Posted on 08/10/2014 12:46:23 AM PDT by Smokin' Joe
Ebola Outbreaks since 1976: no of cases and no of deaths
http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/history/chronology.html
The current outbreak is by far the worst — it seems a lot more people are infected at least twice as many, than in all previous outbreaks all together.
Lagos, (25,000,000) stepped on it hard and got it under control, but the first case there was recognized and the clamp down was immediate.
Not so in Monrovia, Freetown, and other population centers involved elsewhere. The outbreak spread along transport corridors into the cities before that spread was recognized, and while the world was waiting for the outbreak to 'burn out'.
That didn't happen, and failure to recognize that continuing increase in cases and react to that information (Scientific inertia, normalcy bias) has permitted this to grow to an unprecedented scope.
Now, whether through normalcy bias, hubris, or diabolical intent, the disease has a presence on continents it has never been recorded on in the wild, and this is just the beginning if the people in charge do not limit the movement of people from infected countries.
This will continue to grow, it will continue to spread in the US. When it has a solid foothold (which it may have already), the argument against closing the borders--the death warrant for a host of Americans-- will be that the disease is here already, so there is no point in limiting travel from the original outbreak nations.
Whether intentional or not, the effect has been to spread the disease far and wide in the Western (non-islamic) world (pilgrims from the outbreak nations were forbidden to attend the hadj, for instance).
That distribution may be coincidental, but it looks a lot like asymmetrical (biological) warfare to me, perpetrated by or enabled by our own officials and the WHO.
The out break strain of Ebola (EBV or EBOV depending on who is talking) had much higher viral loads that other Ebola out break strains much earlier in the infection.
The nightmare of relatively asymptomatic Ebola carriers has been confirmed.
The scientist quoted below also states that there have been repeated virus reintroductions “...from the animal reservoir” DURING THE CURRENT OUTBREAK.
IOW, people are still eating infected fruit bats in West Africa.
Updated by Julia Belluz on October 13, 2014, 9:00 a.m. ET @juliaoftoronto julia.belluz@voxmedia.com
http://www.vox.com/2014/10/13/6959087/ebola-outbreak-virus-mutated-airborne
Peter Jahrling, one of the country’s top scientists, has dedicated his life to studying some of the most dangerous viruses on the planet. Twenty-five years ago, he cut his teeth on Lassa hemorrhagic fever, hunting for Ebola’s viral cousin in Liberia. In 1989, he helped discover Reston, a new Ebola strain, in his Virginia lab.
Jahrling now serves as a chief scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, where he runs the emerging viral pathogens section. He has been watching this Ebola epidemic with a mixture of horror, concern and scientific curiosity. And there’s one thing he’s found particularly worrisome: the mutations of the virus that are circulating now look to be more contagious than the ones that have turned up in the past.
When his team has run tests on patients in Liberia, they seem to carry a much higher “viral load.” In other words, Ebola victims today have more of the virus in their blood — and that could make them more contagious.
We spoke last week about his work studying the disease, how this Ebola virus may be more dangerous than others, and what that means for the epidemic. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and length.
Julia Belluz: What concerns you most about the virus circulating now?
Peter Jahrling: I want to know if this virus is intrinsically different from the one we have seen before, if it is a more virulent strain. We are using tests now that weren’t using in the past, but there seems to be a belief that the virus load is higher in these patients [today] than what we have seen before. If true, that’s a very different bug.
One of the studies we’re going to do here is to test the virulence of this new strain in experimentally infected primates and compare it with the reference strain, and look at whether it is hotter, extrapolating from monkeys to people. It may be that the virus burns hotter and quicker [meaning it’s more contagious and easily spread].
JB: Yet everyone is worried about Ebola going airborne...
PJ: You’re seeing all these patients getting infected, so people think there must be aerosol spread. Certainly, it’s very clear that people who are in close contact with patients are getting a very high incidence of disease and not all of that can be explained by preparation of bodies for burial and all the standard stuff. But if you are to assume that the differences in virus load detected in the blood are reflected by differences in virus load spread by body secretions, then maybe it’s a simple quantitative difference. There’s just more virus.
JB: A higher viral load means this Ebola virus can spread faster and further?
PJ: Yes. I have a field team in Monrovia. They are running [tests]. They are telling me that viral loads are coming up very quickly and really high, higher than they are used to seeing. It turns out that in limited studies with the evacuated patients, they continued to express virus in blood and semen. What does that mean? Right now, we just don’t know.
JB: Can you entertain the air-borne hypothesis. Do you think it’s plausible?
PJ: You can argue that any time the virus replicates it’s going to mutate. So there is a potential for the thing to acquire an aerogenic property but that would have to be a dramatic change. When scientists have done studies, playing with influenza strains to make them more virulent, when they increase the aerosol potential of a flu strain, they also reduce its virulence. So when you start messing with viruses, you usually make them less virulent.
JB: There have been worries that Ebola can become a pandemic like HIV and spread around the world. Even Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was recently saying as much. Your thoughts?
PJ: The mode of transmission is different between the two viruses. Ebola causes an acute infection which you either die from or you’re immune, you don’t carry the virus for long periods of time. Whereas with AIDS, a lot of people transmitting AIDS didn’t know they have it. Before we had a triple cocktail therapy, AIDS was lethal with the exception of a few people who were not susceptible. Long term AIDS was hotter than Ebola. My gut feeling is that Ebola is going to burn out in human populations.
JB: Why are you optimistic about this epidemic burning out?
PJ: In this epidemic, it would appear that there have been multiple introductions [of the virus from animals to humans]. It’s not all person to person transmission. It’s coming from animals again and again. [This means people need to be near potential animal hosts — believed to be fruit bats endemic to Africa — to get the virus.] Now there are all these different strains. That could also mean the virus is more mutable. We can’t yet say. I think it’s unlikely that this thing is going to perpetuate in humans.
Heartening that honest researchers admit to the holes in their knowledge and still quest to learn more.
. It's strange that WHO/CDC are behaving as though they don't have this bit of intelligence. Given the mutability rate of the influenza viruses tracking such changes is a prime function of the research. Perhaps the flu symptoms have remained the same for so long CDC has become complacent. And their performance and pronouncement certainly reflected that.
The out break strain of Ebola (EBV or EBOV depending on who is talking)....
Appropos of the overall emphasis of the article, the different characteristics of this Ebola strain, note that the WHO changed the name to EVD, Ebola Viral Disease to reflect a key difference to earlier strains, in that there is markedly less hemorrhaging. The change mentioned in one of the previous articles posted on this thread. Confused me for the longest while but it does serve as a time marker.
Covenantor,
There are a lot of implications of that article that are not immediately apparent,
My read of the implications:
The nightmare of relatively asymptomatic Ebola carriers has been confirmed.
And it will tend to show up in children with lessor immune response, with higher asymptomatic responses in the youngest of children.
This fits a NPR story clipped over on the PFIF about a orphaned baby in the natal ward in a West African hospital whose mother died of Ebola.
The baby cried a lot and all 12nurses in the ward held and cuddled the baby. All 12 got Ebola, 11 of 12 died from it.
It will also show up as EVD being transmitted far more by by sexual activity than by burial rights.
I suspect the infected Presby nurse’s boyfriend will be the first documented example of this, as he is now reported to have “Ebola like” symptoms.
Where is the 'Aw geez...' guy when you need him?
Actually they were looking for volunteers for ebola vaccines in August. That’s when WHO finally realized the cat was out of the bag in Western Europe.
GSK offered their experimental vaccine for ebola to WHO way back in march when the outbreak was first identified but WHO for some reason blew them off then.
In August, WHO finally got serious about it again.
So the August time frame would make sense.
As to why the volunteers would be of (mostly) another race on another continent is not readily apparent. The countries involved in the outbreak have been begging for their medicos to get ANY experimental vaccines for months now. Crickets from WHO so far on that request. The closest they are coming is Mali, which hasn’t recorded any cases so far.
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