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Initially, there were a lot of fears that Ebola could mutate to become the airborne Andromeda strain that would wipe us all out.

In the ongoing effort to combat Ebola, more needs to be done to rewrite the public-health narrative. It must move from one that has been infused with fear to one that recognizes the hope for survival that supportive care can offer infected people.

Ebola so scary and so unfamiliar, it's really important to outline what the facts are and that we know how to control it. We control it by traditional public health measures. We do that, and Ebola goes away.

Ebola isn't a respiratory virus. It doesn't spread through the airborne route. So it's not likely to spread like wildfire around the world and kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. That's what I think of as the next big one.

We have to keep up our guard. We won't get the risk of Ebola to zero in the U.S. until we stop it in West Africa. And Ebola is hard to fight. It requires intensity. It requires speed and flexibility.

While Ebola's deadly reach has proven to be a complex and unique international challenge, the many uncertainties surrounding this virus continue to threaten U.S. national security.

The bottom line is that Ebola is hard to treat, and when the first patient ever with Ebola came to the United States, we thought the guidelines would protect the health care workers.

The worst pandemic in modern history was the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed tens of millions of people. Today, with how interconnected the world is, it would spread faster.

We have learned a lot about how to treat Ebola, how to ensure that the people caring for people with Ebola do so minimizing their risk of infection.