Okay, I got it.
WARNING!!! I have been reading on this controversial website: http://truthstreammedia.com/the-handling-of-this-ebola-crisis-is-like-a-bad-horror-film/ , that there are many BIG questions hanging in the air that are not being asked in the mainstream media, one of the sources they quote is a government site: Undiagnosed Acute Viral Febrile Illnesses, Sierra Leone - Volume 20, Number 7—July 2014 - Emerging Infectious Diseases journal - CDC , from the article: “Using IgM-capture ELISAs, we evaluated samples for antibodies to arthropod-borne and other hemorrhagic fever viruses. Approximately 25% of LASV-negative patients had IgM to dengue, West Nile, yellow fever, Rift Valley fever, chikungunya, Ebola, and Marburg viruses but not to Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus.”, now I don’t know what to believe any more, anybody has any answers?
That CDC article is very interesting. Not sure what you think it means though and I have no intrerest in giving that other site any clicks.
What it does say is that of patients being evaluated for Lassa Fever in Sierra Leone in 2006 to 2008 (a condition that looks much like Ebola - see this table) 8.6% had sera that later tested positive for Ebola and 3.6% for Marburg. The fatality rate of those positive is not included in the article.
So it seems like there have been occasional human cases of Ebola in Sierra Leone unidentified, likely ongoing for some period of time. Unclear if those case were human to human or resevior to human however. The issue is what changed allowing this occasional disease apparently there at low levels for at least 6 to 8 years to now spread more widely via human to human transmission? This one seemed to have been imported from Guinea.
In that context a bit from this article that I linked to for another reason in an IMHO Ebola thread gives one pause.
The major thrust of that study was determining the infectivity risk during convalescence; this bit is almost buried in there. This was back in 1995.
So asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic (but presumptively still potentially infectious and able to mingle) apparently can occur with Ebola even in past flares.
This is the potential nightmare, not becoming airborne. Containing it when some untold number are unidentified and possibly spreading it, is difficult, even with relatively low contagiousness.
But then why has it not spread farther before? Again, what is different now?
Asymptomatic carriers aren’t spewing a great deal of bodily fluids, therefore, even if they’re full of the virus they aren’t transmitting it. The biggest risk there is probably an asymptomatic man who transmits the virus via semen to a lover.
Mildly symptomatic people are more of a risk, especially in a culture like ours that demands people ignore “minor” illness and come to work anyway. Even so, as long as they aren’t getting body fluids on others, and use the toilet properly, there is not nearly the risk of someone severely ill and who is generating vomiting, uncontrolled diarrhea, and spontaneous bleeding.
You’re quibbling over a trivial technicality. Most people who are aware that Ebola doesn’t use much error correction and copies fast realize that mutations are extremely common. Evolutionary forces determine what happens to the mutant versions.
Well, while I agree that it’s nitpicking, it’s not entirely trivial. “Evolutionary forces” - selection, basically - are quantifiable and predictable. Once the mutation arises, we can model and predict with a fair bit of accuracy what might happen given certain conditions. However, whether or not the mutation actually occurs is random. We can calculate probabilities given population size, generation time, and mutation rate, but it comes down to a flip of a (weighted) coin as to whether or not the feared mutation actually ever happens. So I think it’s a distinction that, while minor, is worth keeping in mind.
This is not chickenpox or even influenza level contagiousness to be sure, but it requires less intimate contact than HIV or HBV. For now what I can read documents that transmission risk is low, albeit nonzero, even for household contacts, in the early days of symptoms. It may be that those who never become all that ill also never become all that contagious.
Consider what happened with AIDS. Originally, when it spread like wild-fire in the communities that facilitated its spread, before it was recognized as a disease with a known transmission method - people would get sick and die within a year or two. Once it was recognized, the cause and transmission method determined, and people modified their behaviour, the more virulent versions seem to have fallen by the wayside. The ones being spread today are the ones that take a long time to manifest, that can allow the host to survive for years and now decades.
The same appears to be true of Black Death, or bubonic plague. The initial epidemic that spread to wipe out between a third and half of Europe was said to be a dangerous killer that could appear in a victim within a day. It returned every few dozen years (when herd immunity got too low) but never in the lethal level of its first appearance.
The logic is simple - a more stealthy version of a virus that does not quickly kill or manifest in a patient could have a much longer unnoticed infectious phase, and will be less shunned and so more easily infect others. The question is, once a new person is exposed, how likely is it they will acquire the disease. An extremely infectious, fast-acting disease will spread and affect more people and succeed in the short term, but slow and steady wins the race long term. This is simply because population will modify their behaviour once they know how to recognize and avoid the disease.
That are news I was afraid to see, “To summarize, for the following reasons we believe that Ebola could be an opportunistic aerosol-transmissible disease requiring adequate respiratory protection: i) Patients and procedures generate aerosols, and Ebola virus remains viable in aerosols for up to 90 minutes; ii) All sizes of aerosol particles are easily inhaled both near to and far from the patient; iii) Crowding, limited air exchange, and close interactions with patients all contribute to the probability that healthcare workers will be exposed to high concentrations of very toxic infectious aerosols; iv) Ebola targets immune response cells found in all epithelial tissues, including in the respiratory and gastrointestinal system;” from this website: Zerohedge
Peace
Simple Mind, would you please explain why you believe a think tank from the University of Minnesota that has only been in existence since about 2000, and which, as near as I can tell, has zero actual experience with either Ebola or other high level biohazards, is a more reliable source of information on Ebola than the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta which has ample real life experience in dealing with the most hazardous bioagents on the planet, and which has studied Ebola since its discovery in 1976?
Or did you just go hunting on the internet until you found someone, anyone, to confirm your worst fears?
I saw a Ted talk several years ago about this kind of subject. The guys argument is that there is a tradeoff between disease severity and contagion depending on how it is spread. So if you have to spread the disease by persons to person contact or aerosol there is incentive to make the disease less bad, since people too sick to walk around can’t spread the disease. If it is spread by water, ticks, mosquitoes etc the incentive is to make the disease more virulent since the disease can spread even if someone is bedbound and disabled. So one would assume if anything there is pressure in ebola to become less severe, so more people can be healthy enough to spread it by person to person contact.