NPR just interviewed with a physician with Doctors Without Borders in the DRC. This person said the medical staff were concerned about contracting Ebola from a newborn who had tested positive for Ebola. I personally didn’t know that was possible.
IMO it’s past time to retitle the thread to “Ebola has come back”
The virus does cross the placenta. Did they say what happened to the mother?
The closest we could do to that as of now would be the way smallpox was eradicated, by using “ring immunization.” Isolate known cases, and immunize their contacts; this was done in 2014 and 2015, with that strain of vaccine.
The NPR story by Dorry Bouscaren wasn’t quite linking up correctly so will work on it on my laptop tonight.
Bouscaren wrote that the mom had passed away and that no relatives could get to the hospital. A random woman who had tested positive for the virus and had then recovered was actually fostering the newborn in hospital, prior to its passing away from the virus.
You can tell I teared up from reading the story. I hope the WHO can use a ring immunization like you indicated above. It’s going to take some time.
Many years ago I was talking to an Army doctor, somehow these kinds of global infectious diseases came up, and she pointed out something almost ironic, along the lines that Ebola is so extremely fast and deadly, that it has a somewhat difficult time getting a good epidemic going. It kills everybody so thoroughly it tends to die out, if only temporarily.
Yeah. The ideal disease starts like COVID: Catch it, asymptomatic spreader for days, maybe mild symptoms a few more days, but not enough to stop you from wanting to do your normal activities.
Then, like Ebola, you fall off the edge and death is both soon & almost inevitable.
THAT would be bad; like destroy civilization bad.
While Ebola risk remains very low in the U.S., be of good cheer - there’s a chance of catching dengue, particularly in Florida. 111 locally acquired cases there this year at last count. The Tampa area is a hot spot.
My niece had to return early from her second exchange-student trip to Indonesia, because she got dengue fever. She spent a week in an Indonesian hospital, and returned with a travel nurse by her side the whole time. My BFF also believes that his son got it a few years ago after going snorkeling in the Caribbean island of Bonaire.
I’m surprised, a little, that isn’t part of the scheduled immunizations for travel to that part of the world
There is no dengue fever vaccine currently available in the US.
Huh. Maybe it’s a .mil thing. US personnel are inoculated against Dengue depending on the area of deployment.
This link says, in so many words, that the vaccine programs have been aimed at children, for which dengue is most dangerous.
I did a CE about dengue vaccines a while back, and I remember what this story says, that each exposure results in WORSE symptoms, not a milder case, and again, depending on the strain they contracted (there are four).