> The vaccine will be kept in the capital until shortly before use because of the lack of facilities in the provinces for storing it at the required temperature, between minus 60 degrees and minus 80 degrees Celsius, or between minus 76 degrees and minus 112 degrees Fahrenheit.
Are there any other vaccines that have to be kept at such low temperatures?
Many have fairly low temperature storage requirements, a -80C is a fairly standard freezer for dealing with long term storage of anything biological.
But the real problem isn’t -60 or -80. It’s -[Anything]. If there isn't a reliable source of electricity refrigeration (to the extent required by many drugs and vaccines) is the largest problem faced when you’re trying to get vaccinated new and drugs to remote locations.
One of the more interesting uses of UAVs is for transport of samples and drugs back and forth to remote areas. There is at least one company trying it.
Most have to be refrigerated. Vaccines tend to be proteins and sugars which will denature (i.e. unfold or fall apart) if not stored properly.
Though -80 is a little extreme for a vaccine. That's the temperature most commonly used for long-term lab storage of samples. It's not a common storage capacity in first-world countries, let alone the third world.
I don't think the question is whether or not the absolute total number of them in all first world countries is "huge" (which I doubt), but, rather, if they're common.
Would a small, rural hospital have even one? If they do and it breaks, could they rent a replacement (even off-site) while awaiting repairs? For that matter, could even a small research lab do so in a large city?
I'd expect those answers to be "yes" for equipment we consider to be common in industries like restaurants and construction.
I don't know about the hospital (though I expect the answer is yes), but there's four or five -80 freezers within walking distance of me, and that's for a rural university.
A small research lab in a large city could likely replace theirs quickly, or beg/borrow replacement space from another lab.
-80°C is a typical storage temperature for proteins and other biological samples in the lab. This might indicate the experimental nature of the vaccine, and that they didn't have the chance to optimize or test that aspect yet.
When you do the research you'll find that it spreads to fast. Look out for those that control the speed of the virus. Source: my research in extending human lifespan.
I couldn't tell if you were serious or not so I went to your profile page and I saw "Smart Contracts for On-Demand Datasets in Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence". I still can't tell if it's an elaborate joke or not.
So this has happened before. If anyone here has read “The Hot Zone”, which is one of the great ‘techno-thrillers” of the 90’s (but still nonfiction), the virus spreads to Kinshasa. It’s the capital of Zaire and a major city. But then...it disappears.
Ebola is a weird virus. Extraordinarily fatal, about 90% during the 1995 outbreak (smallpox is around 20% for comparison), although they have better treatments now for Ebola that bring it closer to 50%.
Either way, lots of health workers have been documented working in a hut with an infected person and never getting infected, yet others have just passed an infected person on the subway and died.
The real concern here is what this means for the future of warfare.
A lot of people have noted that chemical weapons, and perhaps biological weapons, are perfect for distribution by drone due to their light-weightedness. Biological weapons, much like computer viruses, also can be hard to attribute, making them attractive to use.
The Japanese cult that put Sarin in the Tokyo subway in 1996 was also working on biological weapons. They never got far enough, but it demonstrated even non-state actors can pull off credible bio-weapons.
The real concern here is the people dying right now. The "future of warfare" is no warfare - it's exactly this kind of thinking that drives "well we should research it because someone else most definitely is" type of scenario's, which is what got us into the nuclear mess.
I don't think nuclear weapons and biological warfare are comparable. Nuclear weapons give a country that has them a near total advantage over a country that doesn't in conventional warfare. That's the whole reason countries want nuclear programs: to prevent other countries from using nukes on them.
Biological warfare seems less likely to be used by a stable country because its consequences are so hard to predict and it isn't very targeted.
And the future of warfare isn't no warfare unfortunately. War and violence are human universals. We can definitely do things to make it occur less frequently, but one of those things is having strong deterrents to war in the form of a strong military.
That's actually why Anthrax was researched as a bio-warfare agent. Goes airborne spores to human so collect the spores and you get an airborne agent, but it's very bad at Human to Human transmission basically requiring direct contact with open spores.
They're hard to predict if you're using something contagious like Influenza. For non-contagious agents like Anthrax (lethal) or Tularemia (mostly just incapacitating) they function more as extra-potent versions of chemical weapons. The Soviets had Anthrax warheads on a number of their ICBMs aimed at US cities back in the day[1], they weren't considered good counterforce weapons but they made good countervalue weapons so if a country's doctrine isn't oriented around a first strike like the US's was they make sense.
And given the possibility of nuclear winter you could argue that non-contagious biological weapons are a lot less likely to get out of control.
> The Japanese cult that put Sarin in the Tokyo subway in 1996 was also working on biological weapons, they never got far enough, but it demonstrated even non-state actors can pull of credible bio-weapons.
The real trick is to weaponize them in a way that they spread optimally and then disperse them in a way that avoids detection as long as possible.
North Korea has had bio-weapon development program for a long time and has conducted human experiments with prisoners. They also might do larger scale testing in remote islands. No need to Biosafety level 4 laboratory if the researches are not allowed leave the lab and go home every night. If things go south, you torch the island including the people and start over after few years.
It's almost impossible to know how good they are in bio-weapons until they use them.
> The real concern here is what this means for the future of warfare.
I don't think Ebola is likely to play a role in the future of warfare. Based conversations with Sergei Popov [0], in his experience making biological weapons, viruses generally make for poor weapons because they're difficult to deploy / release. Their work led to them to favor B. anthracis and other sporulating bacteria. You'd probably have to invent a new kind of platform for deployment if you want viral weapons to be targeted. I can see how viruses could be used in terrorism or something comparable to arson, but their use by a state seems unlikely.
One would suspect there would be a certain appeal for clandestine purposes, assuming one can make them hard-to-attribute. Plausible deniability is a useful thing for nation-states. Just look at Russia.
I think it'd be difficult to attribute. The release platform and preparation that's used would probably be the most identifying feature, rather than the organism. In the case of the 2001 anthrax attacks that was (some claimed) the silicon content, which the FBI thought suggested some expert weaponization knowledge and material. IIRC, Popov explained away that saying that you could just mix in some Gas-X [1].
So maybe even investigation into the preparation wouldn't really point to the source.
And, yeah, rereading my comment, my concept of both "state" and "warfare" is probably too simple
DNA is inherited from parent to offspring. While new changes occur, a large amount of the DNA between the two are the same, compared to non-related organisms.
This allows us to reconstruct the history, or in cases where there is less data, infer the history of two different organisms. We can roughly tell where, and when one population split from another.
In the case of bio-weapons, we can tell if the organism came from a culture in a current laboratory, or if it was generated in secrete. If the latter, we can tell what part of the world the original sample came from. All of this are clues to discovering the culprits.
A famous example is the 2001 Anthrax attack in DC. They were able to match the DNA from the anthrax to a US military strain located in Maryland. This led them to a former researcher who most law enforcement believe was the culprit in the attacks.
> others have just passed an infected person on the subway and died.
Who? That's a false, alarmist rumor and the parent reads like a "technothriller", which is probably the wrong way to talk about real diseases that might alarm people. Remember during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, some people coming to the U.S., including a nurse who was effectively imprisoned, were subject of a public panic that had nothing to do with reality. There was no risk. Ebola, like any disease, is contagious only in certain ways. The U.S. CDC says:
The virus spreads through direct contact (such as through broken skin or mucous membranes in the eyes, nose, or mouth) with:
* Blood or body fluids (urine, saliva, sweat, feces, vomit, breast milk, and semen) of a person who is sick with or has died from EVD
* Objects (such as needles and syringes) contaminated with body fluids from a person sick with EVD or the body of a person who died from EVD
* Infected fruit bats or nonhuman primates (such as apes and monkeys)
* Semen from a man who recovered from EVD (through oral, vaginal, or anal sex)
The Ebola virus CANNOT spread to others when a person shows no signs or symptoms of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD). ... There is also no evidence that mosquitoes or other insects can transmit Ebola virus.
Please don't spread these rumors. EDIT: It also distracts people from the real risks.
Yep, this is sneezing. Ebola is scary because it is one of the most contagious diseases.
But in any complex system, it's very hard to predict who will contract the disease and who won't. You can see similar scenarios play out after Chernobyl, where some people who were very close to the reactor which blew up where seemingly unaffected and lived long lives, while others who were relatively far away passed from radiation exposure or the subsequent cancers.
No. Provide some evidence that it's even transmissible one way or that it's transmissible the other. This is HN; have some pride in not passing around unfounded alarmist nonsense.
> if you live in an area with Rhesus monkeys, your snide comment is not applicable
Ha ha ha ... awesome! I couldn't have written a better parody of this nonsense if I tried.
Quote from the article: "As evidence, the research notes that Ebola virus has been found on the outside of face masks worn by health workers caring for victims of the disease. It also points out that the virus has been passed between animals via respiration. And the authors say that Ebola can infect certain cells of the respiratory tract, including epithelial cells, which line body cavities, and macrophages, a type of white blood cell that consumes pathogens.
The paper notes that breathing, sneezing, coughing and talking can release droplets of fluid from the respiratory tract that travel short distances and most likely cause infection by settling on a mucous membrane. Those actions also release smaller airborne particles capable of suspension in mid-air that can be inhaled by others. Technically, both qualify as aerosols, the paper says."
And then I consider where those smaller airborne particles might land that could be ingested by people/animals. Say, in an open marketplace where there are produce/food vendors shooing Rhesus monkeys away.
I don't know if you've ever ridden the subway, but coming into contact with someone's bare skin, even broken skin, is not unheard of in a crowded subway. So it's plausible that your cat scratched arm could come in contact with some infected person's sweaty arm as you try to make your way through a crowded subway car.
It's certainly plausible that someone with an early stage infection may take the subway to go to a doctor. I've seen plenty of obviously sick people on the train (and I keep my distance, not because I think they have Ebola, but because I don't want to catch whatever illness they do have)
> it's plausible that your cat scratched arm could come in contact with some infected person's sweaty arm as you try to make your way through a crowded subway car.
Biology implements its own blockchain, kind of, so it's pretty easy to track down a common ancestor with enough samples. The oldest one gives you the release location and potentially some information about where it was sourced/created if you have enough information from before the event-- For example, tracking anthrax down to a sample collected from a specific farm during a cattle outbreak and then looking at people who were in the area. In contrast, software viruses don't accumulate changes unless they're under active development.
Chemical and nuclear stuff can possibly be attributed by looking at isotopic composition or impurities, to determine manufacturing process. But doesn't really tell you anything unique. Exceptions are e.g. polonium which where only a few state agencies are known to be able to make it.
The classic, scary chemical weapons (e.g. cholinesterase inhibitors, Sarin) themselves are kitchen chemistry. Ricin, even nastier to die from, is barn chemistry in that it's essentially castor bean tea. However, I suspect that people who manufacture on the cheap usually kill themselves and anyone with enough knowledge and resources to not kill themselves often don't want to make chemical weapons.
Most do actually because it’s useful to know what the risk to your own country is.
Specifically if we don’t think the effected country actually has the resources to do so. The alternative is wide spread contagion - take swine flu and bird flu, both started in China, and yet the lack of any monitoring allowed them to spread around the world before being contained. In that case the outbreak was deliberately not disclosed, but choosing not to disclose and not having resources to disclose have the same effect for /other/ countries, including your own.
Things like where a disease has spread is important to work out the risk of it reaching your own country.
You do know that most of what the cdc does is monitor right? It’s not actively going out to spend Your Tax Dollars treating patients - that’s something that the US doesn’t even do in America.
Alternatively we could choose to not track outbreaks and just hope that Ebola knows we’ll deport it if it comes here. (That works right?)
What is the benefit of physical presence in an area where there is an outbreak of a highly contagious disease? How will CDC employees "monitor" citizens of other countries? Please explain the mechanism by which this is supposed to work.
I do not see any evidence that Swine Flu started in China nor that ineffective monitoring is what led to its spread.[0][1] How would a problem like China fudging their numbers have been ameliorated by the presence of CDC employees? Why would China have allowed them in? Even if they did, would they have allowed them to work? If we can't trust foreign partners, we simply can't trust them and I fail to see any case where the problem of unreliable foreign partners can be fixed by the physical presence of CDC employees.
>spend Your Tax Dollars treating patients - that’s something that the US doesn’t even do in America.
Medicare and Medicaid alone accounted for $1.237 trillion of My Tax Dollar spending in 2016, which accounted for 37% of National Healthcare Expenditures.[2] That same year, ACA tax credits accounted for another $100 billion[3], the VA $166.9 billion[4], and TriCare (healthcare for milfare recipients) is usually another $50 billion. This notion that spending on healthcare is something the government "doesn't even do in America" is one of biggest and strangest (because of the ease with which it is refuted) whoppers regularly promulgated by leftist propagandists.
It seems to me that having boots on the ground would allow you to talk to healthcare providers, morticians, community members...do a kind of internal reporting where you asses risks and make recommendations to anyone with the power to help contain, whether that is educating community, suggesting policing actions to local govt, or lobbying for the appropriate kind of external mediation (whether that’s vaccines, clean water, quarantine, etc, depending on the situation on the ground)
Edit: ...gathering samples, studying samples (shipping is not always trivial)...basically anything where you don’t really trust the local response for whatever combination of reasons, and you want to prevent or at least be ready in case there’s a global outbreak
The Bush Doctrine ("We fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here"), while bad for foreign policy, works quite well for infectious diseases.
A few points/questions about U.S. policy and response:
* IIRC, the current administration cut NIH or CDC funding for preventing and/or dealing with foreign disease outbreaks. Under the prior administration, IIRC the GOP in Congress told the NIH/CDC to re-purpose those funds toward other uses. Does anyone know the current status?
* Regarding the Ebola outbreak in West Africa recently, I later read that the only organization in the world with the logistical resources to respond quickly at the necessary scale was the U.S. military, and Obama eventually deployed them.
* The article doesn't mention the U.S. at all. That seems like a major omissions; not even a no comment. Is the U.S. just standing back while these people die and an epidemic spreads, potentially to other places too?
* What is the current administration's stance on funding UN/WHO health operations?
> Both Mbandaka and Bikoro now have mobile labs, where researchers can test blood samples locally—a huge difference compared to most previous outbreaks. Provided by USAID, the labs contain generators, freezers, and equipment for doing diagnostic tests. The Mbandaka lab is expected to be operational tomorrow afternoon, once the WHO delivers a generator.
The U.S. military was deployed, but the West African outbreak was much larger in scope. The people first on the ground with expertise are probably MSF.
Has anyone else read about the cultural factors behind this epidemic? I've been reading about some of the funeral practices. Tradition or not, I couldn't think of a more dangerous thing to do. An understanding of these practices does much to explain the spread in some countries and not others. Religious issues aside, we need to educate people about how idiotic these practices are from a medical perspective. They need to stop. This religion/culture practice is killing people.
"Hugging is a normal part of religious worship in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and across the region the ritual preparation of bodies for burial involves washing, touching and kissing. Those with the highest status in society are often charged with washing and preparing the body. For a woman this can include braiding the hair, and for a man shaving the head."
On the other hand, I am much less afraid given that I live in a country where such practices do not exist. Cultural barriers can sometimes be a very good thing.
It's unfortunate you are being downvoted, but using emotional language like "idiotic" is not helpful. You are, however, factually correct. It is a plain fact that yes, traditional funeral practices in sierra leone and liberia did contribute greatly to the outbreak. One of the things that stopped the outbreak in sierra leone, more than anything, was the massive public education campaign embarked upon by the response agencies, which after several months finally got cooperation from the civilian population to:
a) if you see a sick person, don't touch them, call the special response phone number and a PPE-equipped response team will be dispatched
b) if a person dies, do not touch the corpse, do not wash the corpse, do not handle the corpse
c) know how to identify the early signs of sickness and where the ETUs were (ebola treatment units).
It is actually kind of difficult to contract ebola because you need skin-to-skin contact with sweat, blood or vomit from a very sick person with a high viral load. It's not highly aerosolized and doesn't last very long in the air from coughing or sneezing.
One aspect of Ebola which makes it so terrifying and also less likely to spread widely is its rapid progression and mortality rate. The detailed accounts of a person succumbing to fatal Ebola infection are horrific. But the virus' effectiveness at rapidly multiplying results in its host dying so quickly that transmission is limited. It would be interesting to see if the reduction in mortality rates (from 90% to 50% according to another poster) correlates with a greater length/breadth of the outbreak.
On another note, if human strains of Ebola ever mutate for airborne transmission, we're all screwed.
Relevant Vice youtube video of the 2015 Ebola outbreak in Liberia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANUI4uT3xJI for those who want more context on why its so hard to stop it in underdeveloped and insufficiently prepared African cities (not the developed ones, those tend to be able to contain epidemics)
And you realize that the US is even less prepared for any major epidemics that might occur in the world and here in the US due to the Trump administration's relentless dismantling and defunding of both research and global disease research.
I see hysteria about Ebola. As if it has the potential to wipe out millions.
If Ebola was prone to causing large-scale epidemics, Ebola would have caused large-scale epidemics.
Want to worry? Worry about flu. Worry about smallpox. Those viruses have killed millions and, most likely, will continue to do so now and again in the centuries to come.
But Ebola? Not a chance. How do I know? Because, there is every reason to believe the virus has been around forever, and it's never caused the type of pandemic described by doomsayers.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] thread> The vaccine will be kept in the capital until shortly before use because of the lack of facilities in the provinces for storing it at the required temperature, between minus 60 degrees and minus 80 degrees Celsius, or between minus 76 degrees and minus 112 degrees Fahrenheit.
Are there any other vaccines that have to be kept at such low temperatures?
But the real problem isn’t -60 or -80. It’s -[Anything]. If there isn't a reliable source of electricity refrigeration (to the extent required by many drugs and vaccines) is the largest problem faced when you’re trying to get vaccinated new and drugs to remote locations.
Though -80 is a little extreme for a vaccine. That's the temperature most commonly used for long-term lab storage of samples. It's not a common storage capacity in first-world countries, let alone the third world.
Would a small, rural hospital have even one? If they do and it breaks, could they rent a replacement (even off-site) while awaiting repairs? For that matter, could even a small research lab do so in a large city?
I'd expect those answers to be "yes" for equipment we consider to be common in industries like restaurants and construction.
A small research lab in a large city could likely replace theirs quickly, or beg/borrow replacement space from another lab.
Though precise cryogenic refrigeration is a tech domain of its own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_ice
Ebola is a weird virus. Extraordinarily fatal, about 90% during the 1995 outbreak (smallpox is around 20% for comparison), although they have better treatments now for Ebola that bring it closer to 50%.
Either way, lots of health workers have been documented working in a hut with an infected person and never getting infected, yet others have just passed an infected person on the subway and died.
The real concern here is what this means for the future of warfare.
A lot of people have noted that chemical weapons, and perhaps biological weapons, are perfect for distribution by drone due to their light-weightedness. Biological weapons, much like computer viruses, also can be hard to attribute, making them attractive to use.
The Japanese cult that put Sarin in the Tokyo subway in 1996 was also working on biological weapons. They never got far enough, but it demonstrated even non-state actors can pull off credible bio-weapons.
Biological warfare seems less likely to be used by a stable country because its consequences are so hard to predict and it isn't very targeted.
And the future of warfare isn't no warfare unfortunately. War and violence are human universals. We can definitely do things to make it occur less frequently, but one of those things is having strong deterrents to war in the form of a strong military.
And given the possibility of nuclear winter you could argue that non-contagious biological weapons are a lot less likely to get out of control.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak
They got pretty far.
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/10/1/03-0238_article
North Korea has had bio-weapon development program for a long time and has conducted human experiments with prisoners. They also might do larger scale testing in remote islands. No need to Biosafety level 4 laboratory if the researches are not allowed leave the lab and go home every night. If things go south, you torch the island including the people and start over after few years.
It's almost impossible to know how good they are in bio-weapons until they use them.
I don't think Ebola is likely to play a role in the future of warfare. Based conversations with Sergei Popov [0], in his experience making biological weapons, viruses generally make for poor weapons because they're difficult to deploy / release. Their work led to them to favor B. anthracis and other sporulating bacteria. You'd probably have to invent a new kind of platform for deployment if you want viral weapons to be targeted. I can see how viruses could be used in terrorism or something comparable to arson, but their use by a state seems unlikely.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Popov_(bioweaponeer)
One would suspect there would be a certain appeal for clandestine purposes, assuming one can make them hard-to-attribute. Plausible deniability is a useful thing for nation-states. Just look at Russia.
I think it'd be difficult to attribute. The release platform and preparation that's used would probably be the most identifying feature, rather than the organism. In the case of the 2001 anthrax attacks that was (some claimed) the silicon content, which the FBI thought suggested some expert weaponization knowledge and material. IIRC, Popov explained away that saying that you could just mix in some Gas-X [1].
So maybe even investigation into the preparation wouldn't really point to the source.
And, yeah, rereading my comment, my concept of both "state" and "warfare" is probably too simple
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simeticone
Luckily bio-weapons come with their own tracking tags.
From DNA we can reconstruct its origin. So it is not ideal for clandestine operations.
This allows us to reconstruct the history, or in cases where there is less data, infer the history of two different organisms. We can roughly tell where, and when one population split from another.
In the case of bio-weapons, we can tell if the organism came from a culture in a current laboratory, or if it was generated in secrete. If the latter, we can tell what part of the world the original sample came from. All of this are clues to discovering the culprits.
A famous example is the 2001 Anthrax attack in DC. They were able to match the DNA from the anthrax to a US military strain located in Maryland. This led them to a former researcher who most law enforcement believe was the culprit in the attacks.
This guy seems like as close as possible to a real life Bond villian. How do you know him?
Who? That's a false, alarmist rumor and the parent reads like a "technothriller", which is probably the wrong way to talk about real diseases that might alarm people. Remember during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, some people coming to the U.S., including a nurse who was effectively imprisoned, were subject of a public panic that had nothing to do with reality. There was no risk. Ebola, like any disease, is contagious only in certain ways. The U.S. CDC says:
https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/transmission/index.html
The virus spreads through direct contact (such as through broken skin or mucous membranes in the eyes, nose, or mouth) with:
* Blood or body fluids (urine, saliva, sweat, feces, vomit, breast milk, and semen) of a person who is sick with or has died from EVD
* Objects (such as needles and syringes) contaminated with body fluids from a person sick with EVD or the body of a person who died from EVD
* Infected fruit bats or nonhuman primates (such as apes and monkeys)
* Semen from a man who recovered from EVD (through oral, vaginal, or anal sex)
The Ebola virus CANNOT spread to others when a person shows no signs or symptoms of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD). ... There is also no evidence that mosquitoes or other insects can transmit Ebola virus.
Please don't spread these rumors. EDIT: It also distracts people from the real risks.
But in any complex system, it's very hard to predict who will contract the disease and who won't. You can see similar scenarios play out after Chernobyl, where some people who were very close to the reactor which blew up where seemingly unaffected and lived long lives, while others who were relatively far away passed from radiation exposure or the subsequent cancers.
Ebola isn't particularly contagious. It has a R0 of ~2. Measles for example is 10.
Really? The CDC disagrees:
The virus spreads through direct contact (such as through broken skin or mucous membranes in the eyes, nose, or mouth) with ...
Who are you? What evidence do you have?
Uh-oh. Better keep your Rhesus monkey out of Ebola zones.
Besides, if you live in an area with Rhesus monkeys, your snide comment is not applicable.
> if you live in an area with Rhesus monkeys, your snide comment is not applicable
Ha ha ha ... awesome! I couldn't have written a better parody of this nonsense if I tried.
"Limited airborne transmission of Ebola is ‘very likely,’ new analysis says"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/0...
Quote from the article: "As evidence, the research notes that Ebola virus has been found on the outside of face masks worn by health workers caring for victims of the disease. It also points out that the virus has been passed between animals via respiration. And the authors say that Ebola can infect certain cells of the respiratory tract, including epithelial cells, which line body cavities, and macrophages, a type of white blood cell that consumes pathogens.
The paper notes that breathing, sneezing, coughing and talking can release droplets of fluid from the respiratory tract that travel short distances and most likely cause infection by settling on a mucous membrane. Those actions also release smaller airborne particles capable of suspension in mid-air that can be inhaled by others. Technically, both qualify as aerosols, the paper says."
It's certainly plausible that someone with an early stage infection may take the subway to go to a doctor. I've seen plenty of obviously sick people on the train (and I keep my distance, not because I think they have Ebola, but because I don't want to catch whatever illness they do have)
Many, many times.
> it's plausible that your cat scratched arm could come in contact with some infected person's sweaty arm as you try to make your way through a crowded subway car.
You've got to be kidding me.
Again, who has ever caught Ebola on a subway?
Good question - how many times has there been a significant Ebola outbreak in a city with a subway system?
Mbandaka is not exactly a bustling metropolis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbandaka#/media/File:Stadsaanz...
Chemical and nuclear stuff can possibly be attributed by looking at isotopic composition or impurities, to determine manufacturing process. But doesn't really tell you anything unique. Exceptions are e.g. polonium which where only a few state agencies are known to be able to make it.
The classic, scary chemical weapons (e.g. cholinesterase inhibitors, Sarin) themselves are kitchen chemistry. Ricin, even nastier to die from, is barn chemistry in that it's essentially castor bean tea. However, I suspect that people who manufacture on the cheap usually kill themselves and anyone with enough knowledge and resources to not kill themselves often don't want to make chemical weapons.
Specifically if we don’t think the effected country actually has the resources to do so. The alternative is wide spread contagion - take swine flu and bird flu, both started in China, and yet the lack of any monitoring allowed them to spread around the world before being contained. In that case the outbreak was deliberately not disclosed, but choosing not to disclose and not having resources to disclose have the same effect for /other/ countries, including your own.
Things like where a disease has spread is important to work out the risk of it reaching your own country.
You do know that most of what the cdc does is monitor right? It’s not actively going out to spend Your Tax Dollars treating patients - that’s something that the US doesn’t even do in America.
Alternatively we could choose to not track outbreaks and just hope that Ebola knows we’ll deport it if it comes here. (That works right?)
I do not see any evidence that Swine Flu started in China nor that ineffective monitoring is what led to its spread.[0][1] How would a problem like China fudging their numbers have been ameliorated by the presence of CDC employees? Why would China have allowed them in? Even if they did, would they have allowed them to work? If we can't trust foreign partners, we simply can't trust them and I fail to see any case where the problem of unreliable foreign partners can be fixed by the physical presence of CDC employees.
>spend Your Tax Dollars treating patients - that’s something that the US doesn’t even do in America.
Medicare and Medicaid alone accounted for $1.237 trillion of My Tax Dollar spending in 2016, which accounted for 37% of National Healthcare Expenditures.[2] That same year, ACA tax credits accounted for another $100 billion[3], the VA $166.9 billion[4], and TriCare (healthcare for milfare recipients) is usually another $50 billion. This notion that spending on healthcare is something the government "doesn't even do in America" is one of biggest and strangest (because of the ease with which it is refuted) whoppers regularly promulgated by leftist propagandists.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic_timeline
[2]: https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/sta...
[3]: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/53094
[4]: https://www.va.gov/budget/docs/summary/fy2019VAsBudgetFastFa...
Edit: ...gathering samples, studying samples (shipping is not always trivial)...basically anything where you don’t really trust the local response for whatever combination of reasons, and you want to prevent or at least be ready in case there’s a global outbreak
* IIRC, the current administration cut NIH or CDC funding for preventing and/or dealing with foreign disease outbreaks. Under the prior administration, IIRC the GOP in Congress told the NIH/CDC to re-purpose those funds toward other uses. Does anyone know the current status?
* Regarding the Ebola outbreak in West Africa recently, I later read that the only organization in the world with the logistical resources to respond quickly at the necessary scale was the U.S. military, and Obama eventually deployed them.
* The article doesn't mention the U.S. at all. That seems like a major omissions; not even a no comment. Is the U.S. just standing back while these people die and an epidemic spreads, potentially to other places too?
* What is the current administration's stance on funding UN/WHO health operations?
> Both Mbandaka and Bikoro now have mobile labs, where researchers can test blood samples locally—a huge difference compared to most previous outbreaks. Provided by USAID, the labs contain generators, freezers, and equipment for doing diagnostic tests. The Mbandaka lab is expected to be operational tomorrow afternoon, once the WHO delivers a generator.
As for the CDC, it looks like they're working with the DRC Ministry of Health: https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/drc/2018-may.html
/cmrivers former lab mate
From the BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-26835233
"Hugging is a normal part of religious worship in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and across the region the ritual preparation of bodies for burial involves washing, touching and kissing. Those with the highest status in society are often charged with washing and preparing the body. For a woman this can include braiding the hair, and for a man shaving the head."
On the other hand, I am much less afraid given that I live in a country where such practices do not exist. Cultural barriers can sometimes be a very good thing.
a) if you see a sick person, don't touch them, call the special response phone number and a PPE-equipped response team will be dispatched
b) if a person dies, do not touch the corpse, do not wash the corpse, do not handle the corpse
c) know how to identify the early signs of sickness and where the ETUs were (ebola treatment units).
It is actually kind of difficult to contract ebola because you need skin-to-skin contact with sweat, blood or vomit from a very sick person with a high viral load. It's not highly aerosolized and doesn't last very long in the air from coughing or sneezing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
On another note, if human strains of Ebola ever mutate for airborne transmission, we're all screwed.
We're just collateral damage.
So mutating for airborne transmission among humans is just not on the evolutionary agenda here.
Airborne transmission isn't an evolutionary agenda item. It's an evolutionary event with a non-zero probability of occurring, so far as we know.
Evolution is a great mechanism based in part on the aphorism, "If it can happen, it will".
If Ebola was prone to causing large-scale epidemics, Ebola would have caused large-scale epidemics.
Want to worry? Worry about flu. Worry about smallpox. Those viruses have killed millions and, most likely, will continue to do so now and again in the centuries to come.
But Ebola? Not a chance. How do I know? Because, there is every reason to believe the virus has been around forever, and it's never caused the type of pandemic described by doomsayers.