| Summary/Abstract |
For months, the news out of West Africa has been unrelentingly grim. As of early December, the devastating Ebola epidemic had infected a reported 17,942 people and killed 6,388, according to the World Health Organization (WHO); the actual toll, which would also account for unreported cases, is presumed to be even higher. Order has broken down in some towns and villages, and entire families have been wiped out. In Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia, seeds of economic growth that only recently seemed so promising have been threatened, suddenly, by catastrophe. The cost of the epidemic is likely to hit at least $3 billion by the end of 2015, according to recent World Bank estimates.
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