Posted on 08/10/2014 12:46:23 AM PDT by Smokin' Joe
I have spent a little time compiling links to threads about the Ebola outbreak in the interest of having all the links in one thread for future reference.
Please add links to new threads and articles of interest as the situation develops.
Thank You all for you participation.
I hadn’t heard of this either. Why Kenya?
It’s unsustainably expensive. And the ebola strains don’t have immuno cross reactivity. It would need to be repeated for ebola Sudan and the other dangerous strains as well. Costs could be a quarter trillion USD just for the Ebola strains alone.
These countries will just shoot those infected first, to save money. I’m not kidding, it’s Africa.
Save vaccines for the medical workers and immediate contacts at this point and work harder on small molecule interventions. Those are really the only long term intervention in Africa that make any sense.
I suspect AFrican peasants will lose either way. They will simply be denied the vaccine because it’s too expensive and there’s not as much money in developing small molecule interventions for a disease that only appears once or twice a decade.
Kenya is a transit hub like Murtala Muhammed in Lagos.
Lots of international carriers fly into/out of Kenya. That airport has a lot of intra-African flights including those from West AFrica.
See the tweet I posted last night from the Kenyan who did more than just imply that the flights from West AFrica currently being allowed in to Kenya were kind of like treason on the part of Kenyan authorities.
Do we know if Justina was the escapee?
Looks like she was.
And looks like ‘casual contact’ is enough for deadly infection.
Had she encountered Sawyer in a subway car or touched the railing just after he passed she would have had the same exposure.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/14/how-bureaucrats-let-ebola-spread-to-nigeria.html?
I’m so glad we don’t have any bureaucrats here to ‘hermetically seal’ our borders or anything in the event of an outbreak.
That article contradicts Justina’s account that she didn’t have any contact with his fluids.
Unless there’s another nurse who has died or since become critical with infection.
http://www.punchng.com/news/second-lagos-nurse-dies-of-ebola-says-fg/
“The Kwara State Chairman of Ebola Viral Disease Control Committee, Prof. Sunday Opabola, on Thursday said that a suspected case of Ebola disease has been reported in the state.
He stated that the suspect is a seven-month old baby who had come with his parents from Ibadan for a visit at Ilorin after one of those taking care of him had returned to Ibadan from Lagos.”
Back to Lagos again. Wonder what extent the baby had contact with Sawyer. Was she sitting near him on the plane? Did her mother change her diaper in the airplane lavatory? Walk through the airport? Show up to the hospital that had Sawyer for immunizations?
Jury is out.
What makes most drugs expensive isn’t the R&D, it’s the FDA approval process. The other thing is that large pharmas use blockbusters to fund compound development for other ailments. The profitability of a pharma is deterministic, in that you can decide (and this is often what happens) that you are going to halt development of a compound, or several compounds, which means saving yourself a bunch of cash which ends up showing up in the profit column at some point.
That’s not going to happen here. It won’t be $50 a shot, but it won’t be free.
Vaccines, are way, way different. In general, big pharma doesn’t want cures. There is zero profit in it.
You work for years on the cure, then you go through 10 years of FDA BS, and spend a $1B to get it to market so that you can wreck your market within a year or two?
Therapies are where the dollars are for big pharma.
Vaccines are cures. It’s like defense spending or infrastructure development. It has to be, to a large extent, publicly funded at some level.
As such, the vaccines will cost something, but I doubt it will be $50, if in fact this vaccine works.
Also, you don’t have to inoculate everybody in Africa.
You have to inoculate 1-1/R0 x 100% of the population nearest the outbreak who are uninfected.
If the R0 prior to releasing the vaccine is 4, that’s 75% of the uninfected population nearest the outbreak. If it is 2, it’s 50%, etc. Ebola will burn itself out once effective interventions are in place that drives the reproductive rate of the disease below 1.
It’s true that you need a vaccine for each strain, like you would any Flu shot.
However, nobody ever developed a vaccine for Ebola because the R0 never got above 1 before.
Again, if the Canadians really do have something, then this is a good thing.
I’ve been spreadsheeting the numbers from WHO and CDC on cases and deaths. It is an exercise that can engender fascination within even the most hardened mathophobe.
Which is something I have been trying to point out all along, despite those who wrongly compare the disease to AIDS.
Complacency, momentary lapses in hygienic discipline are all that are necessary to get a lethal dose of the virus if it is available.
Modern cities are incredibly endowed with common contact surfaces, and one person, suffering from fever, sweating, perhaps weak, could contaminate handrails, walls, door handles, and other surfaces that others will contact out of habit.
At that point the infection chain would be virtually impossible to track.
I see. Interesting stuff - political pressure to shut down the hubs.
I get it. Puts Kenya in an interesting spot.
Like shutting down Atlanta would be here in the US, or St. Louis.
I have to disagree that vaccines are cures.
Their effectiveness wears off, and for something that’s floating around in the wild like ebola, would have to be administered to every single child subsequent to their being born, forever. Lots of kids born in Africa every year. That this point don’t have access to clean drinking water, which is much more likely to kill them statistically.
There’s much more profit in adminstering a drug to every single person + any new persons vs. just those that happen to get sick.
It’s much more profitable to vaccinate 300M people for flu, yearly, than to treat a few hundred thousand that might get really sick.
Which is why antiviral drug development is essentially still in its infancy. If it had been easy to develop an AIDS vaccine we’d have already had that mandated on the pediatric schedule and recommended to everyone else. Since it turns out that AIDS is a ‘lifetime’ disease it’s more profitable to just develop antivirals for it at this point.
I’m a big fan of whatever works, the cheapest. FDA is definitely a hindrance to this however. I’m sure glad we don’t have a problem with corrupt bureaucrats in this country who make decisions based on their own stock portfolios or that of their spouses and family! Aren’t you?
Exactly like Atlanta, Dallas or EWR. Or Houston.
Atlanta and Houston both get direct flights from MMA every day. Happy thoughts that!
With a second and possibly 3rd cluster in Nigeria now, as I posted last night, I suspect the Nigerian elites are heading for the exits.
I was speaking categorically. You’re right, vaccines wear off after a time, but it isn’t like hypertension, Type 1 or 2 diabetes, etc.
There’s already been a lot less politics around the deployment of interventions with this outbreak, which is again encouraging.
I also wasn’t implying that it was unprofitable either. It has to be profitable or it wouldn’t get done. People wouldn’t go to school for it, etc.
My son is a Type 1 diabetic. You would be shocked at how expensive this stuff is, regardless of the fact its well tested by now, there’s a massive captive market, and the disease is actually on the upswing.
The prices are confiscatory, compared with an $11 flu shot I get once a year. Not bad value for money.
Imagine if vaccine makers were subject to the FDA approval process? We’d have all died of some horrible chicken flu by now.
Ivory Coast, Ghana and Nigeria are big cocoa growing areas. If this gets loose in any of them look for cocoa and chocolate prices to escalate.
If it gets loose in OPEC nations look for the price of oil to skyrocket.
Oil may already be feeling the pinch a little. Nigeria and Liberia both have offshore production, and to some degree, that is dependent on western (expatriate) technical expertise. No one is going to want to fly in or out of Lagos with sick folks around...
http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=320891
Maersk Line will not stop calling at West African ports stricken by the Ebola virus, but the company will suspend shore-leave — which is the leave that professional sailors get to spend on dry land — as well as make some changes to crews in Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, Lloyd’s Loading List reports.
The decision coincides with the World Health Organisation (WHO) declaring the outbreak a ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern’ (PHEIC), affecting trade and travel.
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