People don't understand how Ebola is different from heart disease, cancer and diabetes, often-cited examples that will kill more people this year than Ebola will. Even in Africa, right now, Ebola isn't likely to kill that many people before the end of the year.
But the big killer diseases are chronic. They are very predictable. Not only do they kill a lot of people, but we know, with a high degree of certainty, how many they will kill, and who is at risk to die from these diseases, now. But none of that is true for Ebola. What we do in the next weeks will matter a lot in determining the outcome. Ebola, could, unless we're smart and aggressive, kill a lot of people long before they'll die from the chronic diseases.
Wired has a must-read article that explains why the near-future could be very dark if we're not smart now. Ebola is more of a present threat than climate change. They also explain that the secondary effects of an outbreak, even far away from North America, could be devastating. It's a world economy. Our borders don't mean nearly as much as they used to. An Ebola outbreak in Malaysia, India or China, could cause a world wide depression.
Right now, resources directed at containing Ebola in Africa would be money well-spent.