Ebola… How far away are we?

Hollywood adores an infectious disease film. One of the most shocking was the 1995 film "Outbreak", in which Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo worked to stop a fictional virus similar to Ebola. In the movie the virus is introduced from Africa to the US by a monkey. In another film, "28 Days Later," a virus from experimental monkeys infects humans in London. Several additional films about the human fear of "killer viruses" have been released. A real-life scare to the US and the western world came when two American Ebola patients were recently transported from West Africa to an Atlanta hospital for treatment. Currently, there is a pervasive public fear of the dissemination of Ebola in the US and the rest of the world.