Posted on 09/11/2014 11:23:51 PM PDT by DouglasKC
THE Ebola epidemic in West Africa has the potential to alter history as much as any plague has ever done.
There have been more than 4,300 cases and 2,300 deaths over the past six months. Last week, the World Health Organization warned that, by early October, there may be thousands of new cases per week in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria. What is not getting said publicly, despite briefings and discussions in the inner circles of the worlds public health agencies, is that we are in totally uncharted waters and that Mother Nature is the only force in charge of the crisis at this time.
There are two possible future chapters to this story that should keep us up at night.
The first possibility is that the Ebola virus spreads from West Africa to megacities in other regions of the developing world. This outbreak is very different from the 19 that have occurred in Africa over the past 40 years. It is much easier to control Ebola infections in isolated villages. But there has been a 300 percent increase in Africas population over the last four decades, much of it in large city slums. What happens when an infected person yet to become ill travels by plane to Lagos, Nairobi, Kinshasa or Mogadishu or even Karachi, Jakarta, Mexico City or Dhaka?
The second possibility is one that virologists are loath to discuss openly but are definitely considering in private: that an Ebola virus could mutate to become transmissible through the air. You can now get Ebola only through direct contact with bodily fluids. But viruses like Ebola are notoriously sloppy in replicating, meaning the virus entering one person may be genetically different from the virus entering the next. The current Ebola viruss hyper-evolution is unprecedented...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The Reston Monkey House incident demonstrated pretty conclusively that Simian Hemorrhagic Fever is transmissible through the air. The lungs shed trillions of virus particles which are ejected long distances through sneezes. The particles can stay suspended in the air a long time.
I am taking statistics this semester. I actually understood that.
Just imagine what’s on the money in your wallet.
Voluntary Human Extinction Movement
http://www.vhemt.org/
Marburg a few years back acted differently.
This will get out of control, because we won’t try to stop it.
yes I have
a “hole in the floor” is a grade above what rural Africans use... Not to mention what many have to use for water
and a pee on the street in a big city is “public restrooms”
But the UN observers always stay in 5 star hotels
Some AID organizations actually have programs to build sanitary pit latrines and of course, village wells so the women and girls don’t have to walk hours every day to haul water
I believe the movie “Outbreak” was based on that incident
Of course in Hollywood version, Dustin Hoffman saved the world by finding one cute little host monkey to make a vaccine
as long as no one sneezes and everyone washes their right hand after they potty and before they dip into the communal pot of goat stew, OK
Well, yeah, it does, but it's not really Clintonian.
"Airborne", applied to an infectious agent, has a specific, technical meaning, and it has had the same meaning for many years. Ebola virus disease is not airborne, using the word in its correct, technical, sense. The word means the same thing to all infectious disease specialists and epidemiologists, and they are not using the word to cover up anything. In technical and professional discussions, the word is being used correctly.
He had me until he said put the UN in charge of the response.
The executive assistant of the Liberian foreign minister died of it. I guarantee she didn’t have a ‘hole in the floor’ to do her business. She had a flush potty like everyone else in her demographic there.
It’s in the taxis and other transportation there now. And probably every other public surface that isn’t in direct sunlight and isn’t decontaminated every single use. Like doorknobs, elevator push buttons and similar surfaces.
It’s also carried by dogs, who are asymptomatic carriers. But while infected, their pee,poop and saliva are infected. So anywhere the dog pees, poops or drools will have ebola virons for several days depending on UV exposure of that spot.
“That he would publish this, at this time, and in the NYT, reflects the enormous tension that must exist today within the CDC bureaucracy.
Not really. He has published scary stories before: http://www.nyu.edu/intercep/lapietra/Osterholm_PreparingforPandemic.pdf “
Dr. Osterholm has been talking about/publishing scary stories for a long time. I remember listening to him speak in the 1990’s at a conference I was attending. He was discussing the book “The Hot Zone” and warning about the dangers of Ebola if it began to mutate.
There is a part of me that is not seeing that scenario as a problem....
...yeah, I know they’ll all disperse back to their homes and spread it even further but there is an upside to it, you have to admit.
Heh heh heh!!
You realize there are many from THIS country that attend the Hajj, right?
And when they ‘bring it back to their homes’, they’ll bring it back here to the US, right?
I know that. But there is a small upside, I’m just saying.
scary results indeed!
Yeah, but if I wanted to print the first six paragraphs in the New York Times, I might have sweetened the pot a little, as well.
If I put in the part about Aegis cruisers shooting down airliners off Conakry, they probably wouldn't have run it.
Could the virus theoretically be passed from cardholder to cardholder via “card-swipe” gizmos?
Yup.
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