A study released on the tenth anniversary of the second invasion of Iraq showed the US had spent that huge sum and was likely to spend up to another $6 trillion in the next forty years paying benefits to war veterans.

Australia’s contribution to that misguided effort a few years ago had reached an estimated $30 billion.

In 1976, the Ebola virus was first noted in the poverty stricken African nations of Sudan and Zaire.

Named for Zaire’s Ebola River, the virus seemed a long way from any developed nation.

Today, it is at our doorstep.

Civil-strife torn Sudan has known more of war than it has of health care for many decades.

Controlling a major infectious disease outbreak was never going to be possible without a massive influx of western help and the international community’s insistence that war come to an end in Sudan.

Even those west African nations that were not suffering civil war did not have the health infrastructure or the funds to contain Ebola.

Like malaria for so many years, Ebola fell into the basket of someone else’s - a much poorer someone else’s - problem.

Now it belongs to all of us.

An estimated 10,000 people are infected in a part of the world which has no chance of dealing with Ebola’s exponential growth.

If a fraction of the funds put into prosecuting a war on spurious grounds had instead gone into fighting this terrible disease, Texas may not have had to announce its first Ebola death.

If these funds had been spent sooner rather than later, compassionate health workers would not be anxiously awaiting the results of their own tests.

The warped priorities of those who prosecuted war, rather than giving a hand up to the developing world, have come back to bite us all.