Tony Gentile / Reuters Italian Air Force soldiers attend a military exercise preparing to help people infected with the Ebola virus in the event that it happens, at the Pratica di Mare Air Base, near Rome September 24, 2014.

Back in April, when the Ebola outbreak in West Africa had killed less than 100 people, Doctors Without Borders urged the world to mobilize a significant response, warning that failure to act could result in an "unprecedented epidemic."

Instead, the world responded with what Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times called "a global shrug." Over the summer, as residents of the developed world comforted themselves with the knowledge that an outbreak on our home turf was highly unlikely, the death toll in one of the poorest corners of the world climbed sharply.

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The "unprecedented epidemic" went from dire prediction to on-the-ground reality, and now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that — worst-case scenario — there could be 1.4 million cases of Ebola in West Africa by January.

It didn't have to be this way.

Early Warnings

For anyone paying attention, the long-brewing crisis hardly came out of nowhere.

At the beginning of August, in a House subcommittee meeting, Ken Isaacs of Christian relief organization Samaritan's Purse said that elevated international aid was already overdue. "The Ebola crisis was not a surprise to us — we saw it coming back in April," he testified, sounding outraged as he castigated the United States for mostly not paying attention until two American Samaritan's Purse workers fell sick in late July.

"The international response to the disease has been a failure," he said. "The international community allowed two relief organizations [Samaritan's Purse and Doctors Without Borders] to provide all of the clinical care for Ebola victims in three countries."

On their own, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea "simply do not have the capacity to handle the crisis in their countries," Isaacs said. "The world will effectively be relegating the containment of this disease to three of the poorest countries in the world."

That assessment was echoed by Daniel Bausch, an American doctor who talked to Business Insider in August about his experience on the ground in Guinea and Sierra Leone. "You have a very dangerous virus in three of the countries in the world that are least equipped to deal with it," Bausch told us. "The scale of this outbreak has just outstripped the resources. That's why it's become so big."

He also emphasized that an international response had to be swift and significant. "Every moment we wait, we risk more transmission," Bausch said. "It's a race against time."

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John Moore / Getty A Chinese UN soldier prepares a truckload of Ebola relief aid after it was airlifted by the United Nations Children's Fund, on August 23, 2014 in Harbel, Liberia. What Now?

By late August, The Wall Street Journal reported, "the nations with the funds and medical resources to help deal with this scourge [had] offered only a trickle of aid." (The CDC has been on the ground helping with the Ebola outbreak for a while, but only in small numbers.)

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