No, it is a horrible way. You are signing the death warrent for anyone being forced to stay inside the area, sacrificing human lives like so many tribes of old.
The best way, the only acceptable way, is to have medicine for the decease. We have some that we just aren't putting into trials because we aren't sure that it won't kill them - when they are going to die anyway in an absolutely horrible way.
It is not safe to go into an area in Africa with an ebola outbreak and try to treat it. Medical workers are not properly adhering to safety protocols. The numbers of medical personnel infected during this outbreak demonstrate that. You can't ask medical personnel to take major risks with their lives to help a few people with ebola. If they and their organizations want to continue to render aid, that's their choice, but if there aren't enough foreign aid resources to set up proper treatment centers with proper quarantine, and when the locals for whatever reason are violating quarantines and putting everyone, other locals and medical staff at risk, then it's simply not safe enough. The only remaining option is to quarantine the afflicted areas.
It's also only a death warrant if the people in the quarantine zones don't observe proper safety. If my city (in the U.S.) had an outbreak of ebola, I'd stay home, and barring someone purposely trying to infect me, I'd be safe. Ebola is not an evil spirit that infects everyone in the quarantine area who doesn't flee. Even if it were a more easily transmissible strain of ebola, if you're not in a housing unit sharing air with people who are infected, you're pretty safe.
" if you're not in a housing unit sharing air with people who are infected, you're pretty safe."
Certainly true - but, it's important to note that ebola is not airborne. You can safely sit beside someone with ebola, and as long as they don't throw up on you, and you don't touch any body fluids - you are also pretty safe.
Not to fear-monger, but there was this article on the BBC linking to laboratory-verified airborne transmission of Ebola. The summary describes it as large fluid droplets being passed through the air (airborne in this sense being a gradient rather than yes/no).
Quarantines are not orthogonal to using or developing medicine.
Quarantine is also the only reliable way to prevent the spreading of a disease, and really the only way we have to deal with a disease like ebola which has no known cure. It sucks for the healthy ones in the quarantined zone, but allowing anyone to leave the zone while in the middle of an outbreak risks far more lives.
"It sucks for the healthy ones in the quarantined zone,"
Note - we aren't talking about smallpox/typhus/flu - ebola is pretty hard to get. As long as you don't touch the body or its fluids, you aren't going to get ebola.
The best way, the only acceptable way, is to have medicine for the decease.
But we don't have any right now, so wishing that reality was different from how it actually is doesn't help us to deal with the short term problem. We can work on deveoping and producing medicine, but while we wait for results we also need a strategy to managing the outbreak right now at the local level.
Incidentally I don't agree that we're signing the death warrant for anyone in there. Those people are already at a high risk of death, but we can still treat them even while they're isolated.
Some diseases simply have no cure. Ebola is one of them. TDR-TB is another (and it's spreading in India and elsewhere).
Both are, thankfully, reasonably difficult to transmit, though conditions of poverty, with close proximity and contact, as well as poor sanitation, increase the likelihood of transmission.
Camus' The Plague has already been mentioned in this thread. I'd strongly recommend reading it.
I consider neither solution acceptable. The only acceptable solution would have been to have a cure for ebola by now.
I do not consider compassion with victims misguided.
I don't live with the delusion that there has to be an acceptable solution to every problem - there isn't even one for those 40000 people on that mountain in Kurdistan - but that doesn't mean we shouldn't acknowledge that it is a shitty solution and work towards getting an acceptable one.
When compassion as you define it means adding multiple orders of magnitude to the potential death toll of ebola, it's time to consider that the results of your compassion may be undesirable. They are victims of a horrible disease, yes. You have compassion, and this is laudable.
This does not make it ethically or morally acceptable to create more victims.
You are expecting a perfect solution. There isn't one. We must accept and live with the least bad solution.
The best way, the only acceptable way, is to have medicine for the decease. We have some that we just aren't putting into trials because we aren't sure that it won't kill them - when they are going to die anyway in an absolutely horrible way.