You May Have a New Strain of Ebola and Test Negative

With all the mutations going on, no one can say with 100 percent certainty what is safe. Your statement is true for the known strains, except maybe the Reston strain, which hasn’t caused symptoms/death in humans so far as I know.

The recent Science publication found fewer than 400 mutations, and more than half of them were conservative, meaning that they changed the genetic sequence without changing the protein sequence. This is out of a genome that is around 19,000 bases. So it really has not changed very much at all.

The Reston strain has been documented to cause asymptomatic disease in humans--15 people were demonstrated to have seropositivity, evidence of past infection. It is still treated as a BSL-4 agent, since there is still the possibility that it causes disease in humans as severe as other strains of Ebola do.

A drop of Sarin or VX on exposed skin is far more immediately lethal than a drop of snot with 10 viral particles of Ebola.

So, let me see. I said that ten molecules of sarin will not kill you, while ten viral particles are deadly. According to the CDC, approximately 1 to 10 ml of sarin on the skin is lethal. So, going by the low end of that range, with sarin having a molecular weight of 140.90 g, specific density at 25C of ~1.1 gram/cm3, I find that a lethal dose of sarin is roughly around 4.7 x 10^21 molecules. Hmm, that looks like many orders of magnitude less lethal than Ebola to me. But what do I know, I'm only a PhD level scientist with experience in the field of toxicology.

As my day job included the production of equipment for the M17 lightweight decontamination system, I can tell your complete ignorance of what the Chemical Casualty Care Division, US Army Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defense, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md teaches its medics regards giving care in a mission-oriented protective posture - 4 (MOPP-4) gear in an immediately lethal contaminated environment.

Working with biologic organisms is not even comparable to working with chemicals. Biological organisms replicate and have a way of getting into places where you would never suspect. Chemicals simply do not behave in that fashion. The amount of sarin vapor that could enter through a pin-prick in a MOPP suit is infinitesimal, especially considering that the suit itself is engineered to bind chemicals before they get near the skin. But a pin-prick in a BSL-4 suit can easily allow a lethal dose of virus access to the skin.

I am not kidding or making things up when I say that researchers have to be trained for months to work in BSL-4 conditions. That happens to be the legal requirement, and it is the requirement for a reason. I seriously doubt anyone with an IQ of 90 is capable of this type of training.

One more thing about the difference between chemical and biological agents. We have treatments for most chemical agents. There is no treatment for BSL-4 categorized biological agents.

I am sure that is true(you are very knowledgable) but we don’t know zip about what it’s doing today, or will do tommorrow with 100% certainty.

I think a lot of people would just like to know that someone is preparing for the worst, and not just dismissing it out of hand, or just hoping for the best.

Continually reassuring people that there’s nothing to worry about, just makes them more concerned and afraid. That has been my experience. You may have a totally different perspective, and that’s fine too.

Eeeee-bolllll-aaaaaa ping!

Bring Out Your Dead

Post to me or FReep mail to be on/off the Bring Out Your Dead ping list.

The purpose of the “Bring Out Your Dead” ping list (formerly the “Ebola” ping list) is very early warning of emerging pandemics, as such it has a high false positive rate.

So far the false positive rate is 100%.

At some point we may well have a high mortality pandemic, and likely as not the “Bring Out Your Dead” threads will miss the beginning entirely.

*sigh* Such is life, and death...

>>”Everyone knows the story of how the closely related cowpox virus protects against smallpox.

There may be a natural member of the Ebola family that does the same thing. 13 people have been infected with Ebola Reston and seroconverted. None of them got sick. So there is a reasonable chance that Reston is a natural vaccine to Ebolas Zaire.

Bit drastic to infect a large population on purpose with a virus, but that’s what we did with cowpox.”<<

Saw this posted elsewhere and was wondering what those skate than I think of this.

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