It is easier to transmit than HIV. HIV is only transmittable through blood, semen, pre-ejaculate, vaginal fluid, or breast milk. Ebola can be transmitted at least some of those ways (not sure about vaginal fluid or pre-ejaculate, but they’re bodily fluids so assume yes), but the CDC says “bodily fluids” including but not limited to sweat, urine, feces, vomit, and saliva.
Or in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 or 2013, for that matter, in each of which at least 10000, and in most cases more than 20,000 Americans died of influenza? But it’s not an “exotic” disease, I guess.
Not really. HIV is quite fragile, and doesn’t survive very well outside a host. Transmission generally requires a direct fluid exchange. You cannot catch AIDS by sleeping in the same bed as someone with HIV. Ebola, it appears, is much hardier. A bed used by an infectious Ebola patient remains highly infectious for sometime, and shared sleeping arrangements is one of the major vectors of transmission of the disease in a West Africa.
Nigeria did not handle it badly. The case they detected did not infect anyone else. They successfully contained it. Why are you so resistant to that notion?
Airport screening will only detect those who are actually ill - which is important, because that’s when they’re infectious. It will NOT catch anyone who has been exposed, has the virus, but is not YET ill.
Gee, maybe that’s why Liberia is asking people about their contacts before they exit the country, restricts those who have been in close contact within 21 days, and are talking about prosecuting Mr. Duncan for lying on that interview. If he survives.
I don’t know and you don’t know, but places like the CDC have been studying ebola since the 1970’s. I expect there are people who know the answer to that question.
The problem, apparently, was finding a company willing to take the job. Thanks to needless fear-mongering, professionals who routinely clean up all sorts of biohazards were apparently fearful of this one. Which is an example of why mongering fear is a bad thing.
Until such a company could be located (and a professional crew did go in and do the work today) it would have been irresponsible NOT to inform the quarantined family of steps to take to protect themselves and minimize risk.
The way you phrase this could lead someone to assume the waste it just tossed into a corner. It’s not. It’s treated like any other biohazard - placed in marked bags, probably bagged multiple times, and put in a location where the public and most staff will not accidentally encounter it.
But hey, don’t let facts stop you from trying to scare yourself.
So she was walking around with Marburg undetected? Her home want doused in bleach and her belongings burned? Her family wasn’t quarantined and her whereabouts traced? America must be lucky to even be around!
The precautions we are taking are good. But they are also over-the-top (which is fine) and not some kind of bare minimum.
Ok, thanks for the info.
well this link says ‘500 a yr’ … that’s not a good number either but far from those other numbers …
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/lawrence-solomon/death-by-influenza_b_4661442.html
I also have the following question … if the flu is such a concern to spread, why don’t the authorities scramble to track down everyone who’s come in contact with someone who has the flu like they do with this ebola virus ? … I’m asking sincerely … I don’t know much about either of these
Because the flu is much less likely to kill someone than Ebola. The death rate for the flu is something like 0.5 per 100,000, while the death rate for Ebola is around 50% (for all outbreaks – some are as low as 25% and some as high as 90% according to CDC). Note that some of the disparity is probably because Ebola outbreaks are usually in areas with poor access to medical care. Prompt and appropriate care can drastically reduce the death rate from Ebola though it would still be much higher than the death rate for the flu.
We also have vaccines for the flu, plus to some degree the flu is just less scary because it is so familiar while Ebola is more of an unknown unless you’re from certain parts of Africa. Even in Africa, Ebola is just not very common most of the time and outbreaks usually only have cases reaching single or double digits rather than thousands of cases like right now.
Your whole premise is also a bit wrong. The CDC closely tracks the various flu viruses. You can read how on their Overview of Influenza Surveillance in the United States page. They can’t scramble to track down everyone exposed most likely because of factors that include the cost, other resource requirements, sheer number of infections, and the relatively low risk of death. Something like 200,000 people are hospitalized per year in the USA because of flu, so they just don’t have the resources to respond in the same way as Ebola, which has only one confirmed case and one other possible case (in DC) so far. (I’m not counting the Americans brought back after being diagnosed in Africa).
They do all this tracking so they can better predict upcoming pandemics and ramp up the response when needed, for instance in 2009 with the H1N1 flu.
I’m not at all. When I pointed out the errors and delays in the Dallas response, it was Ramira who suggested that maybe the Nigerian response had handled it badly as well.
You’ve agreed with every fact I’ve cited, so we’re on solid ground there. You’ve conjectured that the public health response that has made various errors so far has not made any other errors that we don’t know about; like I said, I’m not in a position to disagree, and I hope that’s right.
Since we seem to agree that the airport screening process is not going to catch anyone except openly symptomatic and scrupulously truthful travelers, presumably we also agree that there will be more infected people coming to this country.
I’ve raised the concern that the limits and delays demonstrated in the public-health response to this single case mean that if a wider outbreak arrives, the public health response will be even more constrained, delayed, and ineffective. I’ve wondered whether it’s adequate to leave the response to the infection solely in the hands of the affected family (and, I guess, the apartment manager) for several days, given that future families may not be as sensible if a wider outbreak occurs. No one’s really responded substantively to these concerns; rather, I hear only that seeking some accountability about our ability to respond if there’s a larger problem denotes “fear.”
So I guess I’ll turn the accusation around to the mustn’t-ask-questions side of the discussion: Why are you all so afraid of examining the official response so far? Why is it so important to shut down discussion?
With it being warm climate disease natural checks and balances should exist in nature. Health care wise concerned because most people arent going to go to hospitals till to late. Because medicine is big business in the united states and not affordable. Last out breaks from what I read was 3000 infected 1522 survived. But recent is 3000 dead and over 100 plus health care providers. So I half to question if it has mutated from fluids to physical contact. Plus factor in the media part of it. we live in a country were a native animal carrys black plague and is immune to it but this animal is never mention. So part of me thinks some one wants a Ebola panic in the united states. As for hospitals administrations from articals I have read I don’t think they even know if they are prepared for it. So Id say if from a warm climate in the united states Just try to avoid as much physical contact as possible till it gets colder outside.
World population around 211,000,000,000. Ebola out break people who caught it Under 10,000 for 20 years people who died under 5,000. Those numbers are probably very close to car accident deaths in the United states for one Month. Do I want any one to panic no. Do I want any one to catch it no. But Numbers are in your favor with Ebola
As for fear of the flu. It affects 100,000s of people. They are tracked because the more a virus infects the better its odds of mutating. Not sure if possible but imagine if some how the flu virus infected some one with rabies. And some how cause the rabies to mutate into a air spread virus. Virus are no difference than people taken on physical changes to adjust to new environments.
how body fluids and disease become more scary in america. To be honest I think due to vaccines. We are giving shots not to catchs things. But at the same time I would suspect that would also cause us not to build up a natural herd resistant to foreign ones which people in poor countrys might be carriers of but have a natural resistants to. Sorta like typhoid marry. A cook who spread it to several familys with a high death rate. yet she herself was resistant to it. She was locked up because she refused to quite cooking for a living. they let her out she changed her name and it started all over again. So again she was locked up. They say she eventually moved away from people and died all alone.
I am more concerned about Lyme Disease and Eastern Equine Encephalitis, which have both been found in mosquitoes in my area. When Ebola is found in mosquitoes in my neighborhood, I will worry.
I don’t know what world you’re living in, but the human population on earth is “only” about 7,265,200,000 at the moment. Not to take away from your message about the unlikelihood of contracting ebola, but your population estimate is orders of magnitude off.
My apologies for attributing the quote, then.
I think I am not as worried as you because at this point I don’t think an error will necessarily turn to disaster or lead to an epidemic. I’d rather errors occur when we only have one or two cases than when/if we have a dozen or a hundred, if only because the consequences will be less dire with fewer active cases.
As I said, we haven’t had to worry about this sort of highly deadly disease treatable only with supportive measures for about 65 years. Theory of quarantine is one thing, practice is another. This generation needs to re-learn how to do this sort of thing.
Yes.
Arguably, an actively ill person on an airplane represents a greater threat because the other passengers will be heading off to possibly widely separated destinations. A case turning up a weeks later in an ER still presents a problem, but his contacts are more contained geographically which makes tracking them down easier.
I heard something on the radio coming home about a Brussels-to-US airplane that had a Liberian passenger fall ill en route, apparently the airplane underwent some sort of quarantine on arrival - I don’t’ have full details but that does sound like an appropriate response (my opinion may change with more information, of course).
It’s actually fairly typical for the first response to an outbreak of a potentially epidemic disease to be weak and disorganized - the fact that Patient Zero in Dallas was identified, put into treatment, contacts tracked and some quarantined is actually ahead of the historical curve. Frequently, the original victim is dead and it isn’t until dozens are falling ill that authorities notice there’s a problem. Sure, this can always be handled better but in a larger context this is better than some past performances.
The key thing here is that ebola is not airborne. The family staying inside really does protect the neighbors.
In the days of the Black Death entire families were sometime boarded up in a home to live and die on their own in true isolation - and if you ran out of food in the meanwhile too bad. This family wasn’t abandoned. True, the response was not a good as it should have been, but health authorities were in contact with them, advising them, and supplies were left for them. If any of them fall ill they will receive treatment from the very earliest point in the illness which should help.
Meanwhile, I sincerely hope someone is taking notes so next time this is all handled better.
It’s not so much asking questions but the tone of those questions. It’s more constructive to say “How could this be done better?” than “OMG, that’s so awful, people are going to get sick and die!”
No, it’s physical contact with body fluids that spreads it, not physical contact with, say, a clean hand. The biggest problem is that the seriously ill tend to leak their body fluids, which definitely poses a hazard to those caring for them.
If you mean prairie dogs they are not immune to it, it makes them sick and kills them just like it does people. Or is it some other animal you’re thinking of?
People in this day and age generally aren’t prepared for a potential outbreak of a disease this lethal, we’re not used to it anymore. They can learn, though.
Avoiding physical contact is a pretty good way to avoid a lot of illnesses and is about the only useful thing I’ve seen you post.
World population is more like 7,265,000,000. Fact checking is your friend.
No. Just… no. BTW, the SyFy channel is not an authority on biology.
Within the constraints of biology, that’s true, but I don’t expect any human to give birth to a baby with functional wings and capable of flight, and I don’t expect the flu and rabies viruses to make babies together.
Back in the days before vaccines and modern sanitation tens of thousands of Americans died every year of diseases most current Americans have seldom heard of, can’t spell, and wouldn’t know the symptoms of. The “herd immunity” of the survivors was not sufficient to prevent new outbreaks.
Fact-checking is your friend. The actual history is that because she refused to quit infecting other people she was placed under permanent house arrest but she was allowed visitors - just not allowed to cook for them or serve them food. She didn’t “move away” from people, she lived on North Brother Island, which is in the Bronx. In New York City. Surrounded by millions of people.
If you prefer the Huffington Post to the CDC for epidemiological numbers, fine. But even your 500/year number is vastly more than are going to die from Ebola caught in the US this year. I’d guess somewhere around 500 more.
But then, I’m a liberal, and according to the other on-going thread, fact-based risk analysis is apparently some sort of political statement, now.
Four days after the fact.
Four days after the family already bagged his clothes/possessions and had a go at disinfecting the place themselves, which was probably adequate but hey, maybe we should be extra sure, right?
They’re Liberian, not incompetent.