Ebola

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That is quite incorrect.

The reason why ebola does not spread so fast is because it has only happened in rural Africa where people hardly move around. Patient zero was identified as a 2yr old kid who infected his sister/parents who then infected their relatives that had come from other villages for the boy's funeral. They took the disease to their villages. The only reason this outbreak is now spread over a couple of countries is because the health workers that were visiting those villages caught it and spread it in the cities they had come from.

Think on that for a few moments. Ebola is EXTREMELY contagious. Even though it requires close physical contact it is a fact that a drop of an infected person's fluids on your skin has a big chance of infecting you.

If a person with ebola (symptoms not yet showing) were to fly to the US and walk through the street of a major city... just the sneezing and sweat of this person touching others on the street can set of a massive pandemic. When the patient starts to bleed the first people who aid him, unaware of what it is, would get infected too. Lets say its an emergency room... with the way emergency rooms make you wait there is a big chance this person will one or two people in the wait room...once in the ER any nurse/doctor that touches his sweat or gets a squirt of blood on him gets infected. Since people can hemorrhage for many reasons the hospital will not enact quarantine and CDC alert until hours if not days later when the lab results or symptoms finally point to the unlikely Ebola. By then, there are dozens infected in the hospital and many dozens more on the street, unaware, who will in a week become infectious. Then you consider the people on the plane that were exposed, carrying on to other cities.

Ebola is seriously spooky. In our crowded cities its very difficult to control. In rural africa it tends to kill the carriers who are already isolated from much larger populations and the disease flames out because of that.

Finally, it does not spread like cholera. Most humans have a strong resistance to it, that is why cholera only strikes you if you are already in a weakened health state, are very young or old and have poor sanitation practices. On top of that, cholera is easily treated with generic antibiotics and even if you dont have access to those, just being given oral serums and nutritional supplements gives the patient a very high, almost guaranteed survival rate. There is no cure for Ebola and the bulk of human population has no resistance to it.

Gonna lock the driveway gate now.

I agree with everything you wrote. This point right here is where there is strong discussion of trying to contain the spread. There is talk of getting travel history on everybody who is presenting with fever or non-wound hemmorhage and quarantine for anybody with travel history to an infected area or for anybody for whom it isn't possible to get a travel history because they are unconscious.

And the front door, and the back door. And peer out the windows....

^^^If they try and break in I'm gonna spray them with Lysol,THEN take out them out.
Think I shall sprinkle some caltrops on the drive way in case they get past the gate.

http://youtu.be/Tnod9vtB4xA

meh the youtube link generator isn't working or its just me. *shrug*

[Mod. edit: now fixed. YouTube URL embedding will not work when the URL starts with "https" instead of "http" or when it uses the short-form address "youtu.be" instead of the full "youtube" form]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tnod9vtB4xA[/youtube]

Healthcare workers who follow proper PPE donning and doffing procedures and who practice proper hand hygiene have nothing to fear.



Wrong. Ebola is only spread by direct contact with the secretions from someone who is showing signs of infection. So don't play with the urine of a person who is bleeding from the eyes.



Wrong again. If this were the case then Nigeria would already be mostly infected, considering that several people have travelled there via air. It has been spread by healthcare workers, primarily. In many of those area, they reuse needles and have lax hygiene standards. This has been a major area of concern among the HIV activist community for quite some time.



With the amount of panic and paranoia currently being spread, do you think this an even remotely realistic scenario? There have already been facilities testing for ebola on patients with a fever and gastro-intestinal discomfort (as well as establishing a quarantine).



And again, if this were even remotely accurate, there would already be tens of thousands of cases (or more) throughout Africa.



True that. Its high mortality rate and the creepy bleeding scare the h*ll out of me, even though I know it is more likely that I will be struck by lightning twice or lose a leg to a shark than catch ebola.

All I'm saying is that the possibility for it to run rampant across the globe and decimate humanity is pretty much 0%.



There are plenty of people in those villages who did not contract the disease, despite being in close contact with the infected prior to wider awareness.



It spreads under similar conditions as cholera. It does interact with human physiology like cholera.

It is a Risk Group 4 Pathogen (UN classification), as well as high classifications by other world and US agencies, but that is based entirely on its mortality rate, not its transmission characteristics.

The catch is that the proper PPE is considerably more stringent than what is currently in place. This can change and will have to change but it's going to cost a lot of many to upgrade PPE to the necessary level for all hospitals where this could happen. Remember the photos of that American patient being taken to Emory? That PPE wasn't just stagecraft.




from the WHO FAQ, bolding by me




sonofghandi


I truly hope Dantac turns out to be wrong. It doesn't spread as easily as Influenza. But then again it does spread far more easily than HIV. The high and rapid mortality has been a limiting factor in past pandemics. But standard bloodborne pathogen precautions that protect against HIV are not enough to protect against Ebola. Re-using needles and having lax hygiene certainly doesn't help, but stricter hygiene and single-use needles are not sufficient for containment. If they were, the Emory wouldn't have needed that quarantine unit. The CDC is not currently recommending the level of precautions used at Emory (moon suits, quarantine unit) but I couldn't help but notice that they did use them at Emory. Even so, the recommendations are still pretty strict.
http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/hcp/infect ... tions.html


sonofghandi


Yes, Emory has a quarantine unit and the CDC can run the tests. But that is hardly routine in hospitals and certainly not currently in place.


sonofghandi


What Dantac worries about can be, must be, hopefully will be ameliorated by changes in current hospital policies. But what has kept it in check in Africa is not how difficult it is to spread but rather by how stationary people tend to be as opposed to more developed parts of the world.


sonofghandi


I don't think it will run rampant across the globe and decimate humanity either, but I do think it's more dangerous than you seem to think it is. Lots of diseases rack up a scary high body count without decimating humanity. That this one isn't airborne will keep it well below Influenza 1918 levels. But whether you personally are more likely to lose a leg to a shark than catch Ebola depends entirely on how you spend your time. If you are a surfer, the shark leg loss is far more likely. If you are a healthcare worker in certain places, the Ebola risk outpaces the shark leg loss. Emory didn't want any of its' staff to die which is a large part of why the famous precautions went in place.


sonofghandi


True, many in the villages did not contract it. But then again, no pandemic ever infects everybody. Influenza 1918 didn't but it went down in history as catastrophic anayway.


sonofghandi


No it does not. It has literally nothing in common with cholera which is a waterborne bacteria rather than a secretion borne virus. Cholera spreads when feces gets in the water supply. Ebola spreads when there is exposure to secretions containing the virus. The animal vectors for Ebola are animals common to Africa, a place where there are not a lot of sewage treatment plants. That isn't really what I'd call similar conditions.

It also interacts with human physiology completely differently from cholera. Ebola damages endothelial cells lining blood vessels. Thus the (frequently) fatal bleeding. Cholera does not damage cells directly (though it can grow on intestinal cells) but rather produces a toxin once it gets to the intestines. This toxin causes a diarrhea which can kill via dehydration and electrolyte imbalance. Literally nothing in common in the pathology.



True, generally the level 4 pathogens are airborne. This would be kicked down to level 3 if it didn't have such a high mortality rate. But that hardly makes it safe to be around unless you have pretty high level PPE.

It appears that the US military thought differently about it :




Alto it could also be because they wanted to develop medication/vaccines to protect troops deployed in certain parts of Africa against it.

There are also practical hurdles: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/could-ebola ... t-so-easy/

Not sure I trust the CDC.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/ ... 8L20140813

/\ CDC is government so go figure.
When they do anything rights it's more likely just a coincidence than intentional.....

The virus has also been shown to survive for several weeks in the semen of someone who has had it. So don't have sex with anyone who has recently had ebola.

If I remember correctly, the first verified ebola outbreak was as widespread as it was because the local hospital only had something like four syringes that they reused as necessary. So before long if they had any reason to give you an injection, you got ebola.

I'm also not particularly worried about much of an outbreak occurring in the US.

So you think that Socialism is the answer?

Socialism generally brings the higher levels down toward the lower levels, not the other way around.

You're thinking communist socialism. Look at the Scandinavian nations for a true, responsible application of socialism.

...and honestly, it IS preferable to bring down the higher levels towards the lower levels than to bring the lower levels to the high levels. The latter is and will always be an impossibility since economics is no different than the food chain: There needs to be a very big 'low' class upon which the 'higher' classes feed upon.

In very simply layman's terms and using it as an analogy:

Carnivore
Omnivore
Herbivore
Plants

Upper class
Middle class
Lower class
Poverty (chronic/long term)

What capitalism does is raise only a small segment from the lower to middle class, a VERY small amount from the middle to upper class. The lower class exists in a tug of war between staying in lower and falling into poverty while poverty is the bottom of the hole and they have the weight over everything on top of them. The system is rigged so that there always is a vast low and poverty class otherwise the entire structure collapses. Its the basics of capitalist economic theory: There must always be growth via cheap labor.

Socialism like in Scandinavia you have a very, very big middle class, a fraction of the upper class amount that is found in capitalist countries and a relatively small lower class plus virtually no poverty..and where there is poverty it tends to be temporary/transient. Now, does the middle class in these countries have the same cash at hand as capitalist middle class? No. But their quality of life is comparative with upper class living. Health care, housing, education and vacation times plus strict workforce laws to prevent employee exploiting (something that capitalist countries actually enact laws to encourage such exploitation).

But anyway, back to Ebola: We're seeing scares in the US here and there of people being admitted with what seems to be ebola symptoms... the individual cases are nearly maxing out the health response capability to track down people they come into contact with and containment... just ONE person is doing that. If there was indeed a walking infectious person these hospitals would get the one person one week...then five the next...then 30 the next... and it just grows exponentially after that. By the second week the health services simply don't have containment capability.

That's not socialism.

Americans often liken the Nordic model to a kind of ?hybrid? economics which features a blend of capitalist and socialist visions. According to Sociologist Lane Kenworthy, in the context of the Nordic model, "social democracy" refers to a set of policies intended to improve capitalism as opposed to a system to replace capitalism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model