This is the worst ebola outbreak in history, but have there been outbreaks of other diseases with similar severity as this one is likely to have? Something that killed more than a few thousand people. I'm specifically interested in something post-WW2, when medical care and society was at least vaguely similar. What sort of path did things take? How did societies cope with large numbers of sick people? What finally halted the spread of the disease?
In Haiti there was a cholera epidemic in 2012 that killed 8,5 thousand people. The situation is virtually identical, Haitians are blacks exported to the Americas and the country's healthcare system is a joke. Literacy rates both in Haiti and in west Africa are low, so it's difficult to contain the disease.
Smallpox killed 500 million people in the first 70 years of last century.
What stopped it was ring vaccinations-- vaccinating a ring around every infected person, all family, friends, acquaintances, etc.