Certainly I'm glad my words turned out to be hyperbolic, but it's not really a fair comparison between AIDS and ebola, epidemiologically speaking. AIDS is a slow progress towards awareness, prevention, treatment. Ebola is an acute crisis that requires active mitigating steps stem its spread. Also, there's lots of evidence that it's not really being contained in Sierra Leone, so we shouldn't pretend that just because it's out of the daily headlines that there isn't still a significant threat to countless Africans.

Also, one would hope that the WHO director is a better scientific authority than I am on infectious disease. But that doesn't mean that the efforts of the WHO were adequate in the beginning, or that she wasn't right by luck rather than science. At that time, everything the WHO was saying seemed to be contradicted by doctors and nurses on the ground. Since that time, we've seen a herculean effort by the US, EU and many NGOs that have paid dividends. Her projections are looking good in hindsight, but could she have foresaw this global response, a response that, you'll remember, wasn't in place at that time? Perhaps. I don't know. To me, she sounded like a politician denying that sky is blue.