I bet the large majority of those freaking out over this refuse to get yearly flu shots.
Technically correct, but we should be concerned about Ebola even if there is a zero possibility of getting it oneself. Think of your fellow human.
My neighbor and his sister died of it last week. I live in the United States. Iâm not concerned about ME getting it, but Iâm concerned about all those other people living in the affected area!
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Oh, I shouldnât be concerned because itâs merely an African problem?
I know somebody working at ELWA in Monrovia. He moved his family there last fall. The two Americans we keep hearing about are his colleagues and friends; when they fell sick, they became his patients. Iâm relieved that theyâll be treated in Atlanta, not so much for their sake, but because itâs enough of a burden to have dozens of EVD patients without two of them being your close friends.
Itâs scary to see the headlines. Itâs scary to see photos posted by my sonâs teenaged babysitter, behind-the-scenes photos of the Ebola ward, to recognize one of the people in the photos as somebody Donald Trump wants to keep off American soil. And now we wait, wait to see if the two Americans will recuperate, but Iâm also waiting to see that Dr. X and his family are safe and healthy too. It could easily have been them.
Donald Trump needs to shut his piehole. What else is new? But good people are worried about Ebola and itâs not something that should be dismissed.
I guess its just a matter of perspective. Itâs great to care about your fellow humans, but are we in the west as concerned about civil war in the region? Because thatâs claimed tens of thousands of lives. Ebola gets hysterical media coverage because it kills horribly and it is conceivable that those of us in the west could possibly catch it. We donât give a fuck about 50,000 people dying in a civil war because it doesnât directly affect us, thereâs no mention in the media of it, and those deaths slide by the wayside.
So yeah, it looks like a significant humanitarian challenge for the region, but whatâs motivated us to start worrying about significant humanitarian challenges for this region all of a sudden?
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Time from infection to symptoms: 2-21 days. Any info on at what point someone becomes infectious?
Because if they can still walk around, they represent a risk.
The cases arriving in the USA arenât the issue - itâs the people being infected and then flying to LA, only to start sneezing in a mall.
Do you even science?
Please, read up on Ebola, chicken little. The sky is intact. It is not falling.
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Flights are currently restricted from the quarantined areas.
According to WHO:
People are infectious as long as their blood and secretions contain the virus. Ebola virus was isolated from semen 61 days after onset of illness in a man who was infected in a laboratory.
They also note:
The incubation period, or the time interval from infection to onset of symptoms, is from 2 to 21 days. The patients become contagious once they begin to show symptoms. They are not contagious during the incubation period.
Direct contact with bodily fluids is considered required for infection. So, a realistic concern would be for the flight attendants handling anything the sick person ate or drank from on the flight if they were starting to show symptoms at that time. Other passengers might have some increased risk. The CDC did report on indirect transmission of the virus in monkey populations in lab conditions - where the air was recirculated. A plane could present the same health risk. During this outbreak, when a man sick with ebola hopped a flight from Sierra Leone to Lagos, health workers tracked down all the other passengers on the flight to make sure no one else had contracted the disease. At this time, thereâs still no record of human air transmission.
Ebola can live in a â â â â â or dry environment outside a host for five days. Thatâs why there are all the photos of people walking around quarantine areas with disinfection wands spraying everything down. You can get sick for days after a person who was ill left the scene. Quarantines are necessary when an outbreak occurs.
All that said, we do still have very low risk of ebola openly reaching the U.S. and having a major outbreak here. International airports in the U.S. are equipped with quarantine stations. 20 in the U.S. are currently active and have instructions on what to look for when finding passengers who may be ill with ebola. The goal is to stop the illness before it ever enters the country. If someone flies while still asymptomatic, at least no one on the plane or in crowded travel terminals will have been exposed - and that will have reduced further spread of the illness to other destinations.
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I thought the flow chart perfectly appropriate, after yesterday listening to a co-worker proclaim in an unconvincing stentorian voice of doom that âitâs a virus! nothing can stop it!â for much longer than necessary. I would have liked to respond in the vein of the chartâŚbut his feelings would have been bruised.
Is it a problem for West Africa? YesâŚI should think so. A 50+% mortality rate is nothing to sneeze atâŚso to speak. But Iâm very sceptical about the âwonât somebody think about the poor Africans?!â argumentâŚit is my experience that the vast majority of the (non-African) world could care less what goes on in those parts unless it is particularly heinous or somehow affects them in some small way.
Even a Rwanda/Darfur/Koney/#wherethehellarethosegirls zeitgeist awareness, rarely affects the outcomes in any significant way. Mostly because âawarenessâ does little to solve endemic problems. In this case it hardly helps that the Sierra Leoneans are hiding bodies from the health authoritiesâŚbut if you keep people in a backwater repressed and cut off they will remain ignorant. Unintended consequences can result.
But hearing my goddamn fellow Americans catch their collective vapors over letting a sick American come back home to get treatment is actually rather annoying to me.
I guess being (relatively) rich, well fed, healthy and safe isnât enough for the human condition: we have to create plagues and hells and boogymen to scare ourselves silly. Almost makes me want to cook up a tasty meal of fricassee fruit bat for all those hypochondriac demagogues: Yum!
EVD is not naturally transmitted through the air. They are, however, infectious as breathable 0.8â1.2 micrometre laboratory generated droplets
If someone sneezed in my face - and Iâm not implying flu-capability aerosol - Iâd nonetheless freak out. A good sneeze with a good bit of spray. Nice. I challenge you to put it to the test.
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Thanks!
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Itâs not like anyone ever contracted an illness in a hospital that they died from before. Iâm not that concerned for myself, though Iâd rather not die of Ebola, or anything else, to be quite frank. If it takes a bunch of blogophiles and social net-workers from every walk of life to raise the fear to a point where their actions may spur groups to call for their lawmakers to speed help to our fellow humans suffering and dying in Africa, so be it. Even though the ensuing research and medications and assistance will mostly be based on self interest, it would still be more help than is happening now. Sometimes, putting the shoe on the other foot is not a bad thing. Mmm, I love the smell of fear in the morning.
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That appears to be an edit that wasnât part of the original post when it was first made on Saturday.
Ahhhhh!
I saw the line from first reading late Saturday evening ( GMT ), therefore I found the flowchart amusing in the context presented.
Youâre welcome. 
Ebola really is a very scary, messed up disease. So, the worst thing that people can do is have bad information about it. Thatâs the way to stay scared for all the wrong reasons - being afraid of the unknown.
People also do exactly the opposite - failing to show caution when things become commonplace. They arenât getting flu vaccinations, and for three of the last four years weâve reached epidemic levels in the U.S. Flu does kill - and at various ages - but people know it as disease, so theyâre not worried about it.
Anyway, I understand your concerns and why things like a sneeze to the face might just set you off. When it happens, just remember this: right now, in and on your own body, youâve got lots of the same stuff running around. Some of it good for you, some bad. What you think of as âmy bodyâ actually hosts a whole lot of other living organisms all the time - in fact thereâs more of âthemâ than âyouâ and without them youâd be dead. So donât be totally ickked-out by microbes. Theyâre an important part of you.
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Congratulations, in your ire, you have officially become part of the problem. Your one post included not one, but two major errors in fact.
First one:
Thatâs a major underestimation. The type of ebola that is currently spreading through West Africa is the most deadly form of the disease. It normally has a death rate of 90%. The doctor (an ebola researcher) who died during this outbreak was helpful in organizing treatment that reduced rates to about 70% - at a minimum.
Thatâs another bad one. The widest spread fruit bats (that do appear in populated areas) in West Africa arenât carriers. Only rural and forest bats have tested positive. I already posted this info in a past thread. Also, no one has found how the disease may be transmitted from bats to humans - only monkeys and apes have been observed as animals eaten by sick individuals. Because fruit bats are important pollinators, itâs a really bad thing to perpetuate the idea that ALL fruit bats are a human threat. Some plants rely on them.
Oh yes, and I enjoy the epidemiology of disease as much as the next person.
The thing I have with Ebola and other hemorrhagic diseases is the utter incapacity of our immune systems to fight it - looks like 9/10 without medication (even temperature control seems to help). The prevailing thought in the media appears to be âof course this couldnât happen here - thatâs Africa, after allâ - but Iâd bet itâd spread nice and fast in the right population.
The sneeze is an exaggeration of simple transmission; sexual contact is a good option for Ebola, as is caring for a symptomatic family member. Show it a crack in the door and in it will come, and weâll have quarantined hospitals etc. It would burn out in isolation, but weâd be shocked.
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Again - totally understandable. I donât think youâre being wacky with your concerns. The chance of you getting ebola is extremely remote, but itâs good for you to understand it as a disease. (7/10 if caught early and given fluids + temperature control - other forms of ebola are not as deadly as this one.)
Should a person incubating ebola land in the U.S., some people will get sick. Probably most of them will be family members and people in the hospital where that person seeks treatment. However, we most likely wonât see anything at all like West Africa. Even though people are distrusting of authorities here, they do mostly trust modern medicine when in real danger.
In Sierra Leone, health and Army officials were attacked by locals when they tried to create quarantine zones. A quarantine is necessary for ebola because it is so easily transmitted, and places where infected people have visited must be disinfected, and really shouldnât even be visited for the five days that the virus may be active. Itâs a question of safety for healthy people, not just containing those who are ill.
I donât think youâre trying to scare yourself, or whipping up a frenzy about a disease that likely wonât have a major outbreak here. I also agree that if we did have an outbreak, it would be shocker. People would likely blame the government, even though they have taken every reasonable step to control spread.
Which it still is⌠Obviously
âHave you had direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person?â
No. â âPlease shut the fuck up.â
Meanwhile, in todayâs post:
As Newsweek notes, Brantly and Writebol contracted Ebola âdespite wearing full hazmat suits while working with Ebola patients.â
⌠so maybe we donât yet know everything about transmission paths and ease of transmissibility yet, hmm? That wouldnât be exactly surprising since we have historically seen so few outbreaks of Ebola.
This outbreak is already well past the size at which epidemiologists had assumed any outbreak would necessarily âburn itself outâ based on past outbreaks, and weâve never yet had a case where a carrier rode on a plane or reached a major urban area like Lagos, so weâre already in relatively unknown territory. Maybe the outbreak will remain contained; or not. Thereâs a lot more global travel and connection than in the 1970s; I donât think weâve got a good idea on how this would play out if it ended up reaching Cairo or Mumbai, for example.
That doesnât mean OMG WE ALL GONNA DIE!, it means some moderate thoughtful worrying might be in order, particularly if it can lead to some sort of positive action.
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Yep. Ebola isnât the one. Flu does a much better job of replicating its DNA.
Horridly, it would be fascinating to see a simulated response to, say, five uncontrolled cases in a major city - i.e. five cases where the victims get medical help quite far down the line, having been in contact with 50 people each.
Would the media imagery have set up a hysterical response that could overload the medical system?
Edit: Ah. and presto: New York hospital treating patient who may have Ebola
