The ebola thing reminds me of past scares where people got really unreasonable and had a lot of fear about things that had a fraction of a chance of affecting them. I'm reminded of someone I sat next to at work who was deathly afraid of the bird flu. Here's a list of things that did affect some people, but in general weren't worth keeping on our radar (that I can recall):
* bird flu
* imminent terrorist attacks (not that they don't occur sometimes, but the odds make it irrational to worry about them)
* swine flu
* killer bees
* mad cow disease
* spinach ecoli (or whatever the food borne illness outbreak is at the time)

Anyone remember anything else?

When the current ebola outbreak is controlled, it will become a historical footnote. Then something else will be in the news that has a 1 in 10 million chance of killing us, and that will be the story that sells ad space (despite any documented factual information that makes it unreasonable to worry about).

Meanwhile, elderly people will fall, people will drive drunk, people will drown, have strokes, heart attacks, cancer, etc, and we will spend little of our time worry about those every day until they afflict us.