Not trying to be snarky, but what makes you think that this one will not? The mainstream media seems to downplay it, and a good number of people online seem to be alarmist about it. I'm not sure what to think with the data I have available.
> I'm not sure what to think with the data I have available.
That usually means find more data!
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle - but for someone in the US who doesn't work in a hospital, at least for now, you have nothing to worry about. If it starts spreading in the US, that is the time to start worrying (as an individual who doesn't work in the industry)
I'm not saying doctors and scientists in this field shouldn't be worrying or doing anything about it - what I'm saying is if you are not one of those people and you're not traveling internationally, there is no logical reason for you to even think about it for the time being - things may change for the worse, but until then it is unnecessary worry for something you have absolutely no control over.
Alarmists are using a lot qualified language, and remember, every statement with a qualifier like "might" or "could" is exactly as true as its opposite.
So when someone says, "Ebola might mutate to become a flesh-eating flying monkey" (which is true, by the way, given enough time) they may as well be saying, "Ebola might not mutate..." Both statements are equally true, but they have chosen to say only one.
Why? What actionable information is contained in that choice? I can't see any. Nor (one hopes) does it express their desired outcome.
Statements like "Ebola could mutate..." appear to me to be some kind of verbal reassurance behaviour. From this I infer that they are motivated primarily by fear, and one of the things fear does in social primates is--rather like a virus--spread itself. About which I will now proceed to speculate in an unfortunately data-free way.
People are hierarchical animals, and when we're afraid we feel better if we're not as afraid as everyone else, so we tend to do and say things that will raise alarm in others. Being afraid lowers one's status in the group (and lower status often leads to more fear). There are two ways of dealing with this: reducing one's own fear, or increasing fear in others. Again, this is purely speculative: I've searched around a bit but can't find any research that bears directly on this question. It would be interesting to see it investigated, and relatively straightforward to do.
So "Keep Calm and Carry On" is a good motto to have. It helps us focus on maintaining our place in the monkey hierarchy by controlling our own fear, rather inducing fear in others. And given how frequently fear runs out of control and leads to uncivil behaviour, this seems like a desirable result.
So far everyone from the CDC has been describing what we know about Ebola spreading in scientific knowledge, which is extremely conservative. Everyone I know in my profession thinks about it like an pen tester would, "how would it get into the usa if there's screening?" "how would someone get Ebola without physical contact if it's not airborne?" "if bad sanitation in Africa is the reason that it's spreading so quick there, are there any places in my country that have bad sanitation?" It seems like a better strategy to think about these things and be wrong than have it kill a bunch of people, but I know good and well that my actual understanding is superficial. But it's seemed to have good explanatory power for everything that's happened so far that has taken people by surprise.
For whatever people say, Ebola is still a fairly difficult disease to spread. True, it has jumped borders (even oceans).
However, patient's don't become infectious until they start showing visible symptoms. Not only that, the symptoms are pretty obvious. Compounding all of that, the vector by which the virus travels is one of the "slowest" routes available.
What I think this outbreak does show however, is that we as a global peoples, need to really rethink how we treat and handle the spread of disease.
Are they? The guy in Dallas originally reported with nothing more than abdominal pain. While he quickly deteriorated after that, was he already contagious at that point?
Why do people keep saying it's a fairly difficult disease to spread, when a health worker in the US contracted Ebola, even while wearing protective gear.
If a health worker with protective gear can contract Ebola, imagine how easy it is for someone infected with Ebola to transmit the disease on an airplane or a restaurant. If they start vomiting around people, and splatter the people around them, will those people not get infected? Will the workers who try to clean up the mess not get exposed as well?
The symptoms are obvious, but they are obvious symptoms for much more innocuous diseases as well, so it's easy to miss.
The health worker was working directly with Ebola patients, something went wrong there and should be investigated but, this is still better than a dozen random people contracting it because it actually does spread easily.
Health workers contracting it means that their needs to be either more protective measures or better training to help prevent mistakes.
> Why do people keep saying it's a fairly difficult disease to spread
Because that is the truth.
When someone is working in close quarters to the disease they are substantially more likely to catch it, no? You can wear all the protective gear you want, if protocol for taking off the gear is not followed 100% every single time, you open yourself up to infection. Combine that with fatigue, mistakes happen unfortunately often.
If you are just out walking around coming into normal contact with people, it is incredibly difficult to spread.
It's obviously not the truth. If someone stricken with Ebola makes it into a crowded location, then the chances of several people getting it will be high. This is obvious given the fact that a single Ebola patient infected a trained worker with protective gear. Extrapolate that out to an Ebola victim in the middle of Times Square, puking, coughing, sweating, etc.
Right now we can trace people back to those that traveled in West Africa so it make identification relatively easy.
But once the disease spreads to the point where people who haven't been to West Africa start getting it, then what are we going to do? Quarantine everyone who starts showing the most basic Ebola symptoms, which are high fever and abdominal pains?
And if Ebola starts spreading, what will we do with people with suspected Ebola? Put them in the same facility as those with Ebola? That will drive people to not report their symptoms, increasing their chances of spreading it to others. It's the exact same thing that happened in Africa, and Americans will behave the same way because it's simple Game Theory. If I have Ebola symptoms, and that means I'm going to get stuck into a facility where other Ebola people are, I'd rather just pretend I don't have it because "chances of infection are so low, I probably don't have it."
>It's obviously not the truth. If someone stricken with Ebola makes it into a crowded location, then the chances of several people getting it will be high. This is obvious given the fact that a single Ebola patient infected a trained worker with protective gear. Extrapolate that out to an Ebola victim in the middle of Times Square, puking, coughing, sweating, etc.
Think for one second here. If someone makes it into a crowded location and starts puking, do you think people are going to move towards the puking person or get the hell away? Whereas in a hospital if a patient starts puking is a nurse going to move towards the puking patient, or away?
But at the end of the day this is 100% speculation. You are not qualified to have an opinion on the matter and neither am I. This is why I trust the doctors and scientists who are far more qualified to have an opinion when they say there is - for the time being - nothing to worry about.
They don't need to puke. Sweat transmits Ebola. Someone suffering from Ebola just needs to collapse in the middle of the subway, and people will help the person up, possibly infecting themselves by being coughed on in close quarters, or puked on inadvertently. At this point, once we get uncontrolled Ebola infections in people not remotely associated with West Africa, this is going to be a big problem because we will need to quarantine everyone that has Ebola-like symptoms, which will cause panic and become a huge burden on our medical system.
And that's stupid to say I'm not qualified to have an opinion. I don't need to be a doctor to be allowed to have an opinion. I look at what the so-called experts claim, and understand that what I'm seeing in reality doesn't match what they say. And in fact, my opinion matches what other "experts" are questioning, a la LA Times article[1]. So, yes, I am qualified enough to have an opinion just by using simple common sense. You can feel free to be a good sheep and listen to what you're told, but I prefer to think for myself.
And to be clear, I'm not worried I'm going to get Ebola. I just don't like it when I keep reading in the news that Ebola is extremely hard to catch, when it's obvious that it's not based on the evidence of who and how people are contracting it.
Ebola has an incubation period of about three weeks before symptoms start to show. Asymptomatic people are not contagious. Ergo, for any Ebola patient admitted to hospital with symptoms there is a three-week window to identify anyone they might have exchanged bodily fluids with. Doing this is not that difficult in the typical case, although obviously anyone with an active imagination can come up with atypical cases, but there is a technical term for people who base their reasoning on imaginary atypical cases.
I don't know about you, but I personally am not in the habit of exchanging bodily fluids with random strangers in crowded places, and I have been on buses where people have thrown up--amongst other things--and never once worried that I was getting splashed by anything untoward. Based on that experience I judge the odds of random-stranger transmission to be low. Not zero, but low enough to not be a significant factor in the spread of the disease.
With regard to your "simple game theory", you are assuming that people in charge of quarantine and triage are idiots. They are not. They have thought this through. In quarantine patients will be sufficiently isolated from each other to prevent transmission. This is just basic, dumb-as-rocks first order protocol, which you didn't even bother to look up before posting: http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/hcp/infection-prevention-and-co...
Read the very first item in the table: "single patient room".
> I don't know about you, but I personally am not in the habit of exchanging bodily fluids with random strangers in crowded places
Are you sure? What about touching the same doorknobs or handles in trains as other person? Are you always wearing sterile gloves and always wash your hands (with a foot-operated faucet) before scratching your face when it itches?
If not, you are exchanging bodily fluids with random strangers much more often than you think.
Incorrect. It has an incubation period of 8-10 days, and as little as 2 and up to 21 days. There is about a 1 week window to identify anyone they might have exchanged bodily fluids with. Bodily fluids include sweat in this case, as well as tear drops, urine, etc. Any clothing or bedsheets, for example, that came in contact with these bodily fluids can also transmit the disease.
And as to the quarantine protocol, you have missed my point. My point is people with symptoms will be scared to be admitted into a hospital because they don't want to be quarantined next to someone who has Ebola, single patient room be damned. Instead they'll take all this nonsense about how it's hard to get Ebola and rationalize to themselves that they don't actually have it, so why bother getting locked up with people who actually have it.
>Why do people keep saying it's a fairly difficult disease to spread, when a health worker in the US contracted Ebola, even while wearing protective gear.
When has any public official ever told the truth when the news is grim. Lets think what Bagdad Bob would say.
I have seen some speculation that the further the disease progresses, the higher the viral load will be, and the more likely it is to spread.
So when you are still up and about, you aren't as big a threat as when you are dying in a hospital.
Ebola is fairly difficult to spread, it is not very contagious, no matter what you might believe based on news reports.
If you want to look at a contagious disease, look at flu. The 2009 flu pandemic lead to hospitalization of ~200,000 people in the US alone within a few weeks [1]. Talking about the flu, you can somewhat guess the number of infected people to be much much higher.
The current Ebola outbreak lead to ~8,000 infected persons since its outbreak more than half a year ago in March.
As you see, Ebola is not very contagious when compared to the flu. Yet flu pandemics are usually restricted fairly well once they take off and people are aware.
I'm constantly reading people being afraid of Ebola mutating to make people survive longer so the virus can spread better. Influenza (Flu) is very good with that, yet not even the very contagious flu was able to cause a significant thread to mankind in the recent history.
Ebola is the cause for a humanitarian crisis in West Africa and we should put all our efforts to helping the people who are affected by it, rather than worrying about ourselves for no good reason.
Just because something's growth rate does reach the flu's growth rate doesn't mean that it's not contagious. The flu just happens to be extremely contagious. Ebola is still growing at an exponential rate, the rate just so happens to not be as steep as the flu's.
Even the CDC has predicted 1.4M people infected with Ebola in West Africa alone, at its current rate of increase. Who knows what the infection rate will be outside of West Africa. That doesn't sounds like something that is 'not very contagious'.
Also note that Ebola has 65-90% fatality rate (depending on type), while the flu usually has < 0.1%. As long as Ebola maintains exponential growth, it is much, much more serious than flu.
1. Ebola's rate of infection is ~1.5 - 2 new infections per infected persons [1] Even though this is an exponential rate, it does nowhere get near the rates of many other viruses. As such it is easier to restrict further infections than it is for most other infectious diseases.
2. The 1.4M people prediction from the CDS assumed no intervention or help from other countries and a collapse of the local healthcare systems. That's why I am saying that we should focus our efforts on helping the healthcare workers in West Africa.
> Who knows what the infection rate will be outside of West Africa
Way lower than the rate in West Africa, that is for sure. Ebola doesn't spread through the air, you have to get in direct contact with body fluids. You don't get infected by sitting in a bus or plane with someone, who is infected. Most of the infected people are healthworkers in a setting without protective clothing, even gloves are rare to come by.
Others are direct relatives who don't know much about ebola and who have burial rituals that are very different to the ones most of us are used to. It is very common in West Africa to wash out the mouth of dead persons and to kiss them goodbye. I am pretty sure this would not happen in the US or Europe, especially not if the deceased person died by bleeding out of all body openings.
A very large majority of ebola infected people in West Africa can't go to a hospital - there are no free beds at the moment. So they go back home to their families. THIS is how ebola spreads.
That's why we have to act, but not by panicking, but rather by sending well trained medical staff to help.
The nurse, who had all the protective gear, and still got
the Ebola virus really caught my attention. I don't think
we can afford to debate, or wiki the problem. I think it's
time to restrict travel--at least to the United States. I
gringe when I hear Americans flying back and forth to Sierra
Leone in order to mine gold and diamonds. I don't have any
great solutions, but if we start restricting travel to these
affected countries--the ruling class who have money, and power might take more of an interest in stopping this spread? I know these countries are poor, but in the mist
of the horrid poverty--there always seems like there's certain areas that politicians, and the wealthy end up living. Tell them(the haves) "no travel", and they might just find the money to educate and feed to poor if quarantined? (I wondered why Liberia was so mad at Eric Duncan for coming to America. I didn't feel the president
of Liberia really cared about our welfare. He didn't want
the U.S. to restrict travel?) Down vote me! I'm tired of trying to be so politically correct.
Isn't the virus as easy to spread as common cold? From what I read, you don't need a direct contact with someone's bodily fluids; you can proxy it through a doorknob or any other object both you and infected touch within (relatively) short period of time.
That is direct contact. Their fluid, under any circumstances, on a surface or not, be it their skin shaking hands, a Door handle after with viral load from their sweat, or them coughing up or sneezing out blood droplets . These are all "direct contact with bodily fluids"
Please note, that last example is not the same as sneezing spreading the flu. The flu will remain "airborne" for a period while the droplets of blood don't remain airborne, sure sneeze droplets can get some impressive travel but it's not the same issue, the virus is in the fluid. Medical rules for the appropriate protective gear boil down to "cover all skin" and either "filter breathing intake" or "closed circuit air if possible" ... None of these require a full airtight, spacesuit style seal around the body which is what is needed to protect from a truly airborne disease.
The flu gets a lot of its infectious capability from infecting our respiratory tract. Ebola... Not so much, sure it's damn infectious, but picture a "zone of infectious reach" the flu might get to you at 50 feet, Ebola will get you at 10 only in the worst cases, it's usually more like 5 or less.
There has never been an epidemic that didn't pass, otherwise none of us would be here. The question, of course, is how many Ebola will take before it dies out. His article didn't mention any figures along those lines.
That is survivorship bias. Just because the human race hasn't yet been completely wiped out by a pandemic doesn't mean that there is no possibility that a pandemic can kill every single human on Earth. The Black Death killed half of all Europeans, which is pretty horrifying.
And that was before people lived together in a hyperconnected global urban society that eats petroleum and breathes electricity. A virus doesn't have to kill half of the Europe or US to kicks the western civilization back to medieval.
Urban density back then was nothing comparable to what we have today. But still, the major issue is that feeding all those people heavily depends on long supply chains and energy infrastructure. In the US, only 2% of people are directly employed in agriculture, and that agriculture is working on "petroleum in, food out" basis.
The virus doesn't have to kill half of the population to cripple the west. It only has to disturb food production and energy infrastructure enough for modern civilization to collapse under its own weight.
There is quite a lot of resiliency hidden in animal feed. GMO field Corn and soy beans aren't the most exciting thing to eat, but the annual US harvest (~350 million metric ton of corn alone) provides something like years of calories per US person.
(I am presuming that it would be possible to bring in at least 1 seasonal harvest on an emergency basis, I don't think this is a huge assumption, especially given the way big harvests are already done, with specialist equipment starting in the south and working their way north)
True. The argument wasn't logically sound. Although, to be clear, I was not saying that there was no possibility as you're now claiming. And I'm not sure how your statement about the Black Death supports your argument. As we all know, the Black Death passed. It continues to pop up from time to time, but that's true of almost any disease.
Perhaps a more convincing statistic would be that Ebola does not have a 100% mortality rate. This would suggest that, technically, it will pass since there will be survivors. Again, I think people are more concerned about how quickly that will happen and if/when it will resurface, which it probably will.
To be clear, I don't believe this currently outbreak of Ebola is going to infect everyone, and I do believe it will pass. I'm just saying that there could very well be a pandemic some time in the future that does take a massive toll on the human population. The reason I say that is because it has happened many times in the past, even within the 20th century.
It would require an extremely extraordinary death rate to kill all humans.
It would require that three diseases with a 90% kill rate strike in quick succession to drive humanity down to a few million survivors. Not even the current outbreak of ebola is up to that kill rate, nevermind where the other two plagues would come from.
The more likely scenario is that an extremely contagious and deadly virus would wipe out enough people to start to destabilize our society, then we would wipe out more of ourselves.
Okay, substitute crazed survivors for the second of the three plagues, and famine for the third. Assume that both of these kill 90% of the people at the time.
That still leaves 7 million humans on the planet, and the ones most likely to be left at the end of that are also those most likely to have already dealt with basic security and food.
My point wasn't that it would be a good thing, just that killing ALL humans is a much harder task than it sounds.
It's enough for a virus to seriously disturb energy infrastructure. The cities will depopulate themselves. Civilization will fall as famine sweeps the nations.
My point wasn't that lots of people wouldn't die, it's that it's remarkably hard to kill all humans. Even if 90% of people died to a disease, people fighting killed 90% of the ebola survivors, and famine killed 90% of the fighting survivors, we'd still have 7 million humans left on Earth.
Nothing you've outlined even pushes us out of the millions of people alive range - not by a longshot, considering none of those things mentioned above would actually be 90% deadly. My point was entirely that it's not an existential threat to humanity, and the only things that can actually pose such a threat are environmental (eg, the planet enters a new ice age, but even this might not be existential) or astronomical scale (meteors, gamma ray bursts, etc).
Ed:
Using slightly more reasonable numbers of disease killing 60%, fighting after killing 60% of the disease survivors, and famine killing 60% of the fighting survivors, over one billion people would be left on the planet. A catastrophe bigger than anything we've faced before, for sure, but not an existential threat to the species.
Past performance may not be indicative of future results.
Obviously, we should heed the lessons of the past, but a virus like Ebola is not a static phenomenon and it's concerning that so many seem to have developed strongly-held assumptions. The number of medical personnel infected in this current outbreak is particularly worrisome and we don't yet understand the exact causes of this.
We do know that the strain in the current outbreak is different from those seen before, and that it's mutating[1]. Filoviruses have a rapid rate of mutation, and the longer the outbreak lasts, the more opportunity the virus has to mutate into a form that makes it harder to defeat. The speed with which Ebola kills those it infects is actually disadvantageous to the virus. Natural selection would logically favor a strain of the virus that didn't kill its hosts so quickly.
While a lot of speculation revolves around the possibility that the virus could become more easily transmissible, it would be just as worrisome if there were mutations that affected incubation time or the onset symptoms. These types of mutations could significantly complicate some the strategies we're relying on today, if not render them useless.
If we want to learn from the past maybe we should look at the Plague of Athens [1]. These were the symptoms:
"As a rule, however, there was no ostensible cause; but people in good health were all of a sudden attacked by violent heats in the head, and redness and inflammation in the eyes, the inward parts, such as the throat or tongue, becoming bloody and emitting an unnatural and fetid breath. These symptoms were followed by sneezing and hoarseness, after which the pain soon reached the chest, and produced a hard cough. When it fixed in the stomach, it upset it; and discharges of bile of every kind named by physicians ensued, accompanied by very great distress. In most cases also an ineffectual retching followed, producing violent spasms, which in some cases ceased soon after, in others much later.”
I wonder what this sounds like? The good news was it only killed between 1/3 and 2/3rds of the population.
I wonder why governments haven't dictated a 21+ day quarantine on any population center where someone is positive for Ebola. That should stop propagation on its tracks.
The reason why is the countries where the outbreak has occurred do not have the policing or military capacity to do this. A couple of the countries tried to enforce 3 days quarantines to slow down the spread but the population just ignored it, either through lack of care or lack of ability (when you are living day to day you don’t have much choice about working or not - don’t work, don’t eat).
I live in Braintree Massachusetts, and you may have heard that there's a person suspected of having Ebola in this very city. When I read about it, literally my very first thought was that we need to isolate my city until further notice. Don't get me wrong, I'm not relishing the thought of being stuck here, but we've got a responsibility to keep this thing from spreading. I still stand by that.
Ebola evolves. Each outbreak carries a number of distinct genetic changes [1] and there is a risk of a mutation (or a chain of mutations) that would accelerate transmission in unpredictable ways by interacting with new hosts.
This happened in the past with Yersinia Pestis that wiped out half of the world population through fleas.
I'm not sure sure why there is no centralized effort to accelerate research but rather top virologists focus on logistics of moving dead bodies.
>I'm not sure sure why there is no centralized effort to accelerate research
Your answer is right at the bottom of the science article.
"In memoriam: Tragically, five co-authors, who contributed greatly to public health and research efforts in Sierra Leone, contracted EVD and lost their battle with the disease before this manuscript could be published: Mohamed Fullah, Mbalu Fonnie, Alex Moigboi, Alice Kovoma, and S. Humarr Khan. We wish to honor their memory."
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadThat usually means find more data!
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle - but for someone in the US who doesn't work in a hospital, at least for now, you have nothing to worry about. If it starts spreading in the US, that is the time to start worrying (as an individual who doesn't work in the industry)
I'm not saying doctors and scientists in this field shouldn't be worrying or doing anything about it - what I'm saying is if you are not one of those people and you're not traveling internationally, there is no logical reason for you to even think about it for the time being - things may change for the worse, but until then it is unnecessary worry for something you have absolutely no control over.
So when someone says, "Ebola might mutate to become a flesh-eating flying monkey" (which is true, by the way, given enough time) they may as well be saying, "Ebola might not mutate..." Both statements are equally true, but they have chosen to say only one.
Why? What actionable information is contained in that choice? I can't see any. Nor (one hopes) does it express their desired outcome.
Statements like "Ebola could mutate..." appear to me to be some kind of verbal reassurance behaviour. From this I infer that they are motivated primarily by fear, and one of the things fear does in social primates is--rather like a virus--spread itself. About which I will now proceed to speculate in an unfortunately data-free way.
People are hierarchical animals, and when we're afraid we feel better if we're not as afraid as everyone else, so we tend to do and say things that will raise alarm in others. Being afraid lowers one's status in the group (and lower status often leads to more fear). There are two ways of dealing with this: reducing one's own fear, or increasing fear in others. Again, this is purely speculative: I've searched around a bit but can't find any research that bears directly on this question. It would be interesting to see it investigated, and relatively straightforward to do.
So "Keep Calm and Carry On" is a good motto to have. It helps us focus on maintaining our place in the monkey hierarchy by controlling our own fear, rather inducing fear in others. And given how frequently fear runs out of control and leads to uncivil behaviour, this seems like a desirable result.
However, patient's don't become infectious until they start showing visible symptoms. Not only that, the symptoms are pretty obvious. Compounding all of that, the vector by which the virus travels is one of the "slowest" routes available.
What I think this outbreak does show however, is that we as a global peoples, need to really rethink how we treat and handle the spread of disease.
Are they? The guy in Dallas originally reported with nothing more than abdominal pain. While he quickly deteriorated after that, was he already contagious at that point?
If a health worker with protective gear can contract Ebola, imagine how easy it is for someone infected with Ebola to transmit the disease on an airplane or a restaurant. If they start vomiting around people, and splatter the people around them, will those people not get infected? Will the workers who try to clean up the mess not get exposed as well?
The symptoms are obvious, but they are obvious symptoms for much more innocuous diseases as well, so it's easy to miss.
Health workers contracting it means that their needs to be either more protective measures or better training to help prevent mistakes.
Because that is the truth.
When someone is working in close quarters to the disease they are substantially more likely to catch it, no? You can wear all the protective gear you want, if protocol for taking off the gear is not followed 100% every single time, you open yourself up to infection. Combine that with fatigue, mistakes happen unfortunately often.
If you are just out walking around coming into normal contact with people, it is incredibly difficult to spread.
Right now we can trace people back to those that traveled in West Africa so it make identification relatively easy.
But once the disease spreads to the point where people who haven't been to West Africa start getting it, then what are we going to do? Quarantine everyone who starts showing the most basic Ebola symptoms, which are high fever and abdominal pains?
And if Ebola starts spreading, what will we do with people with suspected Ebola? Put them in the same facility as those with Ebola? That will drive people to not report their symptoms, increasing their chances of spreading it to others. It's the exact same thing that happened in Africa, and Americans will behave the same way because it's simple Game Theory. If I have Ebola symptoms, and that means I'm going to get stuck into a facility where other Ebola people are, I'd rather just pretend I don't have it because "chances of infection are so low, I probably don't have it."
Think for one second here. If someone makes it into a crowded location and starts puking, do you think people are going to move towards the puking person or get the hell away? Whereas in a hospital if a patient starts puking is a nurse going to move towards the puking patient, or away?
But at the end of the day this is 100% speculation. You are not qualified to have an opinion on the matter and neither am I. This is why I trust the doctors and scientists who are far more qualified to have an opinion when they say there is - for the time being - nothing to worry about.
And that's stupid to say I'm not qualified to have an opinion. I don't need to be a doctor to be allowed to have an opinion. I look at what the so-called experts claim, and understand that what I'm seeing in reality doesn't match what they say. And in fact, my opinion matches what other "experts" are questioning, a la LA Times article[1]. So, yes, I am qualified enough to have an opinion just by using simple common sense. You can feel free to be a good sheep and listen to what you're told, but I prefer to think for myself.
And to be clear, I'm not worried I'm going to get Ebola. I just don't like it when I keep reading in the news that Ebola is extremely hard to catch, when it's obvious that it's not based on the evidence of who and how people are contracting it.
[1] http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-ebola-questions-20141007...
I don't know about you, but I personally am not in the habit of exchanging bodily fluids with random strangers in crowded places, and I have been on buses where people have thrown up--amongst other things--and never once worried that I was getting splashed by anything untoward. Based on that experience I judge the odds of random-stranger transmission to be low. Not zero, but low enough to not be a significant factor in the spread of the disease.
With regard to your "simple game theory", you are assuming that people in charge of quarantine and triage are idiots. They are not. They have thought this through. In quarantine patients will be sufficiently isolated from each other to prevent transmission. This is just basic, dumb-as-rocks first order protocol, which you didn't even bother to look up before posting: http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/hcp/infection-prevention-and-co...
Read the very first item in the table: "single patient room".
Are you sure? What about touching the same doorknobs or handles in trains as other person? Are you always wearing sterile gloves and always wash your hands (with a foot-operated faucet) before scratching your face when it itches?
If not, you are exchanging bodily fluids with random strangers much more often than you think.
And as to the quarantine protocol, you have missed my point. My point is people with symptoms will be scared to be admitted into a hospital because they don't want to be quarantined next to someone who has Ebola, single patient room be damned. Instead they'll take all this nonsense about how it's hard to get Ebola and rationalize to themselves that they don't actually have it, so why bother getting locked up with people who actually have it.
When has any public official ever told the truth when the news is grim. Lets think what Bagdad Bob would say.
I'm constantly reading people being afraid of Ebola mutating to make people survive longer so the virus can spread better. Influenza (Flu) is very good with that, yet not even the very contagious flu was able to cause a significant thread to mankind in the recent history.
Ebola is the cause for a humanitarian crisis in West Africa and we should put all our efforts to helping the people who are affected by it, rather than worrying about ourselves for no good reason.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic
Even the CDC has predicted 1.4M people infected with Ebola in West Africa alone, at its current rate of increase. Who knows what the infection rate will be outside of West Africa. That doesn't sounds like something that is 'not very contagious'.
2. The 1.4M people prediction from the CDS assumed no intervention or help from other countries and a collapse of the local healthcare systems. That's why I am saying that we should focus our efforts on helping the healthcare workers in West Africa.
> Who knows what the infection rate will be outside of West Africa Way lower than the rate in West Africa, that is for sure. Ebola doesn't spread through the air, you have to get in direct contact with body fluids. You don't get infected by sitting in a bus or plane with someone, who is infected. Most of the infected people are healthworkers in a setting without protective clothing, even gloves are rare to come by. Others are direct relatives who don't know much about ebola and who have burial rituals that are very different to the ones most of us are used to. It is very common in West Africa to wash out the mouth of dead persons and to kiss them goodbye. I am pretty sure this would not happen in the US or Europe, especially not if the deceased person died by bleeding out of all body openings.
A very large majority of ebola infected people in West Africa can't go to a hospital - there are no free beds at the moment. So they go back home to their families. THIS is how ebola spreads.
That's why we have to act, but not by panicking, but rather by sending well trained medical staff to help.
[1] http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1411100#t=article
You can't take one anecdote and extrapolate from that.
Please note, that last example is not the same as sneezing spreading the flu. The flu will remain "airborne" for a period while the droplets of blood don't remain airborne, sure sneeze droplets can get some impressive travel but it's not the same issue, the virus is in the fluid. Medical rules for the appropriate protective gear boil down to "cover all skin" and either "filter breathing intake" or "closed circuit air if possible" ... None of these require a full airtight, spacesuit style seal around the body which is what is needed to protect from a truly airborne disease.
The flu gets a lot of its infectious capability from infecting our respiratory tract. Ebola... Not so much, sure it's damn infectious, but picture a "zone of infectious reach" the flu might get to you at 50 feet, Ebola will get you at 10 only in the worst cases, it's usually more like 5 or less.
The virus doesn't have to kill half of the population to cripple the west. It only has to disturb food production and energy infrastructure enough for modern civilization to collapse under its own weight.
(I am presuming that it would be possible to bring in at least 1 seasonal harvest on an emergency basis, I don't think this is a huge assumption, especially given the way big harvests are already done, with specialist equipment starting in the south and working their way north)
Perhaps a more convincing statistic would be that Ebola does not have a 100% mortality rate. This would suggest that, technically, it will pass since there will be survivors. Again, I think people are more concerned about how quickly that will happen and if/when it will resurface, which it probably will.
It would require that three diseases with a 90% kill rate strike in quick succession to drive humanity down to a few million survivors. Not even the current outbreak of ebola is up to that kill rate, nevermind where the other two plagues would come from.
That still leaves 7 million humans on the planet, and the ones most likely to be left at the end of that are also those most likely to have already dealt with basic security and food.
My point wasn't that it would be a good thing, just that killing ALL humans is a much harder task than it sounds.
My point wasn't that lots of people wouldn't die, it's that it's remarkably hard to kill all humans. Even if 90% of people died to a disease, people fighting killed 90% of the ebola survivors, and famine killed 90% of the fighting survivors, we'd still have 7 million humans left on Earth.
Nothing you've outlined even pushes us out of the millions of people alive range - not by a longshot, considering none of those things mentioned above would actually be 90% deadly. My point was entirely that it's not an existential threat to humanity, and the only things that can actually pose such a threat are environmental (eg, the planet enters a new ice age, but even this might not be existential) or astronomical scale (meteors, gamma ray bursts, etc).
Ed:
Using slightly more reasonable numbers of disease killing 60%, fighting after killing 60% of the disease survivors, and famine killing 60% of the fighting survivors, over one billion people would be left on the planet. A catastrophe bigger than anything we've faced before, for sure, but not an existential threat to the species.
Obviously, we should heed the lessons of the past, but a virus like Ebola is not a static phenomenon and it's concerning that so many seem to have developed strongly-held assumptions. The number of medical personnel infected in this current outbreak is particularly worrisome and we don't yet understand the exact causes of this.
We do know that the strain in the current outbreak is different from those seen before, and that it's mutating[1]. Filoviruses have a rapid rate of mutation, and the longer the outbreak lasts, the more opportunity the virus has to mutate into a form that makes it harder to defeat. The speed with which Ebola kills those it infects is actually disadvantageous to the virus. Natural selection would logically favor a strain of the virus that didn't kill its hosts so quickly.
While a lot of speculation revolves around the possibility that the virus could become more easily transmissible, it would be just as worrisome if there were mutations that affected incubation time or the onset symptoms. These types of mutations could significantly complicate some the strategies we're relying on today, if not render them useless.
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/ebola-...
1. The size and the number of people infected.
2. The geographical scale. No outbreak has ever been anything other than localised.
3. It is spreading in urban areas. All previous outbreaks of Ebola have been rural.
If any of these differences are important then we can’t really look to past outbreaks to know what is going to happen.
"As a rule, however, there was no ostensible cause; but people in good health were all of a sudden attacked by violent heats in the head, and redness and inflammation in the eyes, the inward parts, such as the throat or tongue, becoming bloody and emitting an unnatural and fetid breath. These symptoms were followed by sneezing and hoarseness, after which the pain soon reached the chest, and produced a hard cough. When it fixed in the stomach, it upset it; and discharges of bile of every kind named by physicians ensued, accompanied by very great distress. In most cases also an ineffectual retching followed, producing violent spasms, which in some cases ceased soon after, in others much later.”
I wonder what this sounds like? The good news was it only killed between 1/3 and 2/3rds of the population.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Athens
This happened in the past with Yersinia Pestis that wiped out half of the world population through fleas.
I'm not sure sure why there is no centralized effort to accelerate research but rather top virologists focus on logistics of moving dead bodies.
[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6202/1369.full
Your answer is right at the bottom of the science article.
"In memoriam: Tragically, five co-authors, who contributed greatly to public health and research efforts in Sierra Leone, contracted EVD and lost their battle with the disease before this manuscript could be published: Mohamed Fullah, Mbalu Fonnie, Alex Moigboi, Alice Kovoma, and S. Humarr Khan. We wish to honor their memory."