The date on this is wrong.
and yes, we are screwed.
The nice thing about diseases is that you can’t see them. You see the symptoms of infection, but you can’t see the organisms. The are really tiny. Being invisible makes them really scary. This makes it easy to generate a public reaction. It’s like global warming. You can’t see it, but it sure is scary what it can do. We are all screwed by global warming!
You shake hands with someone, next thing you know, hepatitis. Somebody didn’t wash their hands after going to the bathroom, and somebody else didn’t wash their hands before eating. But either one washing their hands could prevent the transmission of the Hep A virus. Ebola is probably a lot like that. The flu sure is. Hand washing is the number one way to prevent a flu infection.
The only epidemic disease that got people really working was AIDS. The flu, not so much. AIDS is scary because you get it from sex. Nobody wants that. The intense effort to cure it was unprecedented, because homsexuals were getting it, and some of them were important people. They discovered or invented antiviral medications like acyclovir that work on viral processes to prevent them from reproducing themselves. These are very expensive drugs, and have application in other ailments, like herpes.
AIDS, even after all of the work, still infects the same people at relatively the same rates. It never became the mass extinction disease that media sensationalists wanted to see. Ebola will never cause huge death, and media sensationalists will be extremely disappointed, but that won’t stop them from generating mass hysteria. You see it right here.
I’m going to start posting “In before the we are all screwed” on all the ebola threads. Too late for this one.
Ebola Guy gets back to his family on what, the 19th?
Then second family starts getting sick around the 23rd or sooner?
Egads....