http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-29559444

'Are you from Bongo Bongo Land?'

But only in three points of entry (Ooerr). Hopefully places like Dover will be monitored, because, you know, illegals and all that.....

Western Africa > Algeria > France > ANY UK AIRPORT

lip service for the masses ...

How long is the incubation time for Ebola?

21 days, apparently.

The only way border controls would actually work to detect Ebola would presumably be active quarantine (for a minimum of 21 days) of EVERYONE arriving from 'at risk' countires and I don't see that happening.

what's an at risk country? they can't track people who've transited through other places.

* goes back to read world war Z for tips*

Well you can, because it's on their passport, or at least it should be. Difficult with illegal migrants of course.

You can't trust passports, the first Malaysian aircraft showed inadequacies.

21 days incubation means that it's very possible there's already people in the UK with Ebola. screening would do nothing apart from stopping people who are already ill.

The thing that interests/worries me is : Why has it gone this big NOW? Ebola has been known about for ages. It's always been fairly low level stuff. NA few cases here, a village full there. According to wikipedia, 'From 1976 (when it was first identified) through 2013, the World Health Organization reported a total of 1,716 cases'. We've had several times that in a couple of months. How/why has it jumped from being a disease that isolated pockets suffered from to something that's decimating a good portion of a continent and being spread apparently round the world?

Having said that, I saw an eminent professor of virology talking about it on the news recently and his opinion was that the chances of a large outbreak in the developed world was quite slim. while very nasty, apparently it's a very 'fragile' virus, apt to be broken apart by simple detergent and hot water. In places where personal hygiene is good and disinfectants are widely available, it would be almost impossible for ebola to establish itself in the population, or at least that was his opinion.

There was a lot about it around 1995/96 from what I remember, and then it looked like it would get out, but it burned itself out and stated put. I’d not heard of it before then.

Sure your memory isn't being incorrectly influenced by this. Timing is right .

Roads, towns and cities. The disease is endemic to isolated rural locations and each infected person tends to infect about 2 others, so it never got past a few villages before it fizzled out.

Now there are more roads, and lots of people migrating them from isolated places to mingle and spread disease. And the towns that the roads lead to don't have very nice plumbing.

Cholera, Black Death, AIDS and Syphilis all did the same thing. Albeit sometimes by boat or train.