There’s a news photograph online, taken more than a week ago, showing the American doctor Kent Brantley working at a hospital in Monrovia, Liberia, shortly before Brantley contracted the Ebola virus from a patient.

The photo shows Brantley and other aid workers dressed head to toe in protective clothing — boots, vinyl gloves, aprons, head and face coverings — to shield them from the virus. They appear to be taking extraordinary precautions to protect themselves from the disease.

Brantley, 33, and another infected American aid worker are back in the United States, quarantined at an Atlanta hospital and continuing treatments they began in Africa with an experimental new drug. They appear to be improving, but nobody knows at this point whether the new drug is working or their own bodies are building immunity to the infection.

The Ebola virus disease, also called viral hemorrhagic fever, is rare but horrifically deadly, and swift. As many as 90 percent of the people who catch the virus die in as little time as eight days. Their symptoms include external bleeding, massive internal bleeding, high fever, vomiting and diarrhea. Blood oozes from their orifices and in some cases even from the pores of their skin.

Brantley and the other worker, 59-year-old Nancy Writebol, were volunteers with SIM USA, the Christian charity responding to an Ebola outbreak in West Africa. World Health Organization figures, updated Wednesday, list 1,711 confirmed cases of Ebola virus disease and 932 deaths. Nearly all of the cases are in the three neighboring countries of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, where the outbreak began in March. A smaller outbreak — nine infections, one death — more than 1,100 miles away in Nigeria has been traced to one infected traveler returning there by plane.

Some West African officials have said the epidemic is out of control there, and that the true number of infections is much higher than the WHO numbers indicate. There are reports of bodies dumped in the streets of Monrovia, Liberia’s capital city, in defiance of government orders to quarantine homes and families of Ebola victims and to cremate the victims’ bodies.

Meanwhile U.S. health officials insist it’s not a great risk to bring home Brantley and Writebol. Butler native and infectious diseases specialist Dr. Amesh Adalja said he concurs with the decision to fly them back to the United States on a special private jet. The disease is very deadly, but not highly contagious, he said. It is spread only through contact of blood or bodily fluids.

It is true the risk of spreading Ebola in the U.S. is minimal. Allowing Writebol and Brantley into the United States presents at worst a remote risk. But the question must be asked: Is any risk necessary? Must we flirt, if even slightly, with a health disaster?

Brantley and Writebol began their experimental treatments in Africa. They could have continued the treatments there, without the long flight exposing workers on the plane, through two airports and at an American hospital.

It can be assumed the medical workers will take every precaution. However, the disturbing message conveyed by that news photo is that Brantley was already taking every precaution — and he contracted the virus anyway. Accidents do happen.

It’s noteworthy that many of the standard protocols and defenses against contagious disease were born in the aftermath of the 9-11 terror attacks. It was decided then that America would be safer if the global war against terror waged on foreign shores.

The same approach should apply to a global war on Ebola.

— T.A.H.