Survivalists know that one of the problems with natural disasters is the potential spread of disease. In places like the USA and Europe, when a local disaster strikes aid from outside of the disaster zone usually arrives quite quickly – the health problems caused by Hurricane Katrina were minor.

Yet in other locations health problems following a disaster can be substantial. The Haiti earthquake of 2010 killed an estimated 100,000 people. The resulting cholera outbreak caused the deaths of an additional 8,000 people, “and hospitalized hundreds of thousands more while spreading to neighboring countries including the Dominican Republic and Cuba.” [Wikipedia]. More than 6% of Haitians have now had the disease.

So we have two areas of concern:

1. A natural disaster in West Africa could mean that Ebola goes from spreading fast to unstoppable.

2. A natural disaster in the western world could mean we go from struggling to stop an outbreak happening to an outbreak big enough to cause mass panic and a shutdown of society.

The odds are of course low that a country like the USA would have a natural disaster at the same time and place as an Ebola outbreak. But it is the possibilities that preppers prepare for, not the likelihood.