This map shows where Ebola is now. But where will it go next?
Panic over the spread of Ebola has been growing in Europe, North America, and Asia after the world saw the first three patients diagnosed with the disease outside of West Africa: two in Texas and one in Spain.
We’re not likely to see an outbreak in the US, but now that the disease has been transmitted here, Americans are increasingly worried. Nina Pham, a 26-year-old nurse who cared for Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan in Dallas, was recently diagnosed with the disease. Duncan died in Dallas last week.
And although the threat of widespread transmission in the US is very low, air travel makes it very likely that Ebola cases could arrive here again and may start popping up in other countries.
“Germs have always traveled. The problem now is they can travel with the speed of a jet plane,” Howard Markel, a professor of the history of medicine at the University of Michigan, told The New York Times.
Researchers at the Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Socio-Technical Systems at Northeastern University in Boston calculated which countries are most at risk for imported cases of Ebola by the end of October, as shown in the below chart:
