Ebola: What is the Real Story?

Ebola - what is really going on?  By the looks of the media reports we should all be hiding under our beds. 

One news story this morning reported that airplane cabin cleaning crews at New York’s LaGuardia International Airport began a 24-hour strike on Wednesday, citing, in part, possible exposure to the Ebola virus. Meanwhile, a poll found most Americans want flights banned from West African nations.

Yesterday I heard an interview on National Public Radio with Deborah Malac the US ambassador to Liberia.  She was repeatedly asked why it is taking the US so long to build field hospitals - in a rare moment of good journalism the NPR reporter said that Doctors Without Borders builds a hospital in three weeks.  The response from the US ambassador was pure evasion - "Well it takes time to get everything in place.....it rains very hard here.....blah, blah, blah."

For years the Pentagon's Africa Command (AfriCom) has had no luck in getting military bases built on the African continent.  No self-respecting African nation would allow them.  Now, due to Ebola, Rwanda's corrupt dictator has signed a deal with the US to build a base reports a Portland, Maine-based African immigrant activist.  Obama is pouring legions of US troops onto the continent for its "war on Ebola".

RT reports:

Stoking fears of an inevitable Ebola spread, Marine Corps Gen. John F. Kelly, commander of U.S. Southern Command, said this week that “there is no way we can keep Ebola [contained] in West Africa.”

He added that while many Western Hemisphere nations can handle an Ebola outbreak, if the virus appears in Central American countries like Honduras or El Salvador, he expects many people to head north for the US.

“If it breaks out, it’s literally, ‘Katie bar the door,’ and there will be mass migration into the United States,” Kelly said. “They will run away from Ebola, or if they suspect they are infected, they will try to get to the United States for treatment.”

Several thousand Africans have already died from Ebola.  For Africans it is all very real.  But my lifetime of watching the US shell game (watch both hands) leads me to doubt the 'front story' and wonder about the 'back story' to all of this.

It just feels a bit self-serving to see the US rush into Africa with troops building bases while Cuba sends in hundreds of actual medical doctors.  What is really going on here?