"It's really nothing. Doesn't even smell."
Posted on 10/29/2014 6:07:18 AM PDT by dead
Ebola is a lot easier to catch than health officials have admitted — and can be contracted by contact with a doorknob contaminated by a sneeze from an infected person an hour or more before, experts told The Post Tuesday.
“If you are sniffling and sneezing, you produce microorganisms that can get on stuff in a room. If people touch them, they could be” infected, said Dr. Meryl Nass, of the Institute for Public Accuracy in Washington, DC.
Nass pointed to a poster the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quietly released on its Web site saying the deadly virus can be spread through “droplets.”
“Droplet spread happens when germs traveling inside droplets that are coughed or sneezed from a sick person enter the eyes, nose or mouth of another person,” the poster states.
Nass slammed the contradiction.
“The CDC said it doesn’t spread at all by air, then Friday they came out with this poster,” she said. “They admit that these particles or droplets may land on objects such as doorknobs and that Ebola can be transmitted that way.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
"It's really nothing. Doesn't even smell."
The fact is, it cannot be as contagious as the flu. At least in the earlier stages. Duncan’s family would’ve all been infected. We’d already have cases from the guy who went bowling.
In the later stages, it’s highly contagious. We know this because healthcare workers are easily infected.
The problem is that nobody knows where the magic line really is.
It is crazy. I try not to be a conspiracy theorist, but this all seems intentional. It is one thing to avoid panic, but quite another thing to seemingly be intentionally obtuse about it.
Any contagion in a heavily populated area CAN spread, even if it isn’t as contagious as the flu or measles.
And if we let it get a foothold and reach a point where it can impact our ability to care for patients who get infected and processes are delayed or compromised, it will spread quite rapidly at that point.
From what I hear, the R0 value indicates how many people could be infected from each infected person.
Values of less than one mean the disease will die out.
Values of more than one mean that it will increase, and as the values get greater (like the measles which is around 14)it means it will spread far faster.
I have heard that the only reason Ebola is even close to a value of 2 is because of the burial practices common in those parts of Africa where the dead person’s body is washed by their heretofore uninfected relatives, and that ignorance is high and medical resources are low.
By all accounts it should be closer to 1 than 2, or so I am told.
All in all, the R0 is only a model, and mutations and such would change it accordingly. I am no expert, but I do work in the medical field (now IT) and have a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry, so I can understand the concepts better than many lay people, but...I am not an expert. I only understand what I have read and been told, and it makes sense to me.
You are mistaken.
A single person can infect more than one.
If that person has the flu and travels, it
could be hundreds.
Misting with Clorox will kill most of the bacteria I am quite certain.
Chlorine bleach will kill viruses and bacteria. I wonder if the required ratio of bleach to water will also bleach the color of an expensive suit.
What I am seeing is a minimum 10% household bleach solution. It isn’t instant, the bleach needs time to work on surfaces.
Yes, it will destroy nice fabrics.
You’d probably not notice any difference with just a light misting. Clorox is 5%.
I’m not mistaken, I am describing a model that is commonly used to illustrate how contagious a disease is.
It is a model, used to convey information on how fast a disease “might” spread, not how many will be infected by a single person in reality.
It is a simple fact that if you put a person infected with measles on a plane full of un-immunized people, you are going to have a far, FAR different spread of a disease in an incredibly short period of time, than you would if you put someone on Ebola on a plane full of people.
That is what R0 is meant to convey.
What utter nonsense.
You have a better model, modeling a race horse as a sphere.
Utter nonsense? I’ve been reading your posts for years, and your behavior on this baffles me because it seems out of character.
I don’t think you are stupid, but if you discount what I wrote as “utter nonsense”, I am willing to hear you explain why. I am really interested in hearing why you would categorize the measured, factual response of a fellow Freeper (who has never had a disrespectful communication with you up until now, to my knowledge) with such disrespect. Can you please explain why?
I work in medicine, have had scientific training and clinical work with people infected with highly contagious conditions requiring a high level of protection, though not respirators or hazmat suits. I have been required to understand the various levels of precautions, and the underlying biological reasons for observing those precautions. I think I understand those pretty well, or at least as well as any non-physician or biologist can or needs to.
I don’t really understand why you think this is “utter nonsense”. What I said is fact, and it is indisputable in the context in which I presented it: This model is a way of categorizing how contagious a disease is.
That’s it.
You may disagree with the R0 value of 1-2 for Ebola, and I cannot dispute it because I did not do the research into it.
But, unless I am mistaken, neither did you.
And based on your initial response saying I was mistaken, I suspected you misunderstood the concept because I may not have explained it well.
I stand by my explanation, and the presentation of the disease in this era with people flying on planes and in contact with other people resulting in so few resulting infections (so far) and the experience of people actually treating it, it is indisputable that is far, FAR less contagious than diseases like the flu, diphtheria, and the measles.
So, if you would please do me the courtesy of explaining to me why you would categorize my post (which was my attempt to help other Freepers who may not have had professional exposure to these concepts as I have) understand what we are facing with a dismissive and disrespectful categorization as “utter nonsense”, I would appreciate it if you could do so.
Look FRiend, my apology.
It is the model that is utter nonsense.
And it is.
I gave some examples (eg. an Ebola patient with
opportunistic influenza -or visa versa) where Ro
is much larger.
Also, the additional reservoirs, the additional sexual
transmission after “cure” for months, the fact that
some variants (e.g. Reston) are airborne, and the
fact that there have been only 14,000 cases (and 1/2
in the last month), the fact that individuals are already
violating quarantine, the fact that there is no evidence
that ONLY 21 days is requisite, etc .
makes obvious that the simple model
is not, and could not, be appropriate.
Thank you for your courteous response.
My view on this is that this is not the same as using a climate model to predict a change in climate, because the goal “to predict climate change” is so broad, that so many variables come into play that any model used can (and will) rapidly fall apart in the real world.
But that does not at all mean that all models are useless. If you take a model that has a goal (as I understand the R0 concept does) how rapidly can a particular disease spread relative to another disease, it is not an unreasonable tool.
It is indisputable that a disease which is spread in an airborne fashion, and has a very short period between infection of a host and capability of transmission is comparatively far more likely to infect more people in a shorter amount of time than a disease that is spread via blood or sexual contact and has a longer period between infection of the host and capability of transmission.
That is all the model is used for. It is not an end-all and be-all to describe exactly how an infection is going to proceed in real life.
A person with a highly contagious disease who gets in a car and goes from point A to point B without meeting another person is not going to spread anything at all, and someone who has bloody phlegm who chooses to spit, sneeze and cough on every surface they encounter at a football stadium full of people is going to have a very different effect.
The model doesn’t say how many people an infected person will or won’t infect. It simply illustrates how comparatively fast two different types of infectious diseases might be spread, and real world observations bear it out.
The flu spreads like wildfire every year all over the world and dies out quickly every year when the flu season ends. Ebola slowly appears every few years, stays around for a while, and slowly dies out without spreading very far.
That’s all.
I don’t know anything about those questions. My point was that because the virus can persist for a relatively long time outside the body, that any infection of a surface in which someone’s fingers may pick it up and they can inject it into their own systems by damaging the mucous membranes in their nose with that contaminated finger.
The fact it may or may not be spread directly from one person to another with a sneeze is a different question, and that overall, the way our government has chosen to handle this issue is criminal even if that cannot happen.
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