Ebola: I Guess We Are All Going To Die

Doodle
I don't seem to get why Ebola is such a big deal. It's just another disease.
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It has an infection rate of 1.17 (10 people with ebola will, unchecked, pass it to another 17 people) and a mortality rate of around 50%.

I did a quick scribble in Excel yesterday and figured that (unchecked) it would take about 42 weeks to split the planet 50/50 into survivors/dead. That's very simplistic of course, presumes an even opportunity to spread, ignores natural births/deaths/immunities, but they're very nasty figures.

I was surprised, I'd been talking down the risk compared to the massive year-on-year influenza figures. I realise now that flu doesn't approach the spread/mortality rate of Ebola, not even in the same ballpark.
 
TenEightyOne
I was surprised, I'd been talking down the risk compared to the massive year-on-year influenza figures. I realise now that flu doesn't approach the spread/mortality rate of Ebola, not even in the same ballpark.
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Well, you know, vaccines and over 100 years of constant work to stop the flu, with unlimited test subjects, tends to drop those numbers. But go back before then and we were running triage in tents outside there were so many sick and dying.

The real question is; now that we have personal reasons to study it in the western world how long will it be before we get it moderately under control? Every potential crisis goes this route. The mortality rates in the third-world countries that are hosting the main outbreak are astoundingly high. Then a handful of people get infected in the US and we through the stats out the window. Before long it's a joke on a sitcom.

I heard a line somewhere that I like and started using. I don't worry about a problem until it comes up and shakes my hand. Ebola is a great fear mongering topic in the US but it hasn't become the threat it is in African nations. I'm not qualified to study it or treat it. Aside from offering support, my hands are tied. We can't live our lives scared of everything that might happen to us. If I did that I couldn't leave the house in the morning.
 
2clicks
Imagine that, if it devolves into something benign like the common cold: "I can't come in today boss, I've got Ebola."
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Just ask Native Americans how that works after continual exposure. And I mean with the common cold.
 
I once caught Typhoid. Yes... that Typhoid.

I went on antibiotics and was out of the hospital in a week, with nothing more than a little anemia and weak knees.

If I'd caught that a hundred years ago... well... if I was alive then... and... well... if I'd caught it a hundred years ago, I'd have a good chance (between 30-50%) of being dead as a doornail.
 
niky
I once caught Typhoid. Yes... that Typhoid.
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Oh you name-dropper.

You illustrate the danger from Ebola in the present moment though; outbreaks in countries with limited medical resources and vaccine development in very early stages. In 50 years we'll laugh at Ebola, maybe some of us will have had it :)

Incidentally, there are definitely some forum members with rabies, I'm sure of it.
 
Doodle
I don't seem to get why Ebola is such a big deal. It's just another disease.
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Because it's not curable & there's nothing really out there close to being deemed as a cure. Just experimental drugs that can only be made in small batches right now.

It's not like say, double/pneumonia, where you can be administered to the hospital for a week or so, thrown on some antibiotics & immediately have the odds in your favor in surviving. Ebola has, from what I've observed, a pretty 50/50 chance of killing you, even with the best medicine around. Nobody wants those odds, & nobody wants an non-curable virus with those odds that can spread (a very hard way to spread, but spread none the less).

A big fear with a virus like this, imo, is to avoid a repeat in history of something like the Bubonic Plague (not presumably on a 1/3rd population death toll, but massive still).
 
McLaren
Because it's not curable & there's nothing really out there close to being deemed as a cure.
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Same for the flu. Bed rest and hot soup.

Just experimental drugs that can only be made in small batches right now.
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Likely based on the antivirals that we are just now getting to be functional in flu cases.

It's not like say, double/pneumonia, where you can be administered to the hospital for a week or so, thrown on some antibiotics & immediately have the odds in your favor in surviving.
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Only works on bacteria, so of course it isn't the same. Now, viral pneumonia...


Ebola has, from what I've observed, a pretty 50/50 chance of killing you, even with the best medicine around. Nobody wants those odds, & nobody wants an non-curable virus with those odds that can spread (a very hard way to spread, but spread none the less).
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This is true, but it is due to lack of exposure. The flu and cold used to be just as deadly to unexposed groups.

A big fear with a virus like this, imo, is to avoid a repeat in history of something like the Bubonic Plague (not presumably on a 1/3rd population death toll, but massive still).
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See, this comparison to previous, less technological and advanced times/cultures just doesn't work for me. You can't even compare it to living in a time where people were superstitious about cats and rats burrowed into your home. You can't even compare life and medical facilities in the US to Africa or rural China.

That fact that we are all now reacting to news stories is another issue. People see the headline, "Man in New York Tests Positive for Ebola" and decide that it is panic time. Do a little more digging and you find out that he was a doctor in Africa treating Ebola not long ago.

Only two Americans have contracted Ebola in America, and they were healthcare workers working with an infected patient. If you just look at data for people who dies with Ebola in the US the mortality rate is lower, although the data is not enough to be significant yet. Lack of available data is kind of a good thing.

But here is a doctor explaining why his patient survived here in the US.

We are not being critical of our colleagues in west Africa. They suffer from a terrible lack of infrastructure and the sort of testing that everyone in our society takes for granted, such as the ability to do a complete blood count—measuring your red blood cells, your white blood cells and your platelets—which is done as part of any standard checkup here. The facility in Liberia where our two patients were didn’t even have this simple thing, which everyone assumes is done as part of your annual physical.

What we found in general is that among our Ebola patients, because of the amount of fluid they lost through diarrhea and vomiting, they had a lot of electrolyte abnormalities. And so replacing that with standard fluids [used in hospital settings] without monitoring will not do a very good job of replacing things like sodium and potassium. In both of our patients we found those levels to be very low. One of the messages we will be sending back to our colleagues is even if you don’t have the equipment to measure these levels, do be aware this is occurring when patients are having a lot of body fluid loss.

Our two patients also gained an enormous amount of fluid in their tissues, what we call edema. In Ebola virus disease there is damage to the liver and the liver no longer makes sufficient amount of protein; the proteins in the blood are very low and there is an enormous amount of fluid leakage out into the tissues. So one of the takeaway messages is to pay closer attention to that and perhaps early on try to replace some of these proteins that patients’ livers lack.
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They don't even have complete medical testing data in Africa. They can't properly see what is going on in order to properly treat it. Lots of diseases are very deadly in those circumstances. Hell, anesthesia is deadly under those circumstances.

When he explains how the treatment and procedures were done you can see a clear difference in the resources in the US vs Africa.
Twenty-one nurses, five physicians and we had the support of hundreds. Just making sure all the disposables coming out of those rooms were sterilized before we put them on the federal highway system, for example—we had to certify to the contractor that takes our regulated medical waste that it didn’t have active Ebola virus inside it. We didn’t have the equipment to handle all of the waste but in two hours facilities brought in industrial autoclaves [which sterilize materials with extreme heat] to replace the system that we had. We would have been drowning in garbage without them.
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They had 26 medical personal for one patient. There are probably more than 26 patients per doctor/nurse in Africa. And they had access to the necessary equipment to sterilize all waste in under two hours. I wonder if some of the African facilities have an autoclave at all.


Ultimately, we exist in a very different world from those with a 50% mortality rate and excessively high infectious rate.
 
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We were talking about the NYC case at home this afternoon and agreed that it is amazing that doctors/nurses/aid workers can come back from West Africa having cared for infected people and not be subject to at least a semi quarantine situation where they are ask not to fly, travel in crowded metro etc. They may not be infected, but they were certainly exposed.
 
Barra333
We were talking about the NYC case at home this afternoon and agreed that it is amazing that doctors/nurses/aid workers can come back from West Africa having cared for infected people and not be subject to at least a semi quarantine situation where they are ask not to fly, travel in crowded metro etc. They may not be infected, but they were certainly exposed.
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They are setting up certain airports to check all passengers on flights from those countries now.

It was a slow response in comparison to the political/media frenzy. I think people were more concerned about placing blame than actually doing anything.
 
FoolKiller
They are setting up certain airports to check all passengers on flights from those countries now.

It was a slow response in comparison to the political/media frenzy. I think people were more concerned about placing blame than actually doing anything.
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Personally, I think the bulk airport screening a publicity front (are you sick? Do you have a temperature?). Any doctor worth his/her oath should self quarantine for a week or so after working in affected countries.
 
FoolKiller
Only works on bacteria, so of course it isn't the same. Now, viral pneumonia...

This is true, but it is due to lack of exposure. The flu and cold used to be just as deadly to unexposed groups.

See, this comparison to previous, less technological and advanced times/cultures just doesn't work for me. You can't even compare it to living in a time where people were superstitious about cats and rats burrowed into your home. You can't even compare life and medical facilities in the US to Africa or rural China..
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I think you took my post a little too literally. Yes, it's not the same as pneumonia, but it's something you can easily recover from now-a-days & the odds of survival are heavily in your favor with medical treatment. Even with medical treatment on Ebola, your odds aren't necessarily skewed towards you surviving. That's my point; a lot of diseases/illnesses today can be combated & easily won, but Ebola isn't there yet. IMO, that's a reason why they "make a big deal" about it. What the news does is a whole other, irresponsible deal.

It was also not a direct-to-direct to comparison of the Plague. The example is to show that we as a species want to avoid a virus that could do that sort of damage, regardless of how clean or dirty our environment is.
Noob616
So apparently the infected doctor in NYC went out bowling a few days back. I heard someone say Ebola perfect game.
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mexican-word-of-the-day-ebola.jpg
 
Barra333
We were talking about the NYC case at home this afternoon and agreed that it is amazing that doctors/nurses/aid workers can come back from West Africa having cared for infected people and not be subject to at least a semi quarantine situation where they are ask not to fly, travel in crowded metro etc. They may not be infected, but they were certainly exposed.
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Come on, you don't expect bleeding heart hipsters to believe the rules apply to them do you?
 
TenEightyOne
Come on man, if you're going to pick a side then just do it, no shilly-shallying.
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Pick a side? What are the sides and how am I shilly-shallying?

It seems pretty reasonable to me that a doctor treating Ebola patients should stay home for a while. It seems pretty irresponsible to ignore the recommendations to stay home and monitor yourself for 21 days. I don't know what about that contradicts anything I've said before.

MSF/DWB are some of the world's true heroes and I have immense respect for their efforts in Africa. That doesn't mean they're infallible, to me this really smacks of that adage about doctors being the worst patients. That, combined with being young and idealistic means he took some actions which I think are fairly reckless.

No, this isn't going to be a massive outbreak in NYC and I'd be shocked if anyone else besides perhaps his girlfriend were to contract the disease. I'm not saying we shouldn't be sending aid, but I think it's irresponsible and very "it can't happen to me" not to stay home for a few weeks.
 
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TenEightyOne
I was mocking the strong line that you took; "bleeding heart hipsters" made me laugh :D
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Ah I see, I read it as perhaps I was being hypocritical after arguing with people earlier in the thread who wanted to shut down all flights out of Africa and all that jazz.

I was being a bit flippant too, but the Dr. and his girlfriend appear to be the typical self righteous granola hippie couple, and I haven't quite removed all the small town conservative programming from me yet :lol:
 
Our government has officially updated their stance on Ebola from "the Opposition are idiots" to "the Opposition are really big idiots".
 
We've got another suspected Ebola case, this time in Brisbane. There's no word on whether a treatment of The Opposition Are Really Big Idiots is proving effective.
 
So a nurse currently quarantined and under observation in New Jersey wants to sue the US government arguing that forced quarantine breaches her constitutional right to freedom.

I'm sorry but how selfish can someone be, it's not a big ask to quarantine all medical staff coming back from Africa for a short amount of time and you should want to be quarantined if you care about yourself and your fellow citizens.

All these guys going off all over the place (flights, cruises etc) right after handling Ebola patients is beyond comprehension, can't you wait just 15 or so days before deciding to bolt off somewhere?
 
What I find ironic is.
Countries will quarantine your dog, cat, horse or what ever animal your bringing in to prevent the spread of disease, yet humans are never really quarantined and yet humans have spread more diseases from one country to another in the space of a few hours thanks to air travel.

A sick person goes on a plane, infects nearly everyone on board due to the A/C spreading the disease
Those people go on with their lives, the airline workers start their next shift, possibly infect the next set of passengers which take the disease to a new location.+

prisonermonkeys
We've got another suspected Ebola case, this time in Brisbane. There's no word on whether a treatment of The Opposition Are Really Big Idiots is proving effective.
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First test says Negative.

http://www.9news.com.au/national/20...la-isolation-after-returning-from-west-africa
 

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