ebola, anyone else mildly terrified?

[zygalski]

otolith said:

Actually, it might not be as bad as it looks - are those cumulative totals? I'd like to see a plot of new cases against time.

See the Temporal evolution table halfway down this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_West_Africa_Ebol...

[otolith]

That's less worrying;

Edited by otolith on Wednesday 16th July 14:25

[andy_s]

tonyvid said:

2013BRM said:

smegmore said:

zygalski said:

Mobility of the population is the most worrying aspect of a modern pandemic.

Definitely, the availability of world wide air travel would mean the virus spreading at an exponential rate, a far cry from the Spanish flu of 1918.

I can recommend the book Hot Zone which is an accurate description of ebola and, to quote Stephen King, 'the most terrifying thing he has ever read'

Great book

Published by the same publishers King uses...as an aside.

[FredClogs]

Doctor in charge of stopping people from getting Ebola gets Ebola...

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-28439941

Uh oh...

[otolith]

Not unusual for it to infect and kill medical staff. Good barrier nursing should keep people safe, but they aren't working in space suits and accidents happen. Especially in third world hospitals.

[anonymous-user]

Ebola isn't a disease you would want to get

That said, I don't think it is the one that is going to cause a global pandemic in its current form - it doesn't spread well enough

[otolith]

At least bubonic plague is easily treatable with antibiotics and preventable with vaccine. Well, assuming that the Chinese story that the guy caught it from a marmot is true, and he didn't catch it from an accident at the biological warfare facilities that China doesn't have. Because the bw programmes that China does not have would, if they existed, which they don't, be very unlikely to be working with vanilla wild type plague when it's so easy to engineer multiple antibiotic resistance and vaccine resistance. If something like that got out, you wouldn't get away with putting the victim in an isolation ward, filling him with antibiotics and quarantining close contacts, you'd probably want to quarantine the entire city.

[otolith]

It's endemic in various parts of the world, including the USA. They get a handful of cases a year. It doesn't initially present as anything too unusual but rapidly goes downhill and becomes obvious. Naturally occurring antibiotic resistance is unlikely to be a problem unless someone starts medicating the wildlife - it's zoonotic with relatively infrequent excursions into the human population.

I'm not really serious about the possibility of a weaponised strain (though it has happened before, in the Soviet Union, with anthrax) but the Chinese actions do seem *wildly* disproportionate to a single naturally occurring case of plague. Compare and contrast to the way this case was dealt with in the USA;

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/girl-contracted-bubon...

[croyde]

otolith said:

It's endemic in various parts of the world, including the USA. They get a handful of cases a year. It doesn't initially present as anything too unusual but rapidly goes downhill and becomes obvious. Naturally occurring antibiotic resistance is unlikely to be a problem unless someone starts medicating the wildlife - it's zoonotic with relatively infrequent excursions into the human population.

I'm not really serious about the possibility of a weaponised strain (though it has happened before, in the Soviet Union, with anthrax) but the Chinese actions do seem *wildly* disproportionate to a single naturally occurring case of plague. Compare and contrast to the way this case was dealt with in the USA;

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/girl-contracted-bubon...

Gotta love the 107 degrees graphic

Glad the little girl was OK and kudos to the doctors for thinking outside the box, especially with a disease they had never encountered before.

[Art0ir]

otolith said:

At least bubonic plague is easily treatable with antibiotics and preventable with vaccine. Well, assuming that the Chinese story that the guy caught it from a marmot is true, and he didn't catch it from an accident at the biological warfare facilities that China doesn't have. Because the bw programmes that China does not have would, if they existed, which they don't, be very unlikely to be working with vanilla wild type plague when it's so easy to engineer multiple antibiotic resistance and vaccine resistance. If something like that got out, you wouldn't get away with putting the victim in an isolation ward, filling him with antibiotics and quarantining close contacts, you'd probably want to quarantine the entire city.

Been reading about that tonight, they're not taking any chances anyway!

[Driller]

Jesus Christ, yet more bloody propaganga to keep the masses terrified.

Take a look at how many people die every year in the UK from heart disease alone.

[otolith]

Everybody dies of something.

[FredClogs]

Driller said:

Jesus Christ, yet more bloody propaganga to keep the masses terrified.

Take a look at how many people die every year in the UK from heart disease alone.

You can't catch heart disease on a monday and suffer a horrible death by tuesday afternoon.

[zygalski]

otolith said:

Everybody dies of something.

I can think of better ways of going than having my insides liquefied over a period of a week or two.

[lamboman100]

The death rate for this latest Ebola outbreak has fallen from roughly ~90% to ~30% in recent weeks.

It is gradually coming under control.

[Driller]

FredClogs said:

Driller said:

Jesus Christ, yet more bloody propaganga to keep the masses terrified.

Take a look at how many people die every year in the UK from heart disease alone.

You can't catch heart disease on a monday and suffer a horrible death by tuesday afternoon.

Neither can/will you with ebola. You've probably got more chance of being hit by a meteorite

On the other hand as each day goes by you're adding a little more fur to the inside of your coronary (and other) arteries which may well give problems later on.

Not to mention all the other things people regularly due of rather than the ridiculous, outlandish crap they mention in the news.

But cardiovascular disease doesn't get anyone's attention because it won't happen to them but ebola definitely will

[otolith]

zygalski said:

otolith said:

Everybody dies of something.

I can think of better ways of going than having my insides liquefied over a period of a week or two.

Well, quite. The fact that we are all going to die eventually, probably from something we got because we live in an environment which keeps us alive for twice as long as we have evolved to cope with, does not imply that we shouldn't worry about a nasty communicable disease capable of cutting us down in days.

Not that I am worried about Ebola coming here, it's too hard to catch and too easily contained in a first world country. There is a risk of it becoming more easily transmissible - the Reston strain which doesn't make us ill is very similar to the Zaire strain which kills us, and is easily transmitted between monkeys without physical contact. Then I would be more worried, though we would still be able to contain it. I think it's pretty much inevitable that we are eventually going to have a pandemic of some zoonotic virus with high mortality, but I think an influenza is a more likely candidate.

[zygalski]

Well of course the main fear is that someone travels within 48 hours of contracting Ebola & only shows mild flu-type symptoms as they cough & splutter their way through, for instance, Heathrow.
Then it is very much our problem.

[otolith]

zygalski said:

Well of course the main fear is that someone travels within 48 hours of contracting Ebola & only shows mild flu-type symptoms as they cough & splutter their way through, for instance, Heathrow.
Then it is very much our problem.

Not with known existing strains it isn't. For instance, the bloke who caught Marburg in Kenya in 1980 was very sick indeed when he was put on a packed commuter flight from Kisumu to Nairobi, at the stage of vomiting blood. He got a taxi to the hospital and collapsed and started bleeding out in the waiting room. The only person he infected was the doctor in whose face he vomited.

Given where these things emerge, a more easily communicable strain would be likely to be spotted before anyone got anywhere near an airport. It is certainly feasible that someone could become infected with such a strain and manage to spread it round an international flight before anyone was aware that it existed, but unlikely, I think.

[zygalski]

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs103/en...

"The incubation period, that is, the time interval from infection with the virus to onset of symptoms, is 2 to 21 days"