There is a way to beat Ebola (and we're already doing it)

There is something depressing about the fact that it has taken a sick Spanish nurse to put Ebola back on the front pages. Since the summer, some 3,400 West Africans have died, but interest in the story here had waned. So long as the disease did not make the nine-mile leap across the Straits of Gibraltar, the moat which keeps all nasty things from Africa at bay from fortress Europe, a sense developed that it could quietly be forgotten — or left to the aid charities.

No longer. Spain’s public health authorities are investigating how a nurse who treated two missionaries in a Madrid hospital — who had contracted the disease in Liberia and Sierra Leone — became infected in spite of the protective clothing she was wearing. The nurse had been on holiday since treating the now-deceased missionaries and it is not clear where she had gone, but it seems likely that she contracted the illness through an as-yet unidentified breach in the barrier nursing techniques used to treat patients.