridley’s article yesterday, Beat Ebola or face a pandemic as bad as the Black Death. He begins:

IT is not often I find myself agreeing with apocalyptic warnings, but the west African Ebola epidemic deserves hyperbole right now.

Anthony Banbury, head of the UN Ebola emergency response mission, says: “Time is our enemy. The virus is far ahead of us.”

David Nabarro, special envoy of the UN secretary-general, says of Ebola: “I have never encountered a public health crisis like this in my life.”

Then there’s this today, Is Ebola the Same Virus as the Black Death? This one begins:

Most people assume that the fourteenth-century Black Death that quickly ravaged the western world was a bacterial bubonic plague epidemic caused by flea bites and spread by rats. But the Black Death killed a high proportion of Scandinavians where it was too cold for fleas to survive. “Biology of Plagues. Evidence from Historical Populations” published by Cambridge University Press, analyzed 2,500 years of plagues and concluded that the Black Death was caused by a viral hemorrhagic fever pandemic similar to Ebola. If this is correct, the future medical and economic impacts from Ebola have been vastly underestimated.

And finally, the comforting list of headlines at Drudge:

Hospital Cafeteria Abandoned…
WHO predicts 10,000 new cases — per week…
Death rate reaches 70%…
UN WARNS: 60 DAYS TO BEAT…
Researchers say more in USA based on flight patterns…
LA bus driver quarantined after passenger yells: ‘I have Ebola!’
TX College ‘Not Accepting International Students From Countries With Confirmed Cases’…

My father-in-law never knew his own father because his father died in the same month in which he was born, November 1918, during the first influenza epidemic that killed twenty million at the end of World War I. Funny times we live in where the possibility of a worldwide pandemic is news that comes below the fold.