Influenza is easily spread from person to person because it is primarily a disease that affects the upper respiratory systems. People with influenza have runny noses and sneeze and cough and a lot, and people with the flu often start sneezing and spreading it before they get to the point of feeling really ill and are infectious and capable of spreading the virus days before the first symptoms appear. And some people with the flu will also do stupid things like insisting on going to work while sick and hence spreading their germs to others. While most people who get influenza don’t die from it (although when I got the “Russian Flu” in the late 70’s as a teenager – I felt like I was dying for several days and it took two weeks before I was feeling back to my old self again), influenza is, when it kills, typically deadly only to the very young, the very old and people with compromised immune systems. And most of the people that die from influenza actually die from secondary infections like pneumonia many weeks after contracting the flu.
The 1918 so called Spanish flu (a strain of H1N1 BTW) was however very different in that it hit young healthy adults the worst and killed in the matter of days not weeks due to their immune systems going into hyper drive, a “cytokine storm”. The 1918 flu pandemic killed more people worldwide than those killed during WWI and by some estimates rivaled in its death toll that of some of the Black Death outbreaks of the middle ages. Read up sometime on the 1918 flu pandemic that by some estimates is believed to have killed 50 million or more people worldwide during the course of only two years and then get back to us on how the flu is nothing to sneeze over.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic
Ebola is different in that it does not affect the upper respiratory system. While people who contract Ebola sometimes get sore throats at onset, Ebola “is often characterized by the sudden onset of fever, intense weakness, muscle pain, headache and sore throat. This is followed by vomiting, diarrhoea, rash, impaired kidney and liver function, and in some cases, both internal and external bleeding. Laboratory findings include low white blood cell and platelet counts and elevated liver enzymes.” It causes bleeding, both internally and sometimes externally because it breaks down blood vessel and capillaries.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs103/en/
Ebola is not communicable and spread person to person until symptoms manifest and by the time that happens most people are quite obviously and debilitatingly ill. And in order to contract it, one has to be in direct contact with the bodily fluids of the infected person, it is not spread via casual contact meaning one could sit next to someone with Ebola and not become infected (not that I’d like to sit on a 12 hour airplane flight with someone who has Ebola) but one can’t catch it by merely breathing the same air, and unless that person came in direct contact with the infected person’s blood, vomit, feces, sweat, etc via a break in their skin. This is why and how health care workers and close family members caring for the sick are most likely to contract it. While Ebola is highly infectious and very deadly, depending on the strain, has anywhere from a 60 to 90 percent fatality rate, it is not “easy” to catch but being that it is so deadly and a biohazard, extreme precautions have to be undertaken in dealing with people who have it and in properly deposing of the dead and their soiled with the highly infectious bodily fluids still on their clothing and bedding. https://www.bcm.edu/departments/molecular-virology-and-microbiology/ebola
Personally I am more concerned over the spread of drug resistant strains of TB, the reemergence of diseases like Polio and measles and chicken pox via those who should know better but yet refuse to get vaccinated or their children vaccinated and the possibility of a mutated strain of H1N1 virus mutating into something like the Spanish Flu than I am over my risk of contracting Ebola.
Good post, but remember to put the name of the person you are correcting or disagreeing with, first.
There’s also the possibility of vaccine-resistant pathogens as well, in addition to the antibiotic-resistant ones.