Mask up and head for the hills

With the closest known US cases of Ebola diagnosed about 260km away in Dallas, Cary Griffin is taking no chances.

If, as the former correctional officer fears, the virus spreads to hundreds of people, Griffin is headed to the woods.

"I'll do what the English royalty did to survive the bubonic plague," Griffin said, referring to King Charles II's flight to the countryside during the Great Plague of London in 1665-1666. "I'm going into the country."

Griffin, 27, of Huntsville, Texas, is among a growing segment of Americans, known as "preppers", who plan, train and stockpile in preparation for a natural calamity or societal breakdown.

For many, the three cases of Ebola diagnosed in the US since late September represent a new potential disaster and a reason to run to the store.

US preppers have their roots in Cold War-era civil defence programmes, said Vincent DeNiro, editor of Prepper & Shooter magazine.

The movement's profile rose thanks in part to the National Geographic Channel TV show Doomsday Preppers, and includes strains as disparate as off-grid homesteaders in the Great Plains, wilderness experts in the Mountain West and suburbanites with caches of food and guns.

For many of them, gearing up for Ebola has meant fortifying their stocks of freeze-dried food, water filtration devices and hazardous material, or hazmat suits, which experts say can be useless if not taken off properly.

Some are also honing plans to meet teams of fellow survivalists at prearranged locations, or, like Griffin, who has no spouse or children, preparing to go it alone in the wilderness.

Stockpiling has led to shortages of a range of survival gear, from food with a shelf-life in excess of 20 years to impermeable medical suits, according to vendors.

At Cheaper Than Dirt, a leading online survivalist retailer based in Texas, dozens of varieties of freeze-dried meals are out of stock, from packets of cheesy lasagna to 60-serving buckets of mushroom stroganoff.

Supplies such as hazmat suits and protective gloves are running low, said Richard Smith, general manager of The Survival Center, an online retailer in Washington state. Smith boasted of snagging last week the final wholesale personal protection suits and respirator masks to be had on the West Coast.

Using hazmat gear without proper training is of limited benefit, said magazine editor DeNiro, who has encouraged his readers to stock up on at least six months of food.

Many preppers, who have focused their planning on everything from solar storms and earthquakes to nuclear holocaust, are sceptical of government - a view that dovetails with concerns, voiced by lawmakers and medical experts, that US authorities mishandled the response to the virus.

At a prepper and self-defence school in south Florida, fear over Ebola has meant a rush of students, about 54 in the past two weeks, to take a primer course on how to avoid contracting the virus, said David D'Eugenio, founder of the HomeSafety Academy in Lake Park.

An avid prepper and retired firefighter in West Palm Beach, Florida, Bob Boike, 58, co-leads a team of 32 preppers and their families who have multiple secret locations provisioned to last them a year or more. They have stocked up on water and canned food, having already socked away an ample supply of masks, gloves and other medical supplies, he said.

"This is our insurance for if and when there is societal breakdown," Boike said.