See subject. According to Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, we should be scared. Very scared.
Anything is possible I suppose, but why worry about something you have no control over? You can lock yourself in your house and never go out, but that’s not much of a life if you ask me. Or you can head to Antarctica and hope the virus never reaches you.
If it does happen I’m sure it will be front page news, (unless you believe in government conspiracies in which case it will be kept secret from the public until it is too late), so when you read about it on the front page you can start worrying.
The fact that there isn’t a hell of a lot we can do about it is a good point. Unless you are ready to drop the billions it’d take to actually contain Ebola and strengthen African healthcare systems so future outbreaks stay contained, we aren’t going to be able to do much. The resources we have now are already fully engaged.
I’m certain that, in weapons labs all over, samples of ebola have been carefully cultured and experiments are underway to do exactly this - develop a weapon which sprays ebola over wide areas - in mist form.
Don’t be surprised - if you were in charge of weapon development, would YOU pass on such a lovely little bug?
Flip side: these same people are also looking for a vaccine - in case the other side gets the weapon first.
This kind of insanity is one of the few things I actually fear. The idea that we must do this because they might.
Did we all watch “Dr. Strangelove” and miss the point?
Capt
IIRC Ebola Reston was airborne but I can’t find a good cite for that. I know it is not pathogenic in humans. If I am remembering correctly then, yes, there is a chance that Ebola could potentially go airborne and be pathogenic to humans. But there is an inverse relationship between ease of transmission and pathogenicity for whatever reason.
The biggies (US/USSR) came to their senses and cut nuclear stockpiles (US at one time had 17,000 nukes - including artillery shells).
Syria didn’t willingly give up its chemical weapons (and probably has more hidden or developed since). Developing such weapons is not limited to the big powers.
Hell yes. For the same reasons that Bio-weapon research is mostly the domain of Hollywood and the kind of idiotic cold war programs that tried to weaponize psychics. Diseases are crap weapons in all but the rarest of situations.
IIRC in The Hot Zone he said that Reston appeared to spread through the monkeys as if it was airborne , but they never proved it. I don’t know if more research has been done since.
Uh-huh. Weaponize a disease that you have no vaccine or cure for.
Good luck with that.
Evolve ? Part of the logic is that it has an air born transfer rate of 0.00000% chance now… so there’s a lot of evolving to do because it becomes a real %.
BUT, if there is a virus it can recombine with, then the result is a new virus, that combines features from either… I guess it would still be called “Ebola”, so effectively Ebola (in lieu of the correct scientific name for a hypothetical recombination) can get a whole set of genes for airborne infection all at once, no evolving required.
Ebola Reston went airborne (if it did - not 100% certain) in a laboratory setting with many monkeys held in a confined space, which is unnatural even by human civilization standards. Given monkey propensity for flinging feces and other things, though, I’ve always wondered if it was due to more to poo-flinging monkeys than airborne germs.
How a pathogen acts in a laboratory isn’t always how it acts in a more natural setting.
That’ true but, in this case, the virus was not being manipulated in the laboratory. If the virus was indeed airborne then there had to be some sort of modification to the virus either through selection or recombination of some sort. I don’t see how confined space would influence this…other than maybe speeding up the process.
Ebola Reston was airborne. 100% certain. It spread from monkeys in one room to monkeys at the other end of the building. Six human animal handlers were later proved to have seroconverted - produced antibodies to the virus.
The various Ebola strains are RNA viruses. RNA mutates at a higher rate than DNA. And indications are that the EBOV strain in the current outbreak has been mutating quite a bit. Gathering such data is difficult and several researchers died in gathering that data.
How many changes are needed to allow a virus to change to airborne transmissiblity? Might not be many. It took the right 5 mutations to allow the H5/N1 flu variant to do that. This Ebola strain has already shown more than 300 mutations during this outbreak. Get the right ones in the right combination and this could get MUCH worse and fast.
As the good doctor at the CDC warned. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
This is misinformation. It is not 100% certain, in fact, how the Reston was transmitted.
As made evident in manysober discussionsthat do not aim at a scaremongering:
Even in the poor conditions of the Liberia, if one keeps any perspective, the rate of the infections is not so great, in fact as a point was made in another thread, the civil war of the Liberia was much deadlier than the ebola.
Or it might be a LOT of mutations required to become airborne. I’m not convinced anyone has a really good understanding of why some viruses are airborne and some aren’t, or what’s required for a virus to be airborne.
In addition, some mutations are more likely than others. That’s why there are people with more than five digits on a hand or foot walking around the planet but no people who have functional wings.
Flu viruses are, in general, transmissible by the airborne route and if you find one that isn’t then likely it still won’t take much to make it able to do that. On the other hand, the only filovirus (the group ebola belongs to) that is even suspected of being airborne is Ebola Reston, and even that is not conclusive. It probably takes a lot more to make a filovirus airborne infectious, if that is even a probable outcome.
Here’s another analogy: most birds fly (that is, are airborne), with only a few non-flying exceptions so if you encounter a new species of bird it’s reasonable to assume it flies until demonstrated otherwise. Squirrels do not, as a general rule, fly and “flying squirrels” don’t really fly, they glide, and are an exception to the rule so if you encounter a new species of squirrel it’s reasonable to assume it doesn’t fly, is highly unlikely to evolve into something that flies, and even if it glides it’s range is incredibly limited.
Flu viruses are birds, ebola is a squirrel.
Nice scaremongering. Are you proud of yourself?
Global pandemics are like big rocks falling out of the sky - not a damn thing I personally can do to prevent it, statistically unlikely to happen to me as an individual. Therefore, no point is worrying about it day to day. If it happens I’ll do my best to deal with it.
Worked a year in a level 4 BSL lab. Just being realistic.
good post, Broomstick! thumbs up
Just in case someone reads this literally, that many weapons labs all over are working on such a weapon: the Biological Weapons Convention prohibited such research more than four decades ago. It’s likely a good bet that some rogue states continue such research, but it seems doubtful that a significant number of countries are spending money on a weapon that would be so extremely difficult to control.
If this is true what is your excuse for making the exaggerated claims about the state of the knowledge of the Reston virus? It is a kind of disinformation to claim what you claimed.
You’re right that you as an individual can’t do much, but there are things we can do as a global society that could help.
For example, if we avoid mixing types of livestock together, we can reduce the chance that a pig and a chicken get together for their diseases to hybridize. If we take steps to reduce the contact between domesticated animals and wild animals, same thing.
In Africa, there’s no doubt that improvements to health care, sanitation, communication and transportation would all yield enormous benefits. Disease control would be just one of them. If we reduced the amount of bush meat taken, we’d not only protect endangered species, but also reduce exposure to disease.
None of these are easy fixes and they’ll never reduce the risk to 0%, but they might take our risk from 1% to 0.5%, and that seems like a worthwhile effort.