Ebola; That’s not helping
I guess folks in Monrovia, Liberia were a little upset that Ebola patients were being housed and treated in their neighborhood – so they decided to loot the clinic, for some odd reason. From the Associated Press;
West Point residents went on a “looting spree,” stealing items from the clinic that were likely infected, said a senior police official, who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the press. The residents took medical equipment and mattresses and sheets that had bloodstains, he said. Ebola is spread through bodily fluids including blood, vomit, feces and sweat.
“All between the houses you could see people fleeing with items looted from the patients,” the official said, adding that he now feared “the whole of West Point will be infected.”
Some of the looted items were visibly stained with blood, vomit and excrement, said Richard Kieh, who lives in the area.
The incident creates a new challenge for Liberian health officials who were already struggling to contain the outbreak.
And, oh, yeah, the patients that they were treating, they fled the scene, so they’re wandering around with a deadly, highly infectious disease in a major African metropolis.
Ebola has killed 1,145 people in West Africa, including 413 in Liberia, according to the World Health Organization.
So that should help.
Category: Dumbass Bullshit
Oh boy. This could get really bad. And since Ebola has up to a 3-week asymptomatic latent period after infection, it will be at least 3-4 weeks before we know just how bad.
Well whitey tried to kill all the brown folk with AIDS but that didn’t work so they had to find something else that would do the trick…
/sarc takes off infowars tinfoil hat.
On a more serious note this looks really bad. Probably would only take one infected individual to travel abroad and leak bodily fluids into a salad bar to cause a worldwide man caused disaster.
Can a whole country earn the Darwin award?
I believe it can.
where to start, where to start… the field for that award is as crowded as for the Stolen Valor awards.
I’d say we have a pretty stellar candidate here.
Why exactly are we still helping them?
To prevent something much, much worse.
These Ebola posts can not go by without some reference to Stephen King’s “The Stand”.
Blue Oyster Cult … nicely appropriate.
OOPS!
I do apologize for sharing that movie without first watching it.
I think that the the turmoil and looting is to protest the police shooting in Ferguson, which we all know is George Bush’s fault.
Oh goody. Infected people not under control.
And we haven’t shut down air travel to/from western Africa why, exactly?
Slow on the uptake, perhaps?
I thought United Airlines canceled all flights to African countries last week, but I can’t find anything about it now.
Wouldn’t take much for a regional airline to get to Lagos, Abuja, etc…and while Ebola is not an airborne disease, how hard would it be to come in contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person?
While the WHO and CDC call the risk low, it’s not zero.
It’s actually rather easy, NHSparky.
African cities are crowded; ditto mass transit in those cities, which is typically not air conditioned. And coastal tropical West Africa – like Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, and southern Nigeria – is hot and damp. So people sweat quite a bit.
Sweat is one of the bodily fluids that apparently carries and can transmit the virus.
Besides, what you postulate has already happened. As I recall, the first American who died from Ebola during this outbreak died in Lagos. He caught the disease in Liberia while caring for a sick relative. He was on his way home to the US; he first caught a flight to Lagos on a regional carrier.
Only the fact that he was sick as hell – and someone in Lagos noticed and stopped him, or he simply got too sick to continue traveling – prevented him from making it home with a deadly payload.
I’ll keep looking. All I could find was the standard warnings about travel to various African countries from the State Department.
Something is bound to turn up.
I know one African airline is banning flights from the eastern coast into Kenya.
…There’s a wonderful pic out there of Charles Darwin placing a finger to his lips like he’s saying,”Shhhhh…”
Mike
Wow. I’ve been watching this mess evolve. Did I read correctly that it is 90% fatal?
I don’t know what the viral load is for this, I remember a table from my Microbiology text that some are as low as 10. That means that if 10 viruses get into your system, you got whatever it expresses.
If it’s 90% fatal, has a low viral load, is asymptomatically infective for 2-3 weeks, and this kind of stupidity is happening right now …
Man, it’s starting to sound like a real life description of John Ringo’s new series that started with “Under a Graveyard Sky.”
If so, a lot of people are going to die.
Then, Al Sharpton, Farrakhan, et al, will probably announce that’s it’s a CIA plot against the brown people, and Bush ordered it done.
Or some such banal stupidity.
Old Soldier: I can’t speak to the viral load requirement for typical infection with Ebola. You’re correct, though – some virii are infectious with as little as 10 introduced into the system.
Regarding Ebola, there are multiple strains. One (ebola reston) apparently can infect but doesn’t cause serious disease in humans. (That was the one discussed in “The Hot Zone”). The worst strain (originally ebola zaire; not sure if that’s still the name today, as some have been renamed) has a fatality rate of around 90%. Others aren’t as bad – but the “best” still has a fatality rate of around 30-50%. That’s bad.
For comparison, smallpox had a similar latency period (2 weeks, as I recall) and was also spread by personal contact (as well as by aerosol droplet, something Ebola apparently doesn’t do). I think it was also a small load virus – e.g., only around 10 were required for infection. However, it “only” had a typical fatality rate of 30%.
An Ebola pandemic would indeed be seriously bad news. It doesn’t seem to spread as easily as smallpox, but it does seem to be more deadly. And it has a similarly long asymptomatic incubation period.
If I could wave a magic wand and absolutely isolate every human on the planet, it will take 10 to 20 days to find out how may people are infected. In the meantime, those people who are contagious but not symptomatic are spreading the disease.
The question is: how contagious are they? If very contagious, many more people will come down with the disease, if not so contagious, then not so many. It is a nasty little bastard and I would just as soon not get it.
I plan to do as little interaction with people as I can for the next few weeks.
They may not know what the viral load is as they still have no idea what the natural reservoir of the virus is.
I’m not sure of the size of this virus but the AIDS virus can march about 40 abreast through the natural holes in vinyl gloves. Reminds me of the movie Twelve Monkeys.
Ok, I got curious and went to the CDC website.
Apparently this strain is not contagious without symptoms.
Here is the link:
Current Ebola Outbreak Q&A
A relief–for now.
The only difference between this and Graveyard Sky is this isn’t man-made or man-modified. It is being spread completely by human stupidity.
So it seems.
Jeez, this is bad.
You could have a dead city by the end of the month.
I agree.
Here’s the problem as I see it.
What is stopping someone was (selling/giving/being kidnapped by and having harvested) infected bodily fluids to a less-than-friendly power. That power then infects someone and sends them to Mexico. That vector then crosses the border with the other little brown bodies. Right now, it’s a 50/50 chance they are caught. If they aren’t, then they can just take a bath in a reservoir, go tank-topping in a busy Los Angeles airport, or any other number of things to begin an outbreak of Ebola in the United States.
Remember, this strain is extra virulent. It’s 100% infective and 90% fatal. We have to be right every time and they have to be lucky only once. After that one time, they will simply praise Allah for the plague.
There is a sure fire way to stop Ebola from spreading, but it depends on having responsible and self reliant people. A 100% lockdown of people in their homes for about a week. By then anyone with the virus is dead.
The online April 2014 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine reports a 97% genetic match for Ebola Zaire, but with certain differences that suggests it is a new strain indigenous to Guinea and not imported from Central Africa.
As of 18June, WHO reports a 64% fatality rate.
Again, transmission is by direct contact of body fluid (blood, vomit, semen, saliva, feces) from an infected person who has the symptoms through a break in the skin or the mucous membranes of an uninfected person.
I suspect that this would be difficult to weaponize. If transmission was by aerosol droplet (sneeze, cough, spitting, etc) like Influenza, or Smallpox as Hondo pointed out, we’d probably have Spanish Flu 1918 Redux with catastrophic loss of life.
As it is, IMO, not a lot to worry about. Just don’t travel to West Africa.
One thing we’re overlooking here is the virus’s survival potential outside of the human Body which differs between different viruses. For example, the HIV virus cannot survive outside of a human body for more than a few minutes at best while the Hepatitis virus can survive up to 90 days afterward and still be communicable in say, mucous spit on a wall, ditto with sweat, etc, and do we know how hardy these strains of Ebola are, will they “die” in minutes without body fluids from a live person, or is whatever that’s been contaminated by a victim still able to pass the disease on?
Not a Virologist, but I’ll take a shot at that.
It sounds like it must be introduced, while still hydrated, directly into the blood stream.
But, things I have read seem to suggest that poor antiseptic technique may be responsible, at least in part, for the rapid spread in West Africa. Which suggests that there may be some risk wrt infective tenacity outside the body.
One would think that dealing with something this deadly, one would take extra care with sterilization, but who knows …?
According to an article published in April, when this oubreak was just beginning, this is a new, previously unknown strain of the ebola virus.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/16/ebola-africa-new-strain_n_5162354.html
The researchers have not yet been able to determine where it originated or what its genetic source material is, but they suspect it is a newly-evolved strain from a recent ancestor.
Basically, what that says is that it’s a mutated form of another strain.
“…it’s a mutated form of another strain.”
So it seems.
Everything I am seeing, it is Ebola Zaire. http://guardianlv.com/2014/08/ebola-by-the-numbers/
If I recall what I’ve read, if the strain is <10% genetically different from Ebola Zaire, it's considered Ebola Zaire. It's considered a different strain if it's >10% genetically different. I’ve also read that this strain is only 2-3% genetically different from known examples of Ebola Zaire.
I still think I would rather die of Ebola than Rabies (speaking of bats). Listen if you dare…. cool story: http://www.radiolab.org/story/312245-rodney-versus-death/
This article is a follow-up regarding the looting of that quarantine clinice in Liberia, which was apparently at a school. There are 17 missing patients now, and according to this report, there are 75,000 people in the immediate areas, and there are also corpses lying in the streets, untouched.
http://news.msn.com/world/liberia-losing-grip-on-ebola-as-hunt-for-patients-goes-on-1
It just gets worse by the hour.
This report is from Reuters:
GENEVA, Aug 19 (Reuters) – Cases in West Africa’s Ebola outbreak this year have risen to 2,240, including 1,229 deaths, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Tuesday, reporting the toll in four countries including Nigeria.
The WHO said it was working with the U.N.’s World Food Programme to ensure food delivery to 1 million people living in Ebola quarantine zones in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
“Food has been delivered to hospitalised patients and people under quarantine who are not able to leave their homes to purchase food. Providing regular food supplies is a potent means of limiting unnecessary movement,” the WHO said in a statement.
(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay, editing by John Stonestreet
http://www.trust.org/item/20140819082720-5ad82/?source=dpagetopic
That’s 1,229 dead and rising, and countries that are quarantined are getting food aid.
1,229 dead … that’s still just under a 55% fatality rate, which is pretty bad in anybodies book.
Is it just me or are those numbers pretty much Exactly the same as they were a week ago?
Just an Old Dog: per the CDC, the 1229 dead figure was as of 16 Aug. On 15 Aug, the number of dead was 1145.
I haven’t been able to find figures for later than 16 Aug. No word on how many of those still ill on 16 Aug have since died.