Ebola outbreak 2014

[DB008]

CDC - 2014 Ebola Outbreak in West Africa

http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/2014-west-africa/index.html

Overview

The 2014 Ebola epidemic is the largest in history, affecting multiple countries in West Africa. There were a small number of cases reported in Nigeria and a single case reported in Senegal; however, these cases are considered to be contained, with no further spread in these countries.

One travel-associated case was diagnosed in the United States on September 30, 2014. On October 12, 2014, a healthcare worker at Texas Presbyterian Hospital who provided care for the index patient tested positive for Ebola. CDC confirms that the healthcare worker is positive for Ebola. For more information, see: Cases of Ebola Diagnosed in the United States. CDC and partners are taking precautions to prevent the spread of Ebola within the United States. CDC is working with other U.S. government agencies, the World Health Organization (WHO), and other domestic and international partners and has activated its Emergency Operations Center to help coordinate technical assistance and control activities with partners. CDC has also deployed teams of public health experts to West Africa and will continue to send experts to the affected countries.

Some predictions

The projections – the number of deaths from Ebola will double, and continue to rise, perhaps up to 1.4 million cases by January according to one estimate – inspire fear. Already 4,000 are dead, 3,700 children have become orphans. Many more have died but are not registered on World Health Organisation estimates.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/ebola-outbreak-could-lead-to-an-economic-disaster-in-west-africa-for-years-to-come-9789235.html

We have had Bird Flu and SARS recently, will Ebola be the new one the take out a few million people???

 

[Julia]

An item on tonight's "7.30" seems to have the health authorities here resigned to Ebola coming to Australia.

I don't often agree with Bob Katter, but with this disease for which there is no cure, I agree with his suggestion that we should have set up one quarantine point in Australia into which all people who have spent any time in West Africa over a given period while Ebola has been occurring there, should have to remain for the 21 day quarantine period before being permitted into our general population.

If nurses et al want to go over there and put themselves at risk, that's up to them. But their choice should not, on their return, put the rest of us at risk.

The US was dismissive of any possibility of the single Texas case morphing into others. But already a nurse who cared for that person now has the virus, despite apparently wearing all the protective gear. Another forty people are 'being monitored', whatever that means. If there is any possibility of this forty having contracted Ebola, how is it responsible for them to be allowed to circulate in the community?

What do others think?

 

[SirRumpole]

Don't take any chances, isolate anyone who has been in the area. As Katter said, you can give them a luxury holiday for three weeks and everyone will be happy.

 

[KnowThePast]

Vice news did a good documentary on the current situation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANUI4uT3xJI

I remember reading "Hot Zone" by Richard Preston about 20 years ago, it was one of my favourite books. To see his worst case scenario play out is unnerving.

Saying that, from what I know of the disease, it is not going to spread in developed countries, although isolated cases will almost certainly happen, given the scale so far. Given that, the cost of quarantining potentially a very large number of peole and risks of starting a panic need to be weighed against the benefits.

 

[CanOz]

I think China might be a worry. On one hand you've got the over reaction by the g'mint...then the denial by the people that have it, loss of face etc...

 

[CanOz]

Wouldn't it be interesting if Ebola somehow got loose in the ISIL crowd, brought in by some African splinter groups. They would of course, not want any western treatment. Perhaps that could be a fitting end to such an evil group.

 

[bellenuit]

Wouldn't it be interesting if Ebola somehow got loose in the ISIL crowd, brought in by some African splinter groups. They would of course, not want any western treatment. Perhaps that could be a fitting end to such an evil group.

Be careful what you wish for. It isn't beyond the bounds of imagination that some extreme Islamist, who might have considered being a suicide bomber, might instead deliberately infect himself or herself and then travel to a densely populated western city to spread it as widely as possible. Because the incubation period is a few weeks (I think), he/she may not show any symptoms on arrival, but once the symptoms start and the infectiousness increases he/she can then roam as many packed places as possible spreading the virus. Since the intent is to spread the virus, unlike others, he/she will not seek treatment so no one will be the wiser as to what is in their midst.

 

[Knobby22]

I have had red eyes from hay fever previously.

If it happens again I will become very scary to many and unable to work.

 

[basilio]

Be careful what you wish for. It isn't beyond the bounds of imagination that some extreme Islamist, who might have considered being a suicide bomber, might instead deliberately infect himself or herself and then travel to a densely populated western city to spread it as widely as possible. Because the incubation period is a few weeks (I think), he/she may not show any symptoms on arrival, but once the symptoms start and the infectiousness increases he/she can then roam as many packed places as possible spreading the virus. Since the intent is to spread the virus, unlike others, he/she will not seek treatment so no one will be the wiser as to what is in their midst.

As scary a scenario as you could possibly conceive. The US went over the top when 1-2 people came down with Ebola after a clear link with an infected person.

Wouldn't want to imagine how the reaction if your scenario was played out.

 

[Julia]

Be careful what you wish for. It isn't beyond the bounds of imagination that some extreme Islamist, who might have considered being a suicide bomber, might instead deliberately infect himself or herself and then travel to a densely populated western city to spread it as widely as possible. Because the incubation period is a few weeks (I think), he/she may not show any symptoms on arrival, but once the symptoms start and the infectiousness increases he/she can then roam as many packed places as possible spreading the virus. Since the intent is to spread the virus, unlike others, he/she will not seek treatment so no one will be the wiser as to what is in their midst.

I recently read a novel where the protagonist was an Islamist determined to deliver greater blow to the US than 9/11. He was a doctor and learned how to synthesise smallpox. Then took a job with a pharmaceutical manufacturing company, stockpiled an essential medicine destined for the US, then replaced the ampoules with identical looking ones of the smallpox.

Fiction, of course, and the good guys discovered what he was doing in time to intercept the shipment, but it was all entirely credible.

 

[luutzu]

I have had red eyes from hay fever previously.

If it happens again I will become very scary to many and unable to work.

You'd be locked up, quarantine... and if you're Arab-looking, god help you you terrorist infiltrator bending on infecting us all.

 

[basilio]

It is frighteningly easy to come up with any and all types of whipping boys when diseases and disasters occur.

When people are dropping like flies whatever rational thinking that exists disappears as everyone hunts for a "cause", "reason" or just an excuse to trash a person or group they dislike or fear. Consider, for example, how the Jews were treated when the plague was sweeping Europe.

In the current climate, if Ebola gets out of hand in the First World you can bet your last dollar that Muslims will be swept up in the blame game - regardless of facts.

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

 

[Weatsop]

Ebola can't spread in Australia.

It is mostly spread in West Africa at funerals. Part of their funeral practices include communal washing of the body, as well as communal handwashing. A fair amount of the water ends up in eyes and mouths.

We just don't do that here.

It's been very hard to convince the people there not to continue these practices. Look up the god-awful history of the region and you'll see that people generally have a pretty good reason to distrust the government. There are plenty of rumors going around about how to protect yourself, and these rumors are given as much weight as advice from medical authorities.

A lot of these people have never seen a consistently effective healthcare system. They've never been able to afford a real doctor. They don't have any reason to trust medical advice.

The region is so poor, hospitals often can't afford to feed the patients. Supplies often get stolen. Patients often leave to buy food, or leave altogether to go to a supernatural healer of some kind, or just give up on the hospital as a waste of time.

And the hospitals are the other place people catch it - caring for the ill. Proper barrier nursing should be close to 100% effective (so in Australia we might see one or two healthcare workers catch it, at most, and almost certainly none, even if we get a lot of infected travellers). Lack of supplies, and poor education, experience and compliance in their use in West Africa is compounding the problem there.

Some of the healthcare workers who have caught it are people who just aren't experienced in barrier nursing. It takes practice and discipline not to scratch under your goggles. Just-trained staff are notoriously bad at it.

In Uganda and even far west DR Congo, it's been stomped flat very fast, because the people there have seen it before and know what to do. This is a new region, populated by desperately poor, uneducated people, who don't trust authority. It's perfect ground for Ebola.

I would bet any amount of money that Australia would not see even a second generation here (that is, we might get a patient zero, who might infect one or two other people, but that's the end of it - those one or two will never get to infect any more).

As a virus, it can't grow or spread in water. Even with bodies directly in waterways, the virus would be too dilute to infect anyone. And it doesn't spread if you're not showing symptoms.

So yeah, we've got nothing to worry about.

 

[Weatsop]

I recently read a novel where the protagonist was an Islamist determined to deliver greater blow to the US than 9/11. He was a doctor and learned how to synthesise smallpox. Then took a job with a pharmaceutical manufacturing company, stockpiled an essential medicine destined for the US, then replaced the ampoules with identical looking ones of the smallpox.

Fiction, of course, and the good guys discovered what he was doing in time to intercept the shipment, but it was all entirely credible.

With a few hundred grand and maybe five years, anyone could synthesise smallpox. The genome is public knowledge, and you can buy primers online nowadays. You'd need to be tricky about your purchases, but you'd get there eventually.

There are plenty of easier ways to use bioterror weapons, too. Easy stuff. Hell, get a sample of foot and mouth and slingshot it into some Aussie feedlots. Get some bacterial pneumonia and drip feed it antibiotics until it's totally resistant. Wait for the next SARS or whatever, and nab a patient, to infect volunteers and spread it among your enemies.

Terrorists are idiots, thank god.

 

[Julia]

It is frighteningly easy to come up with any and all types of whipping boys when diseases and disasters occur.

When people are dropping like flies whatever rational thinking that exists disappears as everyone hunts for a "cause", "reason" or just an excuse to trash a person or group they dislike or fear. Consider, for example, how the Jews were treated when the plague was sweeping Europe.

In the current climate, if Ebola gets out of hand in the First World you can bet your last dollar that Muslims will be swept up in the blame game - regardless of facts.]

That's just silly. There was nothing of racist or religious origin applied when any of the nurse in Spain, the returning citizen to the USA from W. Africa, or the North Qld nurse developed what appeared to be symptoms of Ebola.

Try to find a compromise with your biases and reality.

Meantime, the USA has taken the supposedly deciding step of declaring five (yes, just five) of its airports points where incoming passengers will be screened for Ebola. This apparently constitutes taking of their temperature, (often useless in early stages of the incubation period), and the asking of questions.
Wow. That will fix it.

Meantime, the UK has also introduced screening at Heathrow. It is voluntary.

 

[Weatsop]

That's just silly. There was nothing of racist or religious origin applied when any of the nurse in Spain, the returning citizen to the USA from W. Africa, or the North Qld nurse developed what appeared to be symptoms of Ebola.

Try to find a compromise with your biases and reality.

Meantime, the USA has taken the supposedly deciding step of declaring five (yes, just five) of its airports points where incoming passengers will be screened for Ebola. This apparently constitutes taking of their temperature, (often useless in early stages of the incubation period), and the asking of questions.
Wow. That will fix it.

Meantime, the UK has also introduced screening at Heathrow. It is voluntary.

1. You can't spread it if you're not showing symptoms yet.

2. 100% of all clinical cases have had a fever - unlike with SARS and influenza, this may be the first time thermal scanners have been useful for anything other than theatre.

3. Obviously you can't screen people at the airport if they're in the incubation phase, but if you can catch people who are showing symptoms who just spent hours with their elbow up against the person next to them, and then isolate that person.

But most of all:

4. Security theatre is a useful and practical thing. Are you lying to people if you imply you'll stop Ebola at the airport? Absolutely. But then, the chances of you catching Ebola is essentially zero. So anything that makes people feel safer is helping them have a more realistic view of the situation. A TRUER view, if you like.

This is a case where a lie can be truer than the truth. The lie is that screening will help much. It won't. But the truth is that screening isn't really necessary. You're perfectly safe, or as close to perfectly as you'll ever get with any virus.

Ebola could mutate to become airborne. But any of probably millions of virus species - most of which we can't even detect - could also mutate into a killer. One day, one of them will. On a long enough time scale it's inevitable. But the chances it'll be this one? Very damn small. It's still the same basic disease we've known about for decades.

 

[Knobby22]

1. You can't spread it if you're not showing symptoms yet.

You hope. And how subtle may the symptoms be before you can spread it?

And it appears US hospitals aren't that good. The nurses said their outfits were not complete.
We know the public hospital situation over there is in a state of parlance as is the number of ghettoes now existing within the population where the disease may spread uncontrollably (since they have no access to healthcare).

If that new nurse managed to spread it to 20 other people while getting her wedding ready, I can really see a chance that the US will fail to cope.

And what about the possibility of carriers that exhibit very few symptoms and ill effects? And do we really have a good understanding of the virus?

We shall know in the next month.

 

[skyQuake]

From quora link

This is NOT the end of the world. As deadly as Ebola is, it's actually rather terrible at spreading itself.

1. It is only contagious via bodily fluid. The best pandemic virus are spread through the air. It's the most efficient way to get a whole plane full of people sick. You have no more chance of catching Ebola from sitting next to someone on a plane or a train than you would of catching Herpes. Not gonna happen.

Edited again: Some people are confused about "airborne". Yes, if someone with active Ebola coughs in your face, you can get Ebola that way and I suppose that for the 2 seconds it's in the air, it's "airborne". Ebola is not "airborne" in the sense that a cold or flu virus is airborne in that the virus can not hang around in the air waiting to infect people, it can't survive in air filters or on surfaces. A truly airborne virus can infect a whole room full of people with one person's cough. Ebola is not airborne.

The other tremendous disadvantage Ebola has is that it doesn't typically cause coughing or sneezing like a cold virus. It causes bleeding out of various unpleasant orifices. That's certainly very unpleasant, but doesn't spread the virus like a good cough or sneeze.

2. It is only infectious once you are showing symptoms. So even in the incubation period, the person carrying it can't spread it. And when the carrier starts showing symptoms, they're incapacitated within hours. This is a terrible way to spread disease. A really efficient pandemic virus would give the person the sniffles and slight headache for a week or so before taking them out so that the person will ride the train, go out to dinner, go to work, etc. Diseases don't spread well when the person is at home sick in bed while they're infectious.

3. The only reason Ebola has spread as much as it has is because it started out in ideal disease-spreading conditions - poor countries with poor medical care, among people who have little trust for their governing authorities, who generally aren't sufficiently educated to understand the importance of quarantine, and who have funeral rituals which involve touching the dead body. Ebola would never survive in the United States or any other first world country with good medical care and with the ability to quarantine as needed.

Edited to add:

Can Ebola be transmitted by mosquitoes? Nope. Mosquitoes aren't a natural host. Sure, mosquitoes can bite people who have Ebola, but the virus will die inside the mosquito. Same with ticks and other biting insects.

Will Ebola become airborne? Almost certainly not. The virus is incredibly delicate. Even if you just dry out a bloody rag contaminated with Ebola, the virus will die. And the virus hasn't mutated significantly since it was found in 1976, so the odds of it mutating to be able to survive in the air are pretty darn slim. Not to mention that Ebola doesn't cause coughing and sneezing, two of the best ways for an airborne virus to spread, even if it does become airborne on some off chance.

Ebola is not intelligent, folks. Is it dangerous? Sure. Is it deadly? Absolutely. Is it intelligent? NO. Nor is it malicious. Ebola is not plotting world domination any more than that cold that's going around your office. It's just a virus. And we know how to deal with it. The only reason its survived this long is that it's popped up in the best possible place for it to survive - a place with terrible healthcare and with poor sanitation. It will die out again and it won't take over the world.

Don't panic. )

The more severe a disease is, the more airtime and retweets it gets. Ebola is very high in severity, exacerbated by the fact it has no (commercially viable) know cure.


However it is absolutely terrible at spreading (as above)

 

[darkhorse70]

Dont let citizens go to Africa and back. Compromises have to be made. One guys holiday puts the whole country at risk.

Either way if sh*t hits the fan, Ill just go live in the bush's away from any human contact.

Could also just be another scare tactic like bird flue,SARS etc.Take peoples attention off stuff that really matters. Plus the news is just gunning for cases to surface. It makes for good news.

 

[Weatsop]

You hope. And how subtle may the symptoms be before you can spread it?

This is a disease that has been around for decades. It has not changed. 100% of all infectious cases had a fever. We know this due to excellent work tracking contacts in every breakout. Without exception, every single case after the first had close contact with a symptomatic Ebola carrier.

The virus is shed in bloody vomit and faeces. It's hard to miss. If you are puking blood, you are infectious.

----

Dont let citizens go to Africa and back. Compromises have to be made. One guys holiday puts the whole country at risk.

Either way if sh*t hits the fan, Ill just go live in the bush's away from any human contact.

Could also just be another scare tactic like bird flue,SARS etc.Take peoples attention off stuff that really matters. Plus the news is just gunning for cases to surface. It makes for good news.

Read the thread. Compromises do NOT have to be made. You are at absolutely no risk of catching Ebola in Australia, unless you are a frontline healthcare worker and suck at barrier nursing.

No-one sells papers where the headline is "Everything is fine". Obviously the more dire headlines sell more papers. It's not a conspiracy, just bloody obvious.

Both SARS and H5N1 were important because we DIDN'T know what they could do. They were new, unlike Ebola. We did need to take precautions - and the World Health Organisation's success in shutting down SARS before it got established almost certainly prevents a couple of million deaths a year.

In gratitude, the people of the world assume they were just lying about SARS in the first place...

You can't catch Ebola in Australia. It wouldn't matter if a thousand infected people arrived, it can't spread here.

There are plenty of better things to be scared of.