The first time I ever heard of the hemorrhagic virus named Ebola was in the early 1990s. I remember reading The Hot Zone when it was published in 1994 and thinking “this thing is terrifying.”

Well, it’s true. It’s terrifying and it’s on the move. This is the biggest outbreak ever recorded, and it’s spread in four different countries — Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, with a new case in Nigeria. The Nigerian case was a Liberian who carried it on a flight from his home country. That is the worst-case scenario: air passengers carrying the virus throughout the world. Oh, it still has to be passed through bodily fluids to infect another victim, but as it moves it’s harder and harder to quarantine and control its carriers.

The thing that strikes me as the cruelest part of the disease is that those who care for its victims are the most likely to be infected themselves. The early stories of the disease mentioned family members who contracted it from handling the dead body of their loved one, preparing it for burial. That’s hard to take.

So far there are two American health care professionals who’ve been infected while caring for patients in Africa. Let’s hope they recover (apparently if it’s caught early there’s a 40% chance of survival; if it’s not caught early the death rate is up to 90%) along with as many of the others who are suffering from it. It’s a simply horrid way to die.