But of course an outbreak of an epidemic disease, well, those international borders are going to get closed, aren't they? So, precisely because those West African countries have economies where most trade is still done through personal meetings, and much of the recent growth has come from trade across those borders now being closed, the economic effects of Ebola are rather greater than we might think they would be
Finally, in such poor economies the absence of economic growth kills people: let alone what happens when economies start to shrink. With so many people at or just above the subsistence level it doesn't take much of even a slowdown in the economy to push some of them below it. As a result of that it's entirely possible that the economic effects of Ebola will kill more than the disease itself. Not that we'll ever know the number because we'll not be able to tell those deaths from the ones that already routinely occur from bad health care, impure water and shortages of food.
As ever the best thing we can do for poor people in poor countries is purchase more of what they produce (given that most of us are not health care experts who can help with the actual disease itself). This will sound flippant but it isn't, it really isn't. Deliberately seeking out West African products and purchasing them, by preference over those from other areas of the world, is the one thing that each of us individually can do to help.
The reason is the outbreak of the Ebola virus in west Africa, which has killed more than 5,000 people. The epidemic is taking place far from the big safari destinations in eastern and southern Africa-as far or farther than the homes of many European tourists (see map). There are more air links from west Africa to Europe than to the rest of the continent, whose airlines have in any case largely suspended flights. Moreover Ebola is hardly the biggest killer disease in Africa (AIDS and malaria are bigger).