The first problem is the News media itself. These are run by journalists who only know journalism, and see their function either as moderators or provocateurs, sometimes both, run to reinforce either the social norm, however they perceive it, or their company's policy, and in the last resort their own self-interest, if they see a Pulitzer Prize in it.

The first-level social norm is the policy set by the Government, which is and always will be "Don't Panic" - even if you should. The academic research corpus, for example, has demonstrated airborne transmission between pigs and chimps, making it somewhat specious to suggest it cannot be transmitted by aerosol human-human. I cannot, on the other hand, say definitively that it will, but only that it is possible, and therefore the precautionary principle applies. The scientific references I supplied about a week back on the original "tracking ebola" thread.

Secondly, the norms by which these journalists work are less than rigourous. I was just watching one compare the R0 infectuousness of ebola (2) with measles (4) and SARS (18), to show it's not something we should be scared of. What she fails to take into account is the lethality of each, and so seeks to minimise something most serious. Time after time after time the Press seem to think there is a treatment for Ebola, just because Doctors are there: the reality is that there is not. Similarly, there are no end of statements suggesting the casualty rate will get to "10 000 a week" before it starts to drop. This is Wizard of Oz conman tactics, "with one leap he was free", without explaining how. The simple reality is more likely to be that this will continue in West Africa until one of two things happens: there are no more people to be infected, or the population, faced with a complete collapse of the economic structure by which they are fed and cared for, flees, taking the disease with them. This was exactly the mechanism by which the Black Death spread so rapidly in 1348, it was not simply the rat flea as a vector, rats only travelling short distances, but humans carrying the incubating disease which the local rat fleas then spread locally once they got to the point where they could travel no more. Once we start getting humanitarian pleas to take refugees, this time we must say no: we do not know the infectuousness of any individual, but en masse we can be certain that someone somewhere will be infected. Nor can we use some kind of quarantine camp, as the camp is only as good as the date the last inmate arrived, plus 21 days.

The third dynamic is the failure of international diplomacy in the UN. The African Nations are asking why the rest of the world waited until now, without realising that had we gone in at the first sign of trouble, we'd have been accused of all kinds of murder and mayhem, indeed giving tangible justification to the malicious tongues which accused the West of causing it in the first place.

We should always back up the need to exercise scientific standards with the precautionary principle, which is basically don't chance it if you don't know. Both President Obama and the UK's Chief Scientific Officer, when they said that it cannot be communicated by air, demonstrated that they don't know and therefore failed in their duty to express the need to be carefully prudent.

Yet another example happened in the explanation of the "clipboard man" at the airport. It was explained that he was a supervisor of the team working with the patient, because the visibility within one of those suits is limited, his task being to add the visual supervision (literally) that nothing slipped. Yet he himself became part of the problem, taking a bottle which only the patient could have handled, the rest of the team being sealed in their suits. If she handled it, then it carried her saliva, which was certainly contaminated, and he therefore handled something contaminated out of normal cooperative instinct. He should have refused to take it. He failed in himself. The Press swallowed the "official" line just because it was passed down from on high. The only thing we can know now is that the edicts of the Governments are in their own interest, and will be increasingly spun: the amount of spin being an indicator of the gravity of cover-up. Maybe things are improving, for example in the case of Amber Vinson, details were released to the Press within 24 hours of her reporting ill: but is even that fast enough?

We cannot take chances with this one, because we have no cure for it and it is highly lethal. We did so at the start, and it got out of control: the only way to be sure, to be sure, to be sure, is to copy that Irishman and put three condoms on. Or rather, triple-glove. There is a difference, for example, between the English protocol, where the patient is hermetically sealed under negative pressure at all times, and the American one: for example, the room Amber Vinson is in has wooden window fittings. The isolation rooms in the hospital I was intensively involved in, the European Cancer Centre the Bordet Institute, do not, because they have a granular surface which can absorb germs. I'm not talking about food-level hygiene, but medical, and it's details like that which must be picked up on to avoid the risk of leaving contaminant harbours behind. Were the floor surfaces curved at the skirting, to avoid diseased material getting trapped in the angles? Didn't look like it. If the norms aren't right from the start, then deaths can follow.

It may be too late to correct: but until we know it for sure, it's time for some long-term planning to be made, with provision for scaled escalation, so we don't leaave everything until it's too late. About a quarter of a mile from where I live, for example, is one of London's quarantine hospitals used in the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak, with provision for tens of hundreds of patients: we also have a Malaysian teaching hospital a mile away. It still only has two entrances, and has a supermarket and medical centre on site: I wonder whether the people who bought the flats it was converted into have any idea that to me, it looks very possible that of this were to get out of control, they may be asked to move out while the site reverts to its original use. The Colney Hatch asylum, also not far away, is also a huge block with huge grounds which could be further developed extensively: it's been sold to Footballers Wives circles, at a huge markup, but if the devil drives...

It's called getting our ducks in a row, and at the moment, they're still not. Maybe we won't need it, but better to prepare and not need it than to have improvise in the teeth of chaos. Prior planning and proper preparation prevent piss-poor performance.