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without burning down. But that building isn't the only one around, of course, and somewhere in the world, at this very moment, a building is burning down. That's why we install smoke detectors: to protect against something that's rare but potentially very destructive. When it comes to pandemics, the world is one big building fitted with smoke detectors that aren't especially sensitive and have trouble communicating with each other. If there's a fire in the kitchen, it might spread to the dining room before enough people hear about it to go put it out. In the spring of 2014, I started getting emails from the health team at the foundation about an outbreak that sounded ominous: A few cases of Ebola virus had been identified in southeastern Guinea. By that July, there had been Ebola cases in Conakry, the capital of Guinea, and in the capital cities of Guinea's neighbors, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Eventually the virus would spread to seven other countries, including the United States, and more than 11,000 people would die.7 Ebola is a scary disease--it causes patients to bleed to death from their orifices--but it can't infect tens of millions of people, because it only spreads through physical contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person. And by the time you're really infectious, you're too sick to move around. The biggest risks were to people who were taking care of Ebola patients, either at home or in the hospital, and during funeral rites, when someone would wash the body of a person who had died of the disease. <~?~Insert art 006_Gate_9780593534489_art_r1> In this photo we see a funeral taking place near the village of Macenta in Guinea in 2014. Many people contracted Ebola during funeral gatherings because they would come into close contact with a recent victim of the disease.