Thread: What Does The Ebola Outbreak In West Africa Mean For The World?

Hide your kids, hide your wife.

There are so many things horrible about this situation. When news of ebola coming out of africa was first going around, it felt like to me, that no one cared. Because "its africa" and that's what "happens" in africa, ebola.

And maybe its because people didn't care about africans, or naively believed that horrible things like this only happens to africans, that the world didn't take it seriously. Why are the borders open?

I'm upset that Duncan wasn't honest. But I'm even more upset that my government didn't close the damn border and just lets people from a country with an out of control epidemic just fly in here. I'm upset that the hospital in dallas initially turned him away.

And I'm upset that people continue to dumb down the situation. When duncan arrived here, all I heard from friends and family were "oh he's gonna be fine, he's gonna get AMERICAN treatment" because were so much magically better than africans. Well that American treatment didn't do a lick of difference.

The american health system couldn't save duncan and they completely failed to keep the nurses safe. Who else? The CDC failed to give them proper equipment or protocol. Why did the CDC let a nurse, who was with Duncan for days, on a plane? Shouldn't every single person who came into contact with him when he was clearly contagious, be under a much more stricter quarantine?

Isn't it only logical that all medical staff risking their lives to tend to the dying be under quarantine themselves for those 21 days? Yes, we need to go there. This isn't like malaria, this isn't like aids. It is that contagious and it is for the most part, its death hanging over your head.

Its horrible, its evil, its suffering. I'd rather have euthanasia.

Why, do i have to go to DFW this weekend?

Originally Posted by juroara

Why, do i have to go to DFW this weekend?

Don't get sick...We all know how hospitals are really good at cleaning.

I'll come up with a bit more information later I hope - still too lazy to search for citing-worthy material.
Besides the heartbreaking situation in west Africa, for which I lack any great hope considering the state of affairs politically, economically and culturally and the lack of means and determination put into the international efforts -

the most worrying thing is the great number of people and time which the virus has, and has had by now, to mutate in, and adapt to human hosts. It's evolutionarily bad for the virus to kill it's hosts so quickly, it's much better adapted to bush animals. It would profit, if the people kept living longer for the virus to churn out more copies of itself, and the carrying person to infect more new people. There's already a trend to be seen in this direction, the deadliness declines a bit, the duration gets longer. This makes it much more dangerous - people who carry it can't be identified quickly and can happily spread it on.
Also - forty percent of all deaths from it were counted in the last three weeks, as the BBC has reported, while the outbreak is going on for months already. Not good at all.
A huge problem will be famine - quarantine and the deaths themselves will lead to severe breakdowns in agriculture and food supply in already badly shook countries, suffering from left-overs from the civil-wars. It's going to get incredibly messy over there, that much seems to be for sure. They've definitively lost considerable amounts of this years harvest, and it will start to matter dramatically and soon.

It might sound as if I would bring the topic in, just because it's one of my topics - but superstitions and religious practices are considerably helping Ebola along. Like people touching and kissing and washing their deceased ones, hugging and kissing in religious services - and it's neigh futile to convince people of the dangers of these practices - burial instead of cremation, etc.,etc...
Worst are witch doctors, or less nastily said - traditional healers, who attract the sick and yet uninfected people, too - effectively providing paradise and vehicle for the disease to get a hold on whole populations by ignoring or denying the importance of even the most basic and primitive precautions.
And it's true for medical institutions working under improper conditions as well, unfortunately, if less badly - it's a major mess.
Then there are superstitions and paranoia towards medical personnel, esp. foreign personnel, the few ones actively taking up the fight.
With some understandable reasons, too, unfortunately - the paranoia, not the superstitions and allegations of malign intent on the helper's side of course...

I think we can expect singular or a few cases to be relatively easily containable in western countries, despite this lapse with the nurse in the US, but only if the virus stays as acutely deadly as it is. If it mutates to be a bit more benign and let people live longer and without signs of disease - well - then we could end up facing a major world-wide problem, I suppose.
It's quite embarrassing, that incident, but such things will be unavoidable - human error once more. Seems Germany has flown over it's personnel in suitable planes and all went by the book in the hospitals as well. One patient did fully recover, even, but that's within the normal rate of outcomes, he wasn't cured by medicine. What can be done is more or less just giving electrolytes - it's a desperate situation without a vaccine or medication. And if one would be developed - could it be distributed properly and "in time"? I doubt it, but that's the best hope, we've got.

Concerning closing borders - makes sense in Africa, to try and stop it from going bushfire over the whole continent - but closing all of Germany's or the US borders in general, like some people demand it, surely isn't indicated at the moment.
Consider the impacts of isolation on the economy - it's going to be a huge factor in the looming local financial catastrophe as well.

Originally Posted by juroara

Its horrible, its evil, its suffering. I'd rather have euthanasia.

Really? It's survivable, unfortunately not yet by any specific medicine, rather by chance and electrolyte substitution. But survivors might actually provide the key to developing a treatment or vaccine. One reason, maybe, to hang on in there, if it actually happened to you - at least it still doesn't take overly long, either way.

It's War with "creatures", who don't understand the concept of evil, they don't understand anything, but are programmed with a purpose, and they're constantly refining themselves for that purpose. It's a race - our determination*, intelligence and technology vs. their benefit of rapid evolution. RNA viruses like Ebola are even more prone to fast and flexible adaptation, because corrective measures against mutations during replication are less effective than in DNA-viruses. Maybe "mighty us" will never get a general handle on pathogenic microbes - them being able to sooner or later accommodate themselves to most anything we throw at them.

*or lack thereof...

My personal feeling is that its horrible that none of the World leaders thought it was a big enough deal to send help in Africa until an American Doctor got ill. Im glad Obama is sending help, but I think its a little late. Now its on our shores and sure, there are illnesses that kill more people every year like the common cold or tuberculosis, but Ebola kills and spreads so fast. I think the hospital in Texas failed miserably in their protocol and preparedness, but the rest of the modern world will learn from their mistakes hopefully. I guess it remains to be seen how affected and infected your country and Spain and America and others become, but really, some people are really freaking out about it. I keep a watch on the news about it, but don't dwell on it.

Originally Posted by juroara

And I'm upset that people continue to dumb down the situation. When duncan arrived here, all I heard from friends and family were "oh he's gonna be fine, he's gonna get AMERICAN treatment" because were so much magically better than africans. Well that American treatment didn't do a lick of difference.

"American" treatment for Ebola is far superior to Africa's for one simple reason: we have the infrastructure, protocols, and resources to contain and treat it. This is by no means perfect as we've seen with the two nurses having contracted the disease, but there's a reason why people are being brought here for treatment.

It seems that by the time Duncan began to receive treatment for Ebola, he was already too sick to be saved. It's unfortunate, and there were seemingly stupid errors made by the Dallas hospital, but even the best medical care can't save everyone.

As for closing borders, I'm of the mind that doing so would make the situation worse. Surely that would make it more difficult for medical aid to get through.

Originally Posted by BLUELINE976

As for closing borders, I'm of the mind that doing so would make the situation worst. Surely that would make it more difficult for medical aid to get through.

What an odd objection. Clearly they could still let medical aid go through without having to have completely open borders...

Originally Posted by cmind

What an odd objection. Clearly they could still let medical aid go through without having to have completely open borders...

Well - closed as to the medical personnel having a chance to go back home through them. If they are infected, or not - they deserve to be treated in home countries with high standard modern facilities, if safe transport is guaranteed, just like they did it with the German personnel. Of course optimal treatment will considerably heighten their chance of full recovery, as BLUELINE pointed it out.
If you close the borders, you're sending them on a suicide mission of indeterminable duration. Who would go anyway, of the few who still want to go?

Difficult to try and safely separate the traffic - it's going to be a huge mess, there will be a need for a lot of back and forth, when the classical "humanitarian catastrophe" hits, logistics would be daunting, especially in countries with outmoded standards of technology and infrastructure, let alone competency in dealing with bio-hazards.

Originally Posted by StephL

Well - closed as to the medical personnel having a chance to go back home through them. If they are infected, or not - they deserve to be treated in home countries with high standard modern facilities, if safe transport is guaranteed, just like they did it with the German personnel. Of course optimal treatment will considerably heighten their chance of full recovery, as BLUELINE pointed it out.
If you close the borders, you're sending them on a suicide mission of indeterminable duration. Who would go anyway, of the few who still want to go?

Two points:

1) I don't see how that addresses what I said. There's a difference between letting specialized medical personnel travel back and forth, and having open borders to anyone. Is this really that difficult to understand?

2) If you volunteer to go to Liberia and help with an ebola epidemic, you are on a suicide mission, regardless of whether or not you can go home again. I think the people who go over there with their high ideals about helping the poor brown people*, get their ass infected, then come crawling back when it didn't live up to their white knight fantasy, are selfish and deserve scrutiny and screening before we let them come back. If you choose to go to a place with an ebola epidemic, you take your life into your hands.

*would there be as many volunteers if the epidemic was in a white country, I wonder?

Originally Posted by cmind

What an odd objection. Clearly they could still let medical aid go through without having to have completely open borders...

Perhaps, though I think closing the borders would needlessly complicate things. For instance, I'm imagining doctors and medical teams with aid all applying to be added to some kind of "travel approval" list. In the end they may be able to make it to west Africa to help, but they would surely be delayed. The reverse is true as well. Bringing back infected patients in order to take advantage of American healthcare could probably be a nightmare as well.

Either way, even considering closing the borders right now seems, to me, to be buying into the hysteria.

Originally Posted by BLUELINE976

Either way, even considering closing the borders right now seems, to me, to be buying into the hysteria.

What about ebola is hysteria? This is a virus with a combination of a very long incubation period and very high mortality rate. That's a dangerous combo. And although it isn't airborne, it's apparently wily enough to infect two nurses in Dallas. So it's way more contagious than something like HIV. I don't remember them wearing hazmat suits in Dallas Buyers Club.

Originally Posted by cmind

What about ebola is hysteria? This is a virus with a combination of a very long incubation period and very high mortality rate. That's a dangerous combo. And although it isn't airborne, it's apparently wily enough to infect two nurses in Dallas. So it's way more contagious than something like HIV. I don't remember them wearing hazmat suits in Dallas Buyers Club.

And yet despite the ongoing epidemic in west Africa, the U.S. has seen just one death and two infections of two nurses who cared for the man who died. This is not a good reason to call for closing the borders.

Saying that Ebola is "wily" enough to infect two nurses is an example of that hysteria. If you're actively caring for an infected patient, as they were, then your chances of accidentally being infected increase quite a bit, especially if you break protocol. There's nothing wily about that, and in fact it's almost an expected outcome. It's not as if Ebola jumped from Thomas Duncan to somebody who did not even come into physical contact with him or somebody caring for him. That would be wily.

Furthermore, that Ebola has a long incubation period is not necessarily a point in its favor with regard to how dangerous it is. It isn't infectious until symptoms arise, so if a person is on the longer end of the incubation period (~21 days), that can give medical professionals plenty of time to isolate that person from the general population. Sure, this assumes that people would notice whether somebody just got back from west Africa, but it's something important to consider.

By the way, I'm not saying people should not take Ebola seriously. My virology professor starts every class by asking us if we have any questions about Ebola, so obviously it's something to be concerned about. What we should also do, however, is take a step back and consider how it's actually affecting us here, thousands of miles away from west Africa. So far, it really isn't an issue.

Originally Posted by cmind

I think the people who go over there with their high ideals about helping the poor brown people*,

are selfish

*would there be as many volunteers if the epidemic was in a white country, I wonder?

lol

This is one of too many edits, the last one: I'm just now reading up on the really interesting things, scientific background mainly, I'll follow up in that vein tomorrow, I think.

I'm not saying there is no "white-saviour-complex" going in some people's psyches in general, but they tend to stay well away, when it comes to something as dangerous as Ebola. People from western countries trying to help, but running about in West Africa without a clue what they are doing? I really doubt it.

It's a few hundred medical practitioners, logistical experts, infection control specialists, and others who constitute what is called “essential personnel”, who are now in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. They come from all over the world, but largely from North America and Europe, with Doctors without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontierès (MSF), Partners in Health, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO) and others institutions, including foreign military units.

Not enough, not enough...
But most definitively it's not an enticing venue for the usual do-gooding adventure-tourists, they're watching from way off, thankfully.

Besides - if this was in a "white country", politically accessible, but underdeveloped and unable to deal with it themselves - my guess is, we would have seen vastly more effort, people and money thrown at it, right from the very beginning.
And with a decisive international effort many months ago, we might already have been over it since a long while and for good (for now). Especially if local political, economical and cultural factors would be a bit less cumbersome to deal with for "outsiders" in such a hypothetical scenario, but that couldn't be taken for granted...



But it also seems to me, upon second thoughts, that a closing of borders between X and West African countries with an outbreak would make sense even now. Traffic could be paralleled for humanitarian purposes, I guess. One could use some of the same channels, close them off to the usual traffic, but use them for getting personnel and maybe select patients back and goods across, but under strict safety procedures. All persons coming out of the region, should be transferred into quarantine facilities for so and so long upon return, including all personnel.

The likelihood of Ebola evolving into an airborne disease seems to be considered as rather small, but only in lack of selection-pressure. It might get that... I'll look further into it, but it could conceivably increase its Darwinian fitness in other ways, becoming more subtle and elusive.
It can be contracted by aerosols already, like getting coughed or sneezed at directly in the face, and from contaminated surfaces, where it's been shown to be able to stay viable for a few days under favourable conditions. I'll read up later...

I guess, the international reaction lacks decisiveness, because of political concerns. Nobody wants to cause hysteria, let alone if it turned out unjustified. Unfortunately that's also to be attributed to "scares" like the first time Ebola showed itself and could be contained, like the bird flue or BSE, which turned out relatively minor in their scope. Well - we got to wait a bit longer with BSE, but you know what I mean.

Erring on the safe side when it comes to a threat of huge proportions, if it came to the worst, should be paramount, though.

Politicians are wary of over-reacting, hopefully that's not a huge mistake this time around.
And the public is fast to fall back into seeing what it expects, what it files under "normal" - suffering in Africa.



As to the second nurse - what a catastrophic mismanagement at this Presbyterian hospital, but how could it be possible that such an obviously incompetent place gets to treat Ebola? A place even lacking safety-guidelines, let alone proper equipment, sufficient knowledge and personnel, lacking any rudimentary organisation for such a scenario?
"Our" patients get transferred to university hospitals with the highest standards of all of everything, you can possibly wish for at the instant of diagnosis, which is actively being screened for.
Except when human error strikes, I know - but so badly and twice?
How could this happen? It's a political crisis, and an international embarrassment. Only now Obama thinks about swat teams and reacting within 24 h and making sure, people are being treated in suitable institutions?!
Worst of all - the CDC was involved, if that statement* is to be taken seriously, she asked if she may fly with a heightened temperature - is this supposed to be a joke?

Ms. Vinson should not have traveled on a commercial flight, the director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said after learning that she was a passenger on Frontier Airlines Flight 1143 on Monday, flying from Cleveland to Dallas-Fort Worth.
But hours after the director, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, made that statement, one official said that Ms. Vinson had indeed called the C.D.C. before boarding the plane, but was allowed to fly because she barely had a fever.*

Spoiler for mismanagement around infected second nurse:

A Ebola outbreak in America moved closer on Wednesday when a second Dallas nurse tested positive for the disease a day after she took a flight from Ohio to Texas through two international airports.
President Barack Obama was forced to cancel a campaign trip to hold an emergency Ebola summit at the White House amid growing condemnation of the chaotic federal response to the arrival of the disease in the United States.
In wake of the criticism, he pledged that US monitoring of would be Ebola “much more aggressive” and that the Centre for Disease Control would send a "SWAT team" within 24 hours to any hospital encountering a new case.

Only now they've got this idea, he "pledges"?! Boggles the mind, it really does.
What the flupp is this woman doing flying about the place - and how could she call and report a temperature and be told to go ahead and fly?!
Before the plane was disinfected it made several other commercial flights.

He warned that the disease could spread globally if the international community does not do more to tackle the outbreak in Africa as he urged world leaders to step up their efforts to defeat it there.
Nurses’ leaders condemned what they alleged were alarming safety breaches at the Dallas hospital at the centre of the crisis, alleging that a Liberian man who later died of the disease was left in a waiting room with other patients, and health workers treated him with inadequate protective gear.

Amber Vinson became the second nurse from Dallas Presbyterian Hospital to be diagnosed with Ebola after caring for Thomas Eric Duncan, who died there last week. About 75 other members of the medical team are being monitored for signs of the disease.
Miss Vinson is to be airlifted to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta where Ebola experts have successfully treated other patients who contracted the disease in Africa.
Miss Vinson told authorities that she had flown from Cleveland back to the Texas City on Monday, the day before she became ill, through airports used by tens of thousands of passengers each day.
Other passengers on the Frontier Airlines flight were being contacted by health officials and given a hotline number to call. Doctors said Miss Vinson was reportedly not showing symptoms of the disease on the plane, so there should be no risk of infection.
Frontier said that it had temporarily removed the aircraft, on which Miss Vinson had flown with 132 other passengers, from service for disinfecting after it was notified by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Miss Vinson, 29, flew to Cleveland for the weekend to visit her mother and make preparations for her wedding, Ohio health department officials said.
An unnamed man known to have had contact with her there was put into home quarantine, though showing no Ebola symptoms, while other people with whom she met were urgently being tracked down.
She arrived in Cleveland on Friday and stayed with relatives who are employees of Kent State University, but did not set foot on the college campus.
Miss Vinson returned to Dallas on Monday evening, reportedly flying with a slightly higher than normal temperature of 99.5F after checking herself before the flight. She was diagnosed with a fever – usually the first symptom of the disease - on Tuesday morning and then tested positive for Ebola in results confirmed late that evening.
Officials claimed that she broke monitoring guidelines when she flew to Ohio and back to Texas after treating Mr Duncan. Medical staff who cared for him were not supposed to take commercial flights.*
Mr Obama convened the White House summit after officials at the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) admitted that a faster and more concerted federal response to Mr Duncan’s case could have prevented the infection of others.
Before the president’s meeting with his cabinet team, Mr Obama’s spokesman Josh Earnest acknowledged that “there are likely to be more cases of Ebola” in the US.
He said: “What the President and our administration is focused on is when these cases present themselves, that those patients get the treatment they need to recover, that those patients can be treated in a way that doesn't put healthcare workers at a significantly elevated level of risk, and that we can ensure the safety of the broader public.”
Nina Pham, 26, another nurse, is said to be in a “good condition” after becoming the first person to contract the disease in America after also helping to care for Mr Duncan.
The hospital was criticised by some of its own nurses in an extraordinary statement issued anonymously by one of the country’s main nursing unions. “Were the protocols breached?” asked Deborah Burger, a co-president of the union, National Nurses United. “The nurses say there were no protocols.”
Mr Duncan was initially sent home from the hospital, despite arriving at the emergency room with symptoms of the disease and disclosing that he had recently arrived from Liberia where he had contact with an Ebola victim.
The nurses’ statement claimed even when Mr Duncan arrived back seriously ill by ambulance he was not put into isolation for several hours, but left in a waiting area with other patients.
The nurses who first dealt with him wore gowns, gloves with no taping around the wrists, and surgical masks with the option of a shield, the statement claimed, leaving their necks exposed.
The statement alleged that hospital officials allowed nurses who dealt with Mr Duncan at a time when he was vomiting and had diarrhoea to continue to care for other patients “even though they had not had the proper personal protective equipment”.
Officials at the hospital said they would review concerns raised by the nurses but defended their efforts to “provide a safe working environment”.
President Obama sought to reassure Americans that the danger of a wider outbreak in the US was "very, very low".
He tried to calm fears with a personal anecdote, saying that he "shook hands with, hugged and kissed" nurses at Emory university hospital in Atlanta who treated previous cases. "I felt perfectly safe doing so,” he said, explaining that only people with symptoms are infectious.

It sounds like incredible negligence and incompetency on the side of the hospital officials and director to make no preparations in the form of giving out information and guidelines to their personnel in the ER, but I wonder, which hospital would have been anything close to properly prepared in the world except special centres? Only the big and reasonable ones.
You need drills for that - it's easy to think, you did everything safely, while you did not.
He turned up in their ER unfortunately, and all sorts of things went wrong there, but after diagnosis - how could they have been allowed to treat this case in the first place, why no transfer? Why the okay for the nurse to fly, with or without heightened temperature from this CDC person, one such case being already known?

But what does this tell us about how medical personnel fares under much, much worse conditions in Africa? How about patients in need of treatment for other health-problems?
I guess, whoever doesn't expect to actually die without a hospital, will, and probably should stay well away from them. But what about doctors in general? There's bound to be paranoia, more than understandably, but this could and does and will backfire of course.
Women will give birth at home, no mater the risks, the malaria season is coming up - there's going to be much collateral damage on top of it, it's gruesome.








And another edit - Ebola is a level 4 biohazard, and the following should be considered adequate:

Biosafety level - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Biosafety level 4

The Galveston National Laboratory BSL-4 (P4) lab on the Campus of the University of Texas Medical Branch
This level is required for work with dangerous and exotic agents that pose a high individual risk of aerosol-transmitted laboratory infections, agents which cause severe to fatal disease in humans for which vaccines or other treatments are not available, such as Bolivian and Argentine hemorrhagic fevers, Marburg virus, Ebola virus, Lassa virus, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and various other hemorrhagic diseases. This level is also used for work with agents such as smallpox that are considered dangerous enough to require the additional safety measures, regardless of vaccination availability. When dealing with biological hazards at this level the use of a positive pressure personnel suit, with a segregated air supply is mandatory. The entrance and exit of a level four biolab will contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent both doors from opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from a biosafety level 4 (or P4) lab will undergo similar decontamination procedures to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release.

Agents with a close or identical antigenic relationship to biosafety level 4 agents are handled at this level until sufficient data are obtained either to confirm continued work at this level, or to work with them at a lower level.

Members of the laboratory staff have specific and thorough training in handling extremely hazardous infectious agents and they understand the primary and secondary containment functions of the standard and special practices, the containment equipment, and the laboratory design characteristics. They are supervised by qualified scientists who are trained and experienced in working with these agents. Access to the laboratory is strictly controlled by the laboratory director.

The facility is either in a separate building or in a controlled area within a building, which is completely isolated from all other areas of the building. A specific facility operations manual is prepared or adopted. Building protocols for preventing contamination often use negatively pressurized facilities, which, even if compromised, would severely inhibit an outbreak of aerosol pathogens.

Within work areas of the facility, all activities are confined to Class III biological safety cabinets, or Class II biological safety cabinets used with one-piece positive pressure personnel suits ventilated by a life support system.

People changed their minds on this, trying to be "political"? Let the Presbyterian hospital try and deal with it?
Pretending it might all be allright in Africa after all, wanting to believe, not wanting to be caught saying otherwise?
I'm going to sleep now, this is last after last edit, did it again.

So here some "scare-mongering" for you Americans to consider, I was nearly sure of that, but checked up on it - my astonishment was justified:

Germany had prepared nine special facilities with highly trained personnel and suited safety-measures and infrastructure way before the first case has landed.
Yup - they do have positive pressure suits, separate air-supply, air-locks - patients have been transported per specially adapted ambulance plane and ambulances on the ground with police-escort to these centres, asp, contact persons are quarantined - all of which I would have expected to happen in America as well. How can the CDC say, that basically any hospital in the US would be prepared and able to treat a level 4 bio-hazard?!

By putting him in a room with other patients, letting nurses' skin exposed while dealing with a violently vomiting and shi**ing patient, wearing insufficient face masks and insufficiently secured gloves? Letting the same nurses treat other patients at the same time?
Have one nurse infected and let another one on a commercial plane?
I feel a bit weird saying this, but truly, it couldn't have happened here, it simply couldn't - not after diagnosis.
What could happen, though, is people showing up in unprepared emergency rooms, but emergency rooms all over the country are doing drills.
The CDC is not being prepared whatsoever and has either been stupid or lying to the public.

If America keeps up such a policy and travel unrestricted, it's going to go wrong. German foreign affairs/travel are saying they might close borders to inward travel from the region, excepting special cases. I've read the arguments pro and contra, but I'm not quite convinced of the contra-ones, especially since the American idea of proper safety-measures is irresponsibly optimistic, with such negligence in procedures it's bound to spread again "under modern medical conditions".
Even our standards will have ample loopholes for human error, but at least all that can be done, is seriously attempted, and it's rather easy for a country with high-tech medicine like the US, while it's (still) a minuscule case number, one should think.

Politics more concerned with how the look of pressure suits might impact the peoples precious peace of mind?



Ebola-drill in Hamburg

I's all irrelevant, when it jumps over into densely populated areas close by, the slums of Lagos for example, or India, when huge numbers of fugitives will come out of affected regions, including secondarily affected, e.g. economically. How could one expect this not to happen, with exponential expansion and the virus having jumped from central to western Africa in the past? Even if a pandemic won't happen, it might come down to a chronic problem. Even if we eradicate the outbreak completely, as a zoonosis, contracted from animals, the pool for another transfer of Ebola to humans will stay in place as long as the jungle does, which of course one has to hope.

If it's to be a chronic problem, one argument as to why it's unlikely to go truly airborne or gain other, more likely but significant advantages will fall. It's that it isn't under selection-pressure at the moment, no real race with humanity going on, it has it's way unchecked as it is and where it is, case numbers are rising exponentially. It's so easy to just see it as a few thousand people, it's the rate of expansion, that's frightening.



From Wikipedia: Ebola virus disease - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nobody knows the real numbers of course, besides what's documented.

From the last outbreak to now, it has gained 300 insignificant mutations, so it could be quite possible for it to genetically fight back, if we keep it on a low flame and fight it half-heartedly instead of eradicating it. We won't without a vaccine I'm afraid.

I don't know how the epidemic is doing anymore. I'm just glad the whole phase of ridiculous fear and offensive jokes about people who have it is now in the past. At least...I haven't seen or hear anything of that nature for over a year now.