Donald Trump has a novel approach to fighting Ebola: Irrationality

Having already said that American doctors treating Ebola patients in West Africa should be barred from returning to the US, perhaps it was too much to expect a rational viewpoint from Donald Trump.

In two short clips posted on Instagram the Donald expressed his displeasure at Barack Obama's decision to send 3,000 troops to the region to help combat the outbreak.

In case you didn't get it, Trump wants Obama to "stop the flights, now".

For what it's worth, such a move would go against all the expert advice being offered.

Doctors have warned that isolating West Africa would only make the Ebola outbreak much worse, potentially denying help and supplies from getting in, and in a worst case scenario, destabilising the affected countries further still.

No one is under any illusions about the extent of the Ebola crisis and the scale of the task in stopping it spreading any further.

World Bank president Jim Yong Kim said: "Unless we quickly contain and stop the Ebola epidemic nothing less than the future of not only West Africa but perhaps even Africa is at stake."

More than a dozen drugs for treating Ebola are being developed, but none of them have been formally approved.

(Source: Department of Health and Human Services, CDC, NIH)

Dr Ripley Ballou, overseeing accelerated phase-one trials of experimental vaccines for GlaxoSmithKline, admitted the pharmaceutical industry's commercial interests had got in the way of fighting the outbreak.

"Until this outbreak, Ebola was a rare disease occurring in small instances and burning itself out," he said.

"In retrospect we should have jumped on this a little bit quicker."

More: Why you shouldn't joke about having Ebola on a plane, in one video