This is concerning. It's also concerning when the country you live in contains as many idiotic conspiracy theories shared hundreds of thousands of times just like the DRC.
Imperialism has both good and bad. The bad comes in the form of top down governance. The good comes in the form of modernization. See Roman and imperial China Empires among others.
Umm that is exactly what happens with colonization - the colony grows big enough to be self-sufficient and starts getting its potential squandered by the home country's top down governce seeing them as a resource reserve instead of another part of their country.
Either things are reorganized such that they gain more local autonomy granted effectively losing the top down control or they break off. In either case they typically do better because of it. Even with problems in the aftermath they typically rise further - India for instance.
This is not because you understand the theory of evolution that you consider it a moral thing to happen.
Actually, letting the weak die and selecting only the fittest is almost diametrically opposed to the very idea of civilization. Our goal as civilized animals is to make selection an outdated part of evolution. Cure the sick, help the handicap, preserve the old, protect the young.
We don't let people die to diseases in order to strengthen mankind. We take the helm and exterminate pathogens.
I wouldn't read it as a false-dichotomy us/them conclusion, but to the literal facts: Philipines, DRC, US, many countries in Europe are becoming hyperpolarized.. with the intent and aggression being laid down, the only difference is the scale and nakedness of violent acts that result. It's definitely social warfare that's being promulgated with aid of the internet by charlatans and crazies alike.
That's one thing but there is also a strong anti-french and anti-british spirit in central africa which isn't new (was the case in the 90s already), and I think this hostility must be much of the source of the defiance toward foreign (ie usually white) health organisations.
Yeap. The world is flattening as many countries end their brief (and ever briefer) socioeconomic growth. Happenings in one place become not a first-/third-world disparity, but a near-universal condition. InfoWars hate-radio sparking white nationalist stochastic terrorism here, Rwanda hate-radio sparking genocide there.
I'm tempted to flag this for sensationalist, overly dumbed down presentation of ordinary biology of viruses, but okay evidently some people found it valuable.
As I remember it, the author's novel "The Hot Zone" (1994) was better writing and far better science around Ebola and other filoviruses.
Could well be. It's been a couple of decades since I read it, and a fair bit of education in between.
Not sure if that's an argument for or against rereading.
But what Tara C. Smith presents in that Gizmodo post is hardly devastating criticism. As she notes, Preston recognized that it was a a dramatized description of the symptoms, and I don't see that it's "utterly wrong" for a bad case, though I'm sure it's frustrating as an epidemiology professor to repeatedly have people believe it's the only case.
As I recall it the Reston strain is never described as definitely airborne, and an airborne Zaire strain is never mentioned except as a horrifying possibility if one should acquire the ability (not entirely out of character in a fictional thriller one might think).
The criticism for some sort of feminism-deficiency I don't give much for even today, but it seems particularly unfair against a novel which was written decades before today's charged ideological climate on that matter, and I disagree that poor work-life balance and dysfunctional relationships is particularly unrealistic when it comes to career scientists.
Remains then relatively low infectivity, but I think Preston might be forgiven for not emphasizing that in work of fiction built around the fear of Ebola infection.
Thanks for the remark anyway, because it bears noting that the novel should still not be taken to be a biology textbook.
Tangential, but if a virus's contagion is regulated by its virulence (that is, very deadly viruses are less contagious because they kill their hosts) does that mean widespread access to modern medicine could remove the upper bound on virulence by keeping the hosts alive?
I could probably formulate this question better, but the basic question is, "could virus's symptoms be getting worse in general?"
Not an epidemiologist, but I understand it mostly has to do with the means by which the virus is transmitted. Ebola is very lethal but requires physical contact of bodily fluids for transmission, which contains a lot its spreading. You can probably sit on a plane next to a contaminated person and you will be fine. That contains a lot the contagion vs a virus like the flu.
During the 2014 Ebola Outbreak in West Africa there were numerous people who appeared to have been infected while keeping their distance. Everybody was perplexed and assumed the victims--some of whom were medical professionals--unwittingly came into close contact with infected fluids while caretaking.
A small group of scientists started to speak up in various forums arguing that the original scientific experiments (1960s?) which calculated things like droplet sizes, distances traveled, times to evaporation, etc--the numbers used to determine how far particular kinds of virii can travel and how long they can persist in the environment--was irredeemably wrong. These bad metrics were and still are used to build transmissibility models.
According to more modern metrics and models, while not airborne as its strictly defined, Ebola virus can transmit much more readily and further than what is currently taught. TL;DR: aerosolized droplets can carry the Ebola virus much further and longer than believed. Bifurcating virus types into "airborne" and "not airborne" is dangerously simplistic as infected aerosols can have risk profiles closer to that of traditional airborne virus types, particularly for a virus like Ebola.
I can't find the original article I read--an article by the researcher who, IIRC, was the first or one of the first to empirically show the critical flaws in the original experimental results that current models rely upon. But this paper seems to have a good discussion of the issues: "Transmission of Ebola Viruses: What We Know and What We Do Not Know", https://mbio.asm.org/content/6/2/e00137-15
Modern medicine also means earlier detection and quarantine, so by the same logic it should mean less pronounced symptoms so a virus could hide longer.
> The problem with leaky vaccines, Read says, is that they enable pathogens to replicate unchecked while also protecting hosts from illness and death, thereby removing the costs associated with increased virulence.
NB: I thought I stumbled upon the above article--or one like it--through HN within the past few days, but I can't find the post. Maybe I found it following some other article link. shrug
This is a recurring pattern right? Like after article one is posted a few days later somebody went through an interesting rabbit hole and shares his new found knowledge with a new link. Or is this a second order effect from an echo chamber?
It's not just virulence-it's a bit more complicated. Example HIV is (without current chronically given drugs) very deadly. One of the things that makes it so successful is the lag between transmission to and death of a patient. The virus being transmissible for subsequent spread during that time, which could often be a decade even back before modern treatments (80's or 90's).
Deadly viruses are not necessarily less contagious. Contagiousness has to do with a lot of things, including the duration you're able to transmit it (which is sometimes related to virulence because you're dead), the mode of transmission, and the setting its in.
If everything else were to remain the same; keeping the infected alive longer wouldn't necessarily do much at all. The trouble comes when that person spreads the virus to someone else, perhaps with a compromised immune system. If the virus load in the newly infected person is the product of that portion of the original virus which wasn't killed by the "99% effective" methods of killing them, then that victim now has a more robust form of the virus, likely harder to treat.
Wait until it gets into the US in a marginal part of society. Given we have no universal health care, it's likely to spread and evolve faster than we can stop it. The person in Dallas could have infected the homeless person in the same ambulance who subsequently wandered off. Imagine an illegal person catching it and fearing discovery tries to avoid a hospital, only to infect those they are sharing a tiny room with.
Because they broke the laws, and are subject to penalty. This is a fundamental basis of our society.
If you don’t like that, change the law, but don’t forgive that some people just willingly break it (even if they have good reason). Selective enforcement of the law is tyranny.
That doesn't make the _person_ illegal though. People do illegal things all the time. An hour ago I was driving above the speed limit. Am I now an "illegal person"?
You know we have a pretty extensive public health infrastructure in the US? And lots and lots of money and resources?
Combine those things and the primary method of controlling a disease like Ebola is pretty straightforward, you have teams of people find and isolate every single person that had potential exposure to a known infectee.
That you can trace from each known infectee is an important part of it, you don't have to discover the exact chain of infection to achieve a decent level of containment.
Because at that time people didn’t distrust medical authorities like they do now (anti-vaxxers among others), and didn’t fear (as much) the other consequences of coming into contact with government agencies (incarceration/deportation).
And I'm curious whether you happen to be independently against deportation and incarceration. I suppose we'd better open the borders and prisons just to prevent disease, right? Or maybe there's a broader ideology at play here.
>"I suppose we'd better open the borders and prisons just to prevent disease, right?"
That's one way to take something that no one is arguing for and turn it up to 11. At least try to argue in good faith.
Edit: Found a source for you regarding trust in healthcare, for what it's worth.
>A 2015 Pew study [...] We as a country have less faith in the medical system than we once did — trust was at 80 percent in 1973, and in 2016 it is 39 percent."[1]
There's a tricky game being played. For instance, everyone is "against open borders", but they're for decriminalizing border crossing, against deporting anyone, and want free healthcare, housing, and education for everyone irrespective of legal presence. Then people cook up these theories about various forms of law enforcement supposedly promoting crime and disease by making people fearful of taking preventative actions, and we're expected to consider these arguments in isolation and believe you when you say "no one is arguing for" the thing every word you say argues for.
You asked for, and I supplied, a citation about trust in healthcare. What is bad faith about that?
I don't know what any of the other border stuff or law enforcement theories your talking about has to do with trust in the healthcare system, but feel free to continue making noise about it.
No one has said that open borders and no prisons prevents diseases.
Why don't you tell us what your positions on those topics are? I'm trying to look below the surface here.
I didn't see the citation when you first posted. I don't doubt it's valid, but the issue I had up the comment thread was with the theory that lowered faith in medical institutions is because of anti-vaxxers and fear of incarceration and deportation. Your source says nothing of the sort.
I don't know what effect the fear of incarceration and deportation have in regards to lowering faith in medical institutions.
I don't know if the folk who are against vaccination are the sole cause of eroding trust in healthcare, but given that healthcare trust is eroding and anti-vaccination believers are rising, it's not much of a stretch to think the two might be related.
What I do know is that according to the study I linked, trust in healthcare has fallen quite a bit and that is likely to hinder our ability to slow an outbreak.
I called you out for bad faith, not because of your position on the topic, but because I have re-read this thread over and over and still cannot find anyone making the argument that opening borders and opening prisons is going to prevent diseases.
You and others (top-level comment spawning this subthread) seem to be implying (correctly, I think) that immigrants are afraid to engage with the medical establishment (or police... they're all lumped together under "authorities") because they're worried about getting caught up in the immigration enforcement dragnet.
The obvious solution to distrust and lack of engagement between immigrant communities and the authorities — unless you have another non-obvious one — is to stop enforcing immigration laws at all. In other words, the government should never check someone's citizenship/immigration status, except maybe when someone's caught committing a crime (maybe... at least if it's a serious crime... then we'll check immigration status and send them back if they're not a permanent resident). That's what set Al on tilt, because it is essentially an open borders policy.
I have very specifically gone out of my way in this thread to not convey any opinion, implied or otherwise, regarding immigration or border policy. I only wanted to give a source for the fact that trust in healthcare is falling.
I tried to find the actual poll to find out what questions were being asked, but link 1 says the 39% figure is from a 2016 study, while link 2 is a 2015 study and doesn't mention 39% anywhere relating to the medical system.
"Less faith in the medical system" could mean just about anything, from people not believing they have the right coverage, to people being afraid that doctors in lab coats are doing voodoo rituals behind closed doors and giving people diseases.
I don't think it means what you're insinuating: that people with serious flu (or initial ebola symptoms) would avoid going to a doctor in the US when they would have a few decades ago.
You are correct, my 2nd link doesn't seem to have that figure. That was my mistake in sourcing, I will remove it.
I wasn't trying to insinuate anything, honestly. I was just trying to provide a source that trust in healthcare is falling to the person who said "Goodness. Citations needed" to the person who said trust in healthcare is falling.
Al was responding to someone who was insinuating that distrust of medicine (doctors, generally) was the result of aggressive law enforcement. The strong implication was we should do something about the reluctance of people to seek medical care because of their immigration status or outstanding warrants. That means reducing enforcement of various laws. That's what Al was responding to.
The possible variations are:
1. Stop enforcing immigration laws and checking immigration status except in very narrow cases.
2. Stop trying to apprehend people with open warrants.
3. Decriminalize some stuff that's criminal so that fewer people have warrants.
Maybe I've got blinders on, but I think hardly anyone agrees with option 2 in general. And I think almost everyone, other than "Get off my lawn" suburbanites, agrees with option 3. Too much minor shit is illegal. But I also think those are minor compared to the first issue.
That leaves the issue of illegal immigrants and their reluctance to have any contact with authorities, including medical services, which is why Al went on tilt. Unless you either refuse to enforce immigration laws, or make them officially legal immigrants, both of which are equivalent to an open borders policy, they are going to remain fearful of seeking medical treatment and the problem remains.
>distrust of medicine (doctors, generally) was the result of aggressive law enforcement.
Perhaps I am reading it wrong, but the quote is:
>[...] people didn’t distrust medical authorities like they do now [...], and didn’t fear [...]coming into contact with government agencies [...].
Which says "AND didn't fear" not "because of fear".
I can't definitively say what the parent meant to post, but the way I read it (which could be wrong, too) is that they are saying there are two reasons we are not as equipped to deal with an outbreak like we did with polio/smallpox:
One reason is because of erosion of trust in healthcare. The other (separate) reason is because of the fear of police/immigration officials.
And you cited something claiming trust in the medical system was 80% in 1973 and dropped to 39% in 2016, but I couldn't and you couldn't find the actual source of that 39% figure to find out what poll question(s) it was the result of. Without being able to see them, I suspect that the poll questions were different or were so vague that respondents' interpretations changed dramatically over 43 years.
61% might not trust the healthcare system in some sense; maybe they don't trust medical research studies, maybe they don't trust doctors to prescribe the lowest-cost effective treatment, maybe they don't trust that they can afford medical care, maybe they think the whole medical industry is conspiring to rip them off (approximately true). But I guarantee you if 100 people break their arms you'll see more than 39 of them in the ER. Same if they have the flu and the symptoms turn severe. Almost all of them will trust primary and ER care just fine, unless there are other considerations, and immigration status and fear of discovery is the most common consideration by far. One hears it constantly in immigration pieces on media like NPR.
>Because at that time people didn’t distrust medical authorities like they do now (anti-vaxxers among others)
I recommend taking a look at 'The State as an Immoral Factor' by Maria Louise Ramé--pseudonymously written in the late 1800's. Distrusting medical authorities is not a new phenomenon. Here's a small excerpt:
A few years ago nobody thought it a matter of the slightest consequence to be bitten by a healthy dog; as a veterinary surgeon has justly said, a scratch from a rusty nail or the jagged tin of a sardine-box is much more truly dangerous than a dog's tooth. Yet in the last five years the physiologists and the state, which in all countries protects them, have succeeded in so inoculating the public mind with senseless terrors that even the accidental touch of a puppy's lips or the kindly lick of his tongue throws thousands of people into an insanity of fear. Dr Bell has justly said: 'Pasteur does not cure rabies; he creates it' In like manner the state does not cure either folly or fear: it creates both.
Maybe not new, but seemingly accelerating in magnitude.
>A 2015 Pew study [...] We as a country have less faith in the medical system than we once did — trust was at 80 percent in 1973, and in 2016 it is 39 percent."[1]
We had free vaccination of children at school, and opting out wasn’t common behavior. Also, the population was smaller and healthcare significantly cheaper.
Really if Ebola is to be more deadly in absolute terms it ironically should be far less lethal and disturbing in symptoms. If it was weakened to be say about as bad as the flu in terms of lethality its kill count would be way higher.
Ebola is so lethal it would practically have to cause the deceased to autocremate and destroy the remains to be any worse at spreading.
Killing your host quickly is a bad for a parasite - parasiteoids are the closest to being viable in that model where their purpose is "use the host to have your offspring instead of yourself".
> "Killing your host quickly is a bad for a parasite"
Exactly. If the virus mutates such that the time before symptoms appear gets longer that's bad for the rest of us. But if it's the opposite (i.e., it kills faster), then that's good news and it will - in theory - eventually burn itself out.
Perhaps. But humans are the species most likely to jump on a plane and take it directly to some other major metropolitan area somewhere else in the world.
Keep in mind that, unlike The Hot Zone and modern media depictions of Ebola, we know via the West African outbreak that Ebola most commonly manifests as fever, malaise, and diarrhea.
The whole "Ebola victims are bags of blood ready to explode!" thing is...not really true.
I thought (ironically) that Ebola would evolve into a less deadly virus, because that would improve its contagion rates. It doesn't care if it kills us (in fact it'd probably rather not). For a virus, the perfect balance is making is making us as sick as possible (ie. using as much of our resources as possible) without actually staying home from work.
This only matters if Ebola's primary selective pressure is from human hosts. If not, it doesn't matter. There are plenty of viruses that will kill a secondary host dead, but live swimmingly well in their primary host.
I think there is a difference between endemic viruses and zoonotic ones.
Viruses that primarily infect humans have competition between strains. What I've read is how that plays out depends on the mode of transmission vs host immunity. Things can be driven either way. Whichever strain infects hosts with no immunity first tends to win the game[2]. It's infection blocks the other strains. Because immunity means reinfection by another strain is delayed, difficult, or impossible due to immunity[1]. Sometimes less virulent is how you win (common cold) and sometimes more (cholera).
On the other hand I think Ebola has never been an endemic virus, it's a zoonotic virus. So it's accidental how virulent and deadly it is.
[1] Which is how vaccines work. I think the live polio vaccine was used because it's transmissible. Not only do vaccinated people develop immunity, but unvaccinated people catch it and also develop immunity.
[2] Read an article on Cholera. It mentioned in Northern Mexico there are some strains that have evolved to be really really weak. Weak enough to evade detection by public health authorities.
> Ebola virus is a microscopic parasite that replicates inside the cells of a host
A lot of the terminology used in this article is confusing. My understanding is that you get viruses (dead and tiny), bacteria (alive but small) and parasites (alive and usually bigger than bacteria). The author also talks about particles a lot as if the Ebola virus was only the rna and the particle was its trogan horse. I thought that a virus was the whole thing.
The summary was as follows: Once the Ebola virus jumps from bats to humans it mutates differently to what it would in bats. This can’t be studied because we can’t experiment on humans so the scary thing is that we have to just wait and see when there is an outbreak and every outbreak is different.
To be honest we probably can't do quality experiments on bats either. That explains why the article describes transplanting portions of the viral coat proteins on to other viruses-- to enable growth, albeit in an artificial system. that's how things are done. The problem of limited model systems is only relevant to ebola, but many other viruses (bacteria, diseases, ....)
I don't know where your definition of parasite has come from but I've never heard it. Also, it's not universally agreed upon whether viruses are living or non-living (dead is the incorrect term).
Parasite: an organism that lives in or on an organism of another species (its host) and benefits by deriving nutrients at the other's expense.
Has anyone found a site with good data on the Ebola outbreak? I’ve tried to track down, but the only stuff I’ve seen (from the WHO etc) needs a lot of cleaning and like ends in 2015.
Can someone post the one word tl;dr to help others decide whether this article is worth reading or not?
I'm getting tired of these clickbait questions: has ebola's virulence and efficacy increased, or not? Because if it has, that title should be "Ebola is evolving into a deadlier virus", and that's entirely worth clicking through for.
But if it hasn't, this is just clickbait and there are many, many more articles getting published on the web that also require time to read, without wasting time on this one.
tl;dr: Viruses mutate to become more contagious. There's some circumstantial evidence this may have happened in the 2013/2014 West African Ebola outbreak. The Kivu outbreak has ~600 hosts in which the virus is mutating right now. The article doesn't address lethality at all.
(IMHO, all of the useful information in the article is in the first sentence of the tl;dr.)
The more people infected the more mutations will occur.
Mutations that delay death, make the virus lighter (more easily aerosolized), or kill a smaller percent of the infected (letting some people be infectious or even asymptomatic), might make the virus less deadly for individuals, but more deadly overall.
All the mutations are happening simultaneously in a population. Ones that cause the virus to spread better will be conserved precisely because those viruses spread better.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadEither things are reorganized such that they gain more local autonomy granted effectively losing the top down control or they break off. In either case they typically do better because of it. Even with problems in the aftermath they typically rise further - India for instance.
Actually, letting the weak die and selecting only the fittest is almost diametrically opposed to the very idea of civilization. Our goal as civilized animals is to make selection an outdated part of evolution. Cure the sick, help the handicap, preserve the old, protect the young.
We don't let people die to diseases in order to strengthen mankind. We take the helm and exterminate pathogens.
As I remember it, the author's novel "The Hot Zone" (1994) was better writing and far better science around Ebola and other filoviruses.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-the-hot-zone-created-the-worst-m...
But what Tara C. Smith presents in that Gizmodo post is hardly devastating criticism. As she notes, Preston recognized that it was a a dramatized description of the symptoms, and I don't see that it's "utterly wrong" for a bad case, though I'm sure it's frustrating as an epidemiology professor to repeatedly have people believe it's the only case.
As I recall it the Reston strain is never described as definitely airborne, and an airborne Zaire strain is never mentioned except as a horrifying possibility if one should acquire the ability (not entirely out of character in a fictional thriller one might think).
The criticism for some sort of feminism-deficiency I don't give much for even today, but it seems particularly unfair against a novel which was written decades before today's charged ideological climate on that matter, and I disagree that poor work-life balance and dysfunctional relationships is particularly unrealistic when it comes to career scientists.
Remains then relatively low infectivity, but I think Preston might be forgiven for not emphasizing that in work of fiction built around the fear of Ebola infection.
Thanks for the remark anyway, because it bears noting that the novel should still not be taken to be a biology textbook.
I could probably formulate this question better, but the basic question is, "could virus's symptoms be getting worse in general?"
A small group of scientists started to speak up in various forums arguing that the original scientific experiments (1960s?) which calculated things like droplet sizes, distances traveled, times to evaporation, etc--the numbers used to determine how far particular kinds of virii can travel and how long they can persist in the environment--was irredeemably wrong. These bad metrics were and still are used to build transmissibility models.
According to more modern metrics and models, while not airborne as its strictly defined, Ebola virus can transmit much more readily and further than what is currently taught. TL;DR: aerosolized droplets can carry the Ebola virus much further and longer than believed. Bifurcating virus types into "airborne" and "not airborne" is dangerously simplistic as infected aerosols can have risk profiles closer to that of traditional airborne virus types, particularly for a virus like Ebola.
I can't find the original article I read--an article by the researcher who, IIRC, was the first or one of the first to empirically show the critical flaws in the original experimental results that current models rely upon. But this paper seems to have a good discussion of the issues: "Transmission of Ebola Viruses: What We Know and What We Do Not Know", https://mbio.asm.org/content/6/2/e00137-15
EDIT: The original article I read: http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2014/09/commentar...
Though maybe the differences are by-products of the poor models mentioned in another comment.
The rapid mutation is why annual vaccinations are necessary.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-vaccines-can-drive-pathog...
NB: I thought I stumbled upon the above article--or one like it--through HN within the past few days, but I can't find the post. Maybe I found it following some other article link. shrug
But not necessarily more virulent.
If you don’t like that, change the law, but don’t forgive that some people just willingly break it (even if they have good reason). Selective enforcement of the law is tyranny.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/illegal
> a person who enters or lives in a country without the documentation required for legal entry or residence
Combine those things and the primary method of controlling a disease like Ebola is pretty straightforward, you have teams of people find and isolate every single person that had potential exposure to a known infectee.
That you can trace from each known infectee is an important part of it, you don't have to discover the exact chain of infection to achieve a decent level of containment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_diseases_eliminated_fr...
And I'm curious whether you happen to be independently against deportation and incarceration. I suppose we'd better open the borders and prisons just to prevent disease, right? Or maybe there's a broader ideology at play here.
That's one way to take something that no one is arguing for and turn it up to 11. At least try to argue in good faith.
Edit: Found a source for you regarding trust in healthcare, for what it's worth.
>A 2015 Pew study [...] We as a country have less faith in the medical system than we once did — trust was at 80 percent in 1973, and in 2016 it is 39 percent."[1]
[1]https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-dont-trust-th...
Maybe you two should try arguing in good faith.
I don't know what any of the other border stuff or law enforcement theories your talking about has to do with trust in the healthcare system, but feel free to continue making noise about it.
No one has said that open borders and no prisons prevents diseases.
I didn't see the citation when you first posted. I don't doubt it's valid, but the issue I had up the comment thread was with the theory that lowered faith in medical institutions is because of anti-vaxxers and fear of incarceration and deportation. Your source says nothing of the sort.
I don't know if the folk who are against vaccination are the sole cause of eroding trust in healthcare, but given that healthcare trust is eroding and anti-vaccination believers are rising, it's not much of a stretch to think the two might be related.
What I do know is that according to the study I linked, trust in healthcare has fallen quite a bit and that is likely to hinder our ability to slow an outbreak.
I called you out for bad faith, not because of your position on the topic, but because I have re-read this thread over and over and still cannot find anyone making the argument that opening borders and opening prisons is going to prevent diseases.
The obvious solution to distrust and lack of engagement between immigrant communities and the authorities — unless you have another non-obvious one — is to stop enforcing immigration laws at all. In other words, the government should never check someone's citizenship/immigration status, except maybe when someone's caught committing a crime (maybe... at least if it's a serious crime... then we'll check immigration status and send them back if they're not a permanent resident). That's what set Al on tilt, because it is essentially an open borders policy.
"Less faith in the medical system" could mean just about anything, from people not believing they have the right coverage, to people being afraid that doctors in lab coats are doing voodoo rituals behind closed doors and giving people diseases.
I don't think it means what you're insinuating: that people with serious flu (or initial ebola symptoms) would avoid going to a doctor in the US when they would have a few decades ago.
I wasn't trying to insinuate anything, honestly. I was just trying to provide a source that trust in healthcare is falling to the person who said "Goodness. Citations needed" to the person who said trust in healthcare is falling.
The possible variations are:
1. Stop enforcing immigration laws and checking immigration status except in very narrow cases.
2. Stop trying to apprehend people with open warrants.
3. Decriminalize some stuff that's criminal so that fewer people have warrants.
Maybe I've got blinders on, but I think hardly anyone agrees with option 2 in general. And I think almost everyone, other than "Get off my lawn" suburbanites, agrees with option 3. Too much minor shit is illegal. But I also think those are minor compared to the first issue.
That leaves the issue of illegal immigrants and their reluctance to have any contact with authorities, including medical services, which is why Al went on tilt. Unless you either refuse to enforce immigration laws, or make them officially legal immigrants, both of which are equivalent to an open borders policy, they are going to remain fearful of seeking medical treatment and the problem remains.
Perhaps I am reading it wrong, but the quote is:
>[...] people didn’t distrust medical authorities like they do now [...], and didn’t fear [...]coming into contact with government agencies [...].
Which says "AND didn't fear" not "because of fear".
I can't definitively say what the parent meant to post, but the way I read it (which could be wrong, too) is that they are saying there are two reasons we are not as equipped to deal with an outbreak like we did with polio/smallpox:
One reason is because of erosion of trust in healthcare. The other (separate) reason is because of the fear of police/immigration officials.
61% might not trust the healthcare system in some sense; maybe they don't trust medical research studies, maybe they don't trust doctors to prescribe the lowest-cost effective treatment, maybe they don't trust that they can afford medical care, maybe they think the whole medical industry is conspiring to rip them off (approximately true). But I guarantee you if 100 people break their arms you'll see more than 39 of them in the ER. Same if they have the flu and the symptoms turn severe. Almost all of them will trust primary and ER care just fine, unless there are other considerations, and immigration status and fear of discovery is the most common consideration by far. One hears it constantly in immigration pieces on media like NPR.
I recommend taking a look at 'The State as an Immoral Factor' by Maria Louise Ramé--pseudonymously written in the late 1800's. Distrusting medical authorities is not a new phenomenon. Here's a small excerpt:
A few years ago nobody thought it a matter of the slightest consequence to be bitten by a healthy dog; as a veterinary surgeon has justly said, a scratch from a rusty nail or the jagged tin of a sardine-box is much more truly dangerous than a dog's tooth. Yet in the last five years the physiologists and the state, which in all countries protects them, have succeeded in so inoculating the public mind with senseless terrors that even the accidental touch of a puppy's lips or the kindly lick of his tongue throws thousands of people into an insanity of fear. Dr Bell has justly said: 'Pasteur does not cure rabies; he creates it' In like manner the state does not cure either folly or fear: it creates both.
>A 2015 Pew study [...] We as a country have less faith in the medical system than we once did — trust was at 80 percent in 1973, and in 2016 it is 39 percent."[1]
[1]https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-dont-trust-th...
And they affected millions before they were stamped out (by universal vaccinations). So there's that...
Ebola is so lethal it would practically have to cause the deceased to autocremate and destroy the remains to be any worse at spreading.
Killing your host quickly is a bad for a parasite - parasiteoids are the closest to being viable in that model where their purpose is "use the host to have your offspring instead of yourself".
Exactly. If the virus mutates such that the time before symptoms appear gets longer that's bad for the rest of us. But if it's the opposite (i.e., it kills faster), then that's good news and it will - in theory - eventually burn itself out.
The whole "Ebola victims are bags of blood ready to explode!" thing is...not really true.
Viruses that primarily infect humans have competition between strains. What I've read is how that plays out depends on the mode of transmission vs host immunity. Things can be driven either way. Whichever strain infects hosts with no immunity first tends to win the game[2]. It's infection blocks the other strains. Because immunity means reinfection by another strain is delayed, difficult, or impossible due to immunity[1]. Sometimes less virulent is how you win (common cold) and sometimes more (cholera).
On the other hand I think Ebola has never been an endemic virus, it's a zoonotic virus. So it's accidental how virulent and deadly it is.
[1] Which is how vaccines work. I think the live polio vaccine was used because it's transmissible. Not only do vaccinated people develop immunity, but unvaccinated people catch it and also develop immunity.
[2] Read an article on Cholera. It mentioned in Northern Mexico there are some strains that have evolved to be really really weak. Weak enough to evade detection by public health authorities.
A lot of the terminology used in this article is confusing. My understanding is that you get viruses (dead and tiny), bacteria (alive but small) and parasites (alive and usually bigger than bacteria). The author also talks about particles a lot as if the Ebola virus was only the rna and the particle was its trogan horse. I thought that a virus was the whole thing.
The summary was as follows: Once the Ebola virus jumps from bats to humans it mutates differently to what it would in bats. This can’t be studied because we can’t experiment on humans so the scary thing is that we have to just wait and see when there is an outbreak and every outbreak is different.
Parasite: an organism that lives in or on an organism of another species (its host) and benefits by deriving nutrients at the other's expense.
Sounds like a virus to me.
Note this ends in 2015 because that one and the current one are different outbreaks.
I'm getting tired of these clickbait questions: has ebola's virulence and efficacy increased, or not? Because if it has, that title should be "Ebola is evolving into a deadlier virus", and that's entirely worth clicking through for.
But if it hasn't, this is just clickbait and there are many, many more articles getting published on the web that also require time to read, without wasting time on this one.
(IMHO, all of the useful information in the article is in the first sentence of the tl;dr.)
Mutations that delay death, make the virus lighter (more easily aerosolized), or kill a smaller percent of the infected (letting some people be infectious or even asymptomatic), might make the virus less deadly for individuals, but more deadly overall.
All the mutations are happening simultaneously in a population. Ones that cause the virus to spread better will be conserved precisely because those viruses spread better.
In all of science as we know it, there is no such thing as proof. Proof is the domain of mathematics and logic.