The current epidemic of Ebola virus disease has attracted medical ethics commentators like bees to a honey pot. No previous infectious disease epidemic has elicited such a flurry of articles on the ethical challenges associated with infection control and treatment in such a short time. The ethical questions raised by various academicians broadly fall into three categories. The first relates to questions of individual medical ethics, in particular surrounding the compassionate use of experimental drugs and vaccines. The second concerns allocation of resources to these experimental treatments versus infection control. And the third, centers on how resources should be spent in the long term—on building a public health and clinical infrastructure that can cope in an epidemic instead of propping up a weak infrastructure during a humanitarian crisis. The tension between these moral challenges can be grouped along two axes: individual versus public health, and short term versus long term.

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