18% Chance of Imported Ebola in U.S.

According to a new report from researchers in the journal PLOS Currents: Outbreaks, the chances of seeing at least one imported case of Ebola in the U.S. is as high as 18 percent. The prediction is based on the flow of airline passengers from West Africa. “What is happening in West Africa is going to get here. We can’t escape that at this point,” a senior author of the study told NPR. He added that if there is an importation, it would be in “very small clusters of cases, between one and three.” Other developed nations, including the U.K. are also at risk. But the countries with the highest probability of importing Ebola are, not surprisingly, hitherto-unaffected African countries such as Gambia, Ivory Coast, Morocco, South Africa and Kenya.