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The current Ebola outbreak in West Africa has the world once again gripped by the threat of a zoonotic disease that has spread into several countries. While the underlying factors that have led to an increasing frequency of zoonotic disease outbreaks are complex, including population pressure and rapid movement between locations in most of these epidemicsthere are least three related key driversa challenge of initial detection and appropriate investigation and response to a cluster of suspected cases, a challenge of management of an outbreak of a communicable disease, and a challenge of prediction or anticipation of what disease outbreak (both communicable and non-communicable) could come next (or is currently occurring but unseen). These three challenges reveal the urgent need of a public health workforce that is adequately trained and supported to operate multi-disease public health surveillance and response systems. Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia do not yet have specific programs to develop this workforce and the system to support them while Nigeria does (and several other countries do), and this difference is critical in addressing the major public heath challenge posed by the current Ebola outbreak as well as a myriad of communicable and non-communicable diseases. We will take a look at each of the three challenges in turn.