[dredmorbius]

Understanding systems effects (see Donella Meadows Thinking in Systems) is hugely important for understanding complex interactions.

The factors feeding into the Ebola crisis, and emerging from it, are sobering both in their interactions and how they tend to lead toward a fairly inevitable conclusion.

As for whether or not this is possible to avoid: human population and impacts on the world are unsustainable. Something is going to happen to bring numbers down. Voluntary population control, disease, starvation, war, social disruption, or other catastrophe, are pretty much the only real operators.

In that sense, yes, I'd argue that the general concept is pretty unavoidable.

I'm not saying Ebola (or this particular outbreak, or even necessarily disease) is "the one" and that the End Times have come. But it's a bit like an old-school video game. The challenges will keep coming harder and faster until we fail one.