It is useful to remember that Ebola is transmitted through bodily fluids and isn’t airborne.
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Don’t be too sure about that. Predicting the properties of RNA viruses is like predicting the stock market. They mutate like crazy and an outbreak may end as it mutates away from the most virulent form.
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Well if you feed enough bodies through a woodchipper, it becomes effectively
airborne, but that’s straying into Coen Brothers territory.
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Worst Film Remake Ever: Run, Ebola, Run
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You need to start by understanding that these places are truly foreign to any place you have been, their reality is not just slightly off from yours, things are seriously different.
You probably have basic assumptions that doctors are always professional and well trained, diseases are mostly just clever little cells that can usually be drugged away, hospitals are always better for you than being home, you can trust clinicians even if you don’t know them and have no relation to them, haven’t paid them up front, etc, etc.
All of these things become can debatable when you get far enough into the back country. If funky space aliens came and whisked away a member of my family, dragged them off to their mother ship and said, “No, you can’t have him, he is going to stay here and die now”, even though he just had a cough and a few little scratches when I saw him, well I might just round up a few of the boys and go do the right thing for my kin no matter what crazy weird sh*t those godless freakazoid aliens tried to sell me.
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Fear. It’s the same reason a man in California with a drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis resisted treatment and fled a couple months ago. He is still ‘on the loose’ as it were, putting folks at risk: California manhunt for tuberculosis-positive patient - BBC News
Agreed. Remember the South African witch doctors and their vile cure for HIV?
Well, the good news (for the virus), is that it’s in Lagos and has claimed its first victim:
Lagos is a seething, but seething, city.
People can be exposed to Ebola virus from direct physical contact with body fluids like blood, saliva, stool, urine, sweat etc. of an infected person and soiled linen used by a patient.
Sweat. Lots of that in hot countries.
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Yep’ nice sweaty person in a crowded market/train station/etc could expose a lot of individuals. A first person (Google glass style) video sent to the authorities would likely cause a perfect terror response.
And related news today, the health minister for Nigeria confirms that a Liberian man died of Ebola in the Nigerian capital Lagos.
FYI: Abuja, not Lagos, is the capital of Nigeria. Lagos may be the largest city, but the capitol is hours away.
The one major difference (while it is fear either way, broadly speaking) is that TB is not something you want running around the population, especially the drug resistant kind; but it takes a fair while to kill you in many cases. Ebola, less so.
The TB guy is worsening his prognosis by running; but he’s also running from ~6months, possibly longer, of enforced isolation and hardcore treatment, presumably in order to do something more pleasant than medical jail. With Ebola, supportive care isn’t as valuable, even with treatment most will die; but the patient is vanishingly unlikely to enjoy much time on the outside before she dies or becomes too sick to survive without substantial assistance.
Ah, good news - she’s been found - turned herself in.
But oh dear:
She was one of dozens of people who have tested positive but are unaccounted for, our correspondent adds.
Ebola outbreak: Sierra Leone escaped patient dies - BBC News
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On the positive side, nigerian scams show a steady decline since
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I’m not gonna tell you what you already know, but I’ll also +1 your bafflement on this issue. I shouldn’t find the actions of the family so funny… but I do.
People everywhere defer to authority on so many issues, but when it comes to health issues the opposite often seems to be the case. Even otherwise rational people will buy into health SCAMs, despite the wealth of information that says otherwise.
Exposing yourself to likely death because you think you know better than an expert - Priceless.
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FWIW fuzzy never has basic assumptions.
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