What othe diseases have symptoms similar to Ebola? I assume our medical infrastructure is familiar with them, and treatment is effective and prompt.
Ebola’s early symptoms can be sufficiently vague as to be similar to a variety of illnesses. In various African outbreaks early cases have been misdiagnosed as malaria, typhoid, or chikungunya. And while malaria is not endemic in North America, chikungunya has been rampaging through parts of the Caribbean.
Early ebola symptoms might also be mistaken for influenza (the flu). Headache and fever are common early symptoms of both.
Later in the disease progress some ebola patients experience hemorrhaging, internal and sometime external. Other viral hemmoragic fevers such as Marburg or Lassa Valley Fever share those possible symptoms. Lassa is relatively common in western Africa with about 500,000 cases annually, but it is far less lethal than ebola. Marburg is comparatively rare.
Our medical system isn’t great with tropical diseases. Many travelers have died after doctors failed to recognize malaria-- which is omnipresent in some areas, initially presents non specifically, and can kill in 48 hours.
If traveling to malaria prone areas, it pays to become very good at diagnosing and treating malaria (and of course being religious about taking your prophylaxis). Local doctors often don’t understand that malaria is much more severe for people who have never been exposed, and the doctors back home don’t recognize it.
Doctors are only human, and tend to be much more familiar with diseases that, well, that they’re familiar with. However, with the current media hype, I’m sure that medical facilities in areas where Ebola is most likely to pop up - and probably many others - have been telling doctors what to watch out for.
Here is the World Health Organization’s fact sheet: Ebola