Ebola is moving faster through Africa than treatment
Pinto Nag sends us a link to MSN which says that one of the charity organizations working in Africa that more than a thousand people have already succumbed to the disease and it’s moving faster through the population than they can keep up with the spread;
The UN health agency said the death toll from the worst outbreak of the disease in four decades had now climbed to 1,069 in the four afflicted countries, Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.
“It is deteriorating faster, and moving faster, than we can respond to,” MSF (Doctors Without Borders) chief Joanne Liu told reporters in Geneva, saying it could take six months to get the upper hand.
“It is like wartime,” she said a day after returning from the region where she met political leaders and visited clinics.
WHO said Thursday it was coordinating “a massive scaling up of the international response” to the epidemic.
“Staff at the outbreak sites see evidence that the numbers of reported cases and deaths vastly underestimate the magnitude of the outbreak,” it said.
I guess that the proposed treatment that they have for the virus hasn’t been used on humans yet. Ebola has been detected in Lagos, a Nigerian city, so this is the first time they get to see the affect of the spread of the disease in an urban setting.
Ya know, when I used to take a vacation from the old job, things would go to shit while I was out – but it was never like this. The President should think about taking shorter or fewer vacations for his last few years. I’m sure there are people in uniform right now packing their bags for a trip to Africa.
Category: Who knows
The Plague did the same thing.
re: plague — and for the same reason. The people, infected and caregivers, don’t understand how it is transmitted. In areas with poor hygiene people develop a tolerance for the illnesses that they get, they have rules for interacting with each other that allow for that. Unfortunately ebola is different so the old rules don’t work. Failure to adopt new rules is killing them.
Seems to me that I read somewhere that an infected person can pass on the disease for a week or ten days before they become symptomatic. During that interval they can infect a lot of people. So if, right this instant, Africa was able to isolate every individual from every other individual, it would be two weeks or so before we know how many people are infected. For sure it is a lot more than we know about now.
International travel accelerates the spread world-wide – imagine one infected but not symptomatic person on a plane.
We are going to see a lot more cases before it gets better. The number depends on just how contagious this strain of ebola is.
One asymptomatic asshole gets on a plane, and we’re all well and truly fucked.
That’s one reason I don’t fly.
There was just has a scare with a sick passenger on a flight from Africa to Frankfurt, but the traveler had some other virus or flu. It’s just a matter of time, even though transmission requires close contact.
One of my biggest, “Aw, shit” scenarios might look like the following:
One of the nations affected so far is Nigeria. What do we know about Nigeria? Besides being famous for scam e-mails, it’s a rather large oil producer, meaning lots of engineers, technicians, ships, etc., any of which can become a carrier.
From a personnel standpoint, where do you think most of those engineers, technicians, and drillers reside? Yes, boys and girls–Europe and the US.
Just one person gets infected and gets on a plane before they show symptoms, and it’ll be one major shit show.
I just now read this at ANN COULTER’s web site:
http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2014-08-13.html#read_more
Which she wrote in response to criticism of this:
http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2014-08-06.html
Interesting, huh?
If we are lucky ebola will continue to have a 90% or greater mortality rate. If the virus becomes less lethal it is likely more will die over time.
Currently the only known effective treatment is infusing the plasma harvested from a survivor of the disease into the bloodstream of a victim. With a 90% mortality rate and adding in other diseases like malaria and AIDS the pools of survivor plasma donors is pretty small.
I suggest that to be internationally inclusive Obama and the first wookie, along with his daughters Malaria and Sharia go visit Liberia ebola patients personally and show them some American love. I’m sure there is a community there Obama can organize to bring them social justice.
You’re retarded. You don’t have to like the President, or his politics, but have some class and leave the man’s family out of it.
The First Silver Tip has inserted herself into our lives so she is fair game. Obama has trotted out his daughters on occasion to make a point but I think leaving kids out of the mix is the right thing to do as they don’t have much say in it.
Well, you’re retarded too then. Tough guy, pick on a woman and two children. I hope calling them names makes both of you feel better. I didn’t much care for President Clinton, but insure as hell left his daughter out of it as she was just a child. You two need to grow the f@ck up.
And I left Hillary out of my arguments too. She wasn’t President, he was. If Hillary gets elected I’ll have to swallow a bitter pill, bit Bill will just be a shrill for his wife, like she was for him.
The real question no one is asking publicly is this.
Are we experiencing the beginning of the Zombie Apocolypse?
Time to get my zombie survival kit in order, lol.
Ok, seriously, this just sucks. As was said above, one sick person on an airplane and we are all fucked.
Jeez, talk about an epidemic. Worst case, this thing could burn right through Africa and on into the Middle East and Europe.
Not pumping the doom and gloom thing, but the death count has risen to 1,145 since yesterday (was 1,069).
When they say ‘underestimated’, they are also understating their underestimate.
Ex-PH2…Your post poses a question in my mind. What is the CDC and the federal government doing in regards to travel restrictions into America from Africa? I think it is past time we put into place a one way policy of aid workers going and then quarantined upon return for a health check. And no locals from the area into the U.S. unless quarantined to be sure they are free of this disease. Don’t want to sound over the top but this is how plagues get loose in an unprepared populace. I think of the Spanish Flu and others that caught us off guard and ill prepared. Now that we know this disease’s dangers, resistance to treatment and spread methods, we need to be very careful about it getting into our country. I am not by nature an alarmist either.
That’s a good question. The Spanish flu was a mutated form of the bird flue H5N1 that panicked so many idiots in the media a few years ago. I think it was 2005, wasn’t it? The bird flu in that case turned out to be a naturally-occurring recombinant variant of avian, swine and human flu viruses, which was found to have the same DNA as the Spanish flu had. There were tissue samples preserved from people who died of Spanish flu. The DNA makeup showed that the two were the same, but the 2005(?) variant was less deadly, and no matter how hard the medai tried to create a panic, it didn’t happen. That was mostly due to the availability of the internet and real-time online information. Then there was the Hanta virus scare, and that came and went quickly. I read ‘Hot Zone’, which was about the airborne monkey version of the ebola virus, at Reston, VA. It was frightening, but it never left the lab. The writer of that book followed the efforts of a search team to find out exactly where it came from, but they never discovered its origin. It was only lethal to monkeys. This ebola virus is NOT the monkey ebola virus, and my guess is that the source of it is a mutation of the monkey ebola virus. I’m guessing about that, and I hope it goes no further than the African west coast, but if people are exposed and don’t exihibit symptoms within 10 days, they may not know they’re carrying it. I don’t think it’s the zombie apocalypse, although I did revisit a 2008 British TV series titled ‘Survivors’, which was about the mass decimation of the human species by a genetically manufactured flu vaccine that escaped the lab and became a lethal strain of the flu. And gues what? Some vaccine manufacturer announced a few months ago that they were working on a ‘one size fits all’ flu vaccination. That was the basis for the Brit 2008 TV series – a one-stop vaccine for all flu viruses. Moral is: don’t… Read more »
EX-PH2,
I read that book, it was a great read and sobering.
Ebola Reston is not the same strain as the other strains, which are deadly.
Ebola Marsburg and Ebola Malinga were to other strains, and currently there seem to be three strains wrecking havoc in Africa.
Ebola reston originated in the Philipines.
Not good. The only sure way to stop the spread is isolation.
Unfortunately for the countries involved isolation also cuts out the regular food aid that these people need to survive.
Its wrecking an already weak infrastructure that can’t support the population as it is.
Ebola spreads very easily, the only good thing about it is that it kills so quickly that the carriers only have a two-three week window to spread it. With such poor infrastructure already the chances of a patient going further than a few miles before succumbing is likely.
The scary part is if it gets into the larger population centers they cant handle it. If several international travelers get it, it could be game over.
I came across some interesting information today. Do you know how many Medical doctors there are in Liberia? For a country with 4 million people there were just 40 doctors there in 2008. It has been reported that several of them have been infected with Ebola during the recent outbreak and may have died. Can you imagine one doctor for every 100,000 citizens. and only 27 nurses per 100,000. Rural dwellers can live their whole lives and never see a doctor, much less be treated by one. How do you deal with an epidemic with that small number of health professionals? My guess is that you don’t. I will try to come up with the statistics for the other affected nations. I’m sure they will be as bad or worse.
The only saving grace about being that backwards is that transportation infrastructure is so backward that it Can isolate the breakouts.
The bad thing is that even as backwards as transportation is its still 100 times more advanced than medicine there.
A raggedy ass 1973 Ford bus can still carry someone a few hundred miles over dirt roads in a period of a few days, infecting all the passengers and people along the way.
Sierra Leone has 2 doctors per 100,000 as does Nigeria. We on the other hand have 242 doctors per 100,000 people. There is a good chance that if this gets any worse all of the doctors in the affected area could be dead. That is bad JuJu baby!
This report says that armed men in Liberia broke into a quarantined location, looted the place and took out stuff that is most likely infected material, like mattresses, and 29 patients in the clinic fled.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-armed-men-attack-liberia-ebola-clinic-freeing-patients/
Are they trying to make it worse? I’d said yes, without further info, yes, they are.