[dllthomas]

No. Based solely on rates in the past, rather than any sort of projection into the future, I'm incredibly unlikely to be likely to be infected by either (note from your link, that of the <2k/yr of malaria in the US we see "almost all in recent travelers").

If I am infected by either, I am overwhelmingly more likely to survive a bout of malaria.

And during an unusual outbreak (which is the case for ebola at present), looking simply at past incidence will underestimate my risk.

It's still probably not a high risk, and there are higher risks (which I try to pay more attention), but I don't think it's wrong to say it poses a greater threat to me (or to the overwhelming majority on this site) than does malaria.

[danieltillett]

Actually it is very difficult to place any risk estimate on ebola (or any other new viral strain) as we don’t really know much about it.

Imagine that it is 1918 again and someone was trying to make a prediction of the likelihood of influenza becoming a deadly pandemic that would kill 100 million people over the next 18 months. They would look at the past history of influenza and say there is a negligible risk of this happening. Of course now since we know that influenza can become very serious we keep our eyes on it, but for something like ebola we really know very little.

[dllthomas]

Based on previous outbreaks of things generally I think it's most likely to be correct that this outbreak is also of low risk to the US population at large. Which is not to say that there's not a tremendously high value of information - the next thing we learn could change that (and again, probably won't, but...). I think it does make sense to be paying some attention as random individuals, and more attention as health workers or CDC employees, and I think it is probably still the case that my drive home is more likely to kill me (but I pay a lot of attention to my drive home!).

[danieltillett]

Humans tend to overestimate the danger of apparent low probability, high impact events (like pandemic ebola) and underestimate the risks involved in mundane events (like driving a car).

Given how infrequent pandemics occur, a better way to judge the risks involved would be to take a much long term view and try to measure the risk of a major pandemic occurring in your lifetime. When you look at the history of plagues over the last 2500 years they are infrequent, but common enough that we can get some handle on the risk. My very rough calculations based on past pandemic frequencies and death rates put the risk at around 1 in 1000 of being killed by a pandemic sometime during your lifetime. This is not huge, but at the same time it is not trivial.

Edit. I added the word apparent to the “…danger of…” as I realise that my wording is confusing without it.

[dllthomas]

You seem to have approximately restated what I said. That's fine, but it's best to note that that's your intent...

[danieltillett]

Not really, well not by intent :)

I might have worded it better, but pandemics are actually one of those areas that people get the risks wrong for the opposite reason than usual. While pandemics are considered low frequency, high risk events and so over-worried about, they are actually relatively frequent events on a historical time scale and are not worried about as much as they should be. They are really more in the car crash category not the stuck by lightning category, but we get complacent because a big one has not happened in living memory (unless you count HIV).

[dllthomas]

Ah, yeah, that is a bit of a different angle on it. Truth be told, I'm not sure whether or not we're underrating the risk. On the one hand, increased travel and population density should see faster spread.

On the other hand we have a lot of changes in our favor: understanding how diseases are spread (starting with germ theory, all the way up through population models), understanding how many more diseases are treated, an astoundingly better ability to communicate, probably a better ability to coordinate...

I don't know how it nets out. The streak we've had should be taken as some evidence that it breaks in our favor. Certainly we should not succumb to the gambler's fallacy, there. However, I think we're well served to keep an eye on things.