When I was teaching college biology, ecology and astronomy I liked to frame concepts with astonishing facts.

Take the mathematics of growth. Growth by repeated doublings is called exponential growth and is quite common. Stages of embryo development, compound interest, population growth and resource depletion all involve repeated doublings.

A parable for exponential growth is an oft-told story of a peasant who, after saving an emperor’s life, was asked his reward. The peasant, savvy in math, pointed to a checkerboard and placed a single grain of rice on the corner square, asking the emperor to double it to two on the next square, four on the third, eight on the fourth, etc. The amount of rice through successive doublings on the board’s final square was all he asked. The emperor, thinking he was getting off cheaply, agreed, then angrily reneged and executed the peasant after realizing there wasn’t enough rice in all the land to compensate him.

Another exercise in the power of exponential growth (from J. O. Bennett’s data): suppose a bacterium evolved that divided every minute, had ample space and nutrients to continue population growth unchecked and was invulnerable to bacteriophages (bacterium eaters). Given the average microscopic size of a bacterium, the colony would cover  the entire Earth’s surface to a depth of seven feet. Bacteriophages are really man’s best friend.

Now, consider the deadly Ebola virus and its victims doubling every 10 to 20 days in Africa, about twice the latency period for symptoms to appear. U.S. health officials estimate 1.4 million people could be infected with Ebola by mid-January. Yet formal American assistance to Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone came weeks after Cuba sent scores of doctors to contain the epidemic.

Having squandered trillions of dollars and thousands of lives in the Middle East, congress (pushed by fear-mongering) was baited into another $10.4 million per day “pruning back” jihadists. But funding for disease control keeps being cut even as microbes adapt to meats laden with low-level antibiotics and intercontinental trade and air travel assist contagious disease.

No serum exists to vaccinate against Ebola, and pharmaceutical companies won’t do the research because there’s no profit in it. Their profits come from patenting and manufacturing drugs and serums developed by government agencies and federally-funded researchers.

Inability to understand exponential growth is a dangerous congressional shortcoming.