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Racing To Contain Ebola
An anonymous reader writes "Ebola, one of the most deadly diseases known to humans, started killing people in Guinea a few months ago. There have been Ebola outbreaks in the past, but they were contained. The latest outbreak has now killed over 100 people across three countries. One of the biggest difficulties in containing an outbreak is knowing where the virus originated and how it spread. That problem is being addressed right now by experts and a host of volunteers using Open Street Map. 'Zoom in and you can see road networks and important linkages between towns and countries, where there were none before. Overlay this with victim data, and it can help explain the rapid spread. Click on the colored blobs and you will see sites of confirmed deaths, suspected cases that have been overturned, sites where Ebola testing labs have been setup or where the emergency relief teams are currently located.'"
I thought for a moment that racing is to Ebola what cookies are to flour. Then again, too much sport can kill you anyway. ;-)
Ezekiel 23:20
I thought I had read someplace that severe hemorrhagic fever diseases (and maybe it was Ebola specifically) weren't large-scale pandemic risks because they incapacitated and killed people too quickly, inhibiting their spread. Whereas other diseases like pandemic flu or smallpox were a bigger pandemic risk because the host wasn't knocked down so fast and could be mobile and communicable for longer.
just escape to Madagascar, the virus won't probably reach you there.
I predict a low posts count.
The most terrifying book I have ever read is "The Hot Zone" by Richard Preston. http://www.amazon.com/Hot-Zone... If this gets out and goes global, it is THE END of civilization as we know it. I suspect a few more people might be following this than normal.
That's where the ancestors of everyone hail from.
This is not the funny you're looking for.
Fuck you. The population of Conacry is between 1.5 and 2 million.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
For most of the rest of the world, "America" refers to the pair of continents nestled between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Technically everyone on those continents is American, and people with a better handle on geography and a more... robust world perspective recognize the need to specify. For better or worse, our culture has appropriated the term American to mean those within the U.S., but that's not really accurate. I mean, it's literally inaccurate; it's like saying Florida when someone asks you what city you're from.
I predict a low posts count.
The most terrifying book I have ever read is "The Hot Zone" by Richard Preston. http://www.amazon.com/Hot-Zone... If this gets out and goes global, it is THE END of civilization as we know it. I suspect a few more people might be following this than normal.
No ebola, while a very nasty and unpleasant disease isn't a "global killer" for the same reason it is so feared: it kills most* of it's victims and that in a relatively short time. That makes fast spreading of it very unlikely unlike other diseases like variants on the flu. That also makes it possible to contain outbreaks even on a larger scale: at worst a pure isolation of the affected people for some weeks is enough.
(* depending on strain, up to IIRC 90% lethality)
It seems this one is being spread by birds, but frankly doesn't it seem like other diseases are killing way more than this instance of ebola?
did you forget to take your meds?
What country uses the expression "US American"?
The rest of the American ones. You know... Canada, Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guyana, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Chili, Argentina, Uruguay, The Falklands, The Sandwich Islands... A lot of the world substitutes "Fucking" for "US" to separate us from the rest of the Americans.
I predict a low posts count.
The most terrifying book I have ever read is "The Hot Zone" by Richard Preston. http://www.amazon.com/Hot-Zone... If this gets out and goes global, it is THE END of civilization as we know it. I suspect a few more people might be following this than normal.
No ebola, while a very nasty and unpleasant disease isn't a "global killer" for the same reason it is so feared: it kills most* of it's victims and that in a relatively short time. That makes fast spreading of it very unlikely unlike other diseases like variants on the flu. That also makes it possible to contain outbreaks even on a larger scale: at worst a pure isolation of the affected people for some weeks is enough.
(* depending on strain, up to IIRC 90% lethality)
In todays world I can contact a lot of people in two weeks... Even without flying every day. One Liberian ambassadorial aid could really mess some stuff up.
Can we just be NANCs, rhymes with yanks,
and acronym's for North American Non-Canadian?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
it's like saying Florida when someone asks you what city you're from.
Yet, you argue that someone from Brazil should be called an American because the continent they come from is called South America. I'd buy that if they changed the country's name to "The Brazilian States of America".
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Dude, that's just racist, monkeys need love too...
Paranoid bullshit. Maybe see a shrink before you go on a killing-spree?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Have you even bothered to find out _how_ it spreads? It is not airborne. The thing that is wrong here is that you are clueless and vicious.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Unless a Reston style variant decides to transfer to humans. Then we're pretty fucked.
For most of the rest of the world, "America" refers to the pair of continents nestled between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
In Chinese, the word used for North/South America means the United States when used in isolation. This is also true in most other languages I am familiar with. The only exception I know of is Spanish. Spanish speakers are not "most of the rest of the world", although they are most of America (in the Spanish sense).
Yes but unless an air-borne variant strain that can infect humans exists the spread is still not as problematic than some super-flu. How many persons will be in contact with bodily fluids of your aid?
And even if an air-borne variant exists the short incubation period means it will be easier to detect and contain. The misdiagnosis of the flu will be much higher too loading the "care" system more and exposing people having some allergic symptoms or the common cold to the flu virus. When it comes to a disease that spreads relatively quickly and causes the patients to leak bodily fluids like a sieve* the diagnostic situation is a lot easier.
If I'd have to choose a disease to be frightened of the flu is the number one.
(* okay, exaggerated)
I would call it mutual annihilation through war, not self annihilation through war. Unless it is the most inept war ever.
At worst a few thousand people die. That's fewer than die in the Arab world because they keep murdering health workers, because THAT's disrespectful of Allah or some such shit.
I'm currently in Columbus, OH - currently undergoing a mumps problem, with almost 200 cases reported. The number is still growing. This is a dumb problem to have to worry about. Get your vaccinations.
Let's see what we are working with:
(1) 90% mortality rate,
(2) No known vaccine,
(3) Spreads by bodily fluids,
(4) Area with poor hygiene,
(5) All experts recommend letting the virus "burn itself out."
Objectively, is there really anything to do other than to strictly and conservatively quarantine every country (and sub-quarantine cities as necessary) with a positive case?
We should not even be sending in aid workers, who could potentially be exposed. Medicine and water can be airdropped.
That's the short term solution. In the long term, you need to educate the population, improve hygiene and infrastructure, and figure out where the infection is coming from. In general, the African governments have not really been interested in doing any of the above.
Well dang, best post I seen for a while and I just gone and used up my mod points, M-O-O-N, that spells mod points.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
(Full disclosure, I am one of the lead coordinators of the mapping effort discussed in the article and in my post below.)
Yes, the OpenStreetMap project is where the mapping is being done. The map linked in the article shows outbreak information overlaid on top of the OSM database of roads and buildings. It is this underlying map data that the croudsourcing is about.
If you go to this site you can create an OSM account and then start edititng the map immediately (think wikipedia, but for maps). You normally would edit by just going to the main OSM page and then editing the map there, the site I linked is the HOT task manager. We create areas on the task manager that need mapping done, the area is then broken up into a grid of small square tiles, and then people 'lock' a tile to work on, map all the roads and/or buildings in that tile, and finally mark the tile complete after the map has been updated. This tool was used to map all the roads and buildings in 3 large cities (Gueckedou, Macenta, and Kissidougou), where the outbreak originally started; all three of these towns were mapped completely, down to the last building, within 24 hours of HOT getting satellite imagery for them.
Right now the focus is to find and map all the small residential areas outside of these main cities, and to draw in the main connecting roads to each village. This helps the medical teams track the spread of the disease from village to village, as well as making it easier for them to travel around to do their own work. I really encourage slashdotters to help out on these kinds of projects. The mapping tools are easy to use (the in browser iD editor especially), but the technical knowledge of the slashdot crowd makes it easy for the average ./er to learn more advanced tools like JOSM and also to help with analysis and writing code to do cool stuff with the map data. You can really help out this (and a lot of other humanitarian efforts) by doing a bit of mapping anywhere in these areas, every little bit of extra data helps.
-AndrewBuck
Well, for starters, the world's nuclear arsenal isn't capable of sterilizing the entire African rainforest system, or even killing all the people living there. Therefore, all you'd get is the fun task of enforcing a guarantine in a radiactive area with devastated physical and social infrastructure.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Bullshit, and you'd know it was bullshit if you'd ever been to any of those countries. They refer to themselves by the name of their Nation, not the continent it's located on, just like pretty much everyone else on the planet does.
Actually, my personal favorite is Mexico where the word for norther visitor and the word for diarrhea is the same. Turista. And I guess you are right, as those European's don't seem to be on the same planet most of the time...
*sings*
Prediction fulfilled - even including this reply to a (spit) AC.
And I work in the area. But I've been watching it for a couple of months now.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Even then only for usages of the word "fucked" that include a mere 75% mortality.
We're humans ; we'd make that up in a couple of generations. 40 years. No, 50 years. No, maybe as little as 60 years.
Actually, stepping back the human population by (say) 75% might be one of the best moves a "Mad Scientist" (or "Rogue Government") could make for the species. Might be death for you, or for me (I was handling equipment 2 days out from from Liberia just 2 weeks ago), but on average, that's not likely to be a bad price.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
If that shit gets loose ... you have already lost the Conacry choice. You'd probably be safer by turning every port of entry into the Continental US into radioactive dust, and a hundred kilometres around.
Let the Hawaiians die - they've got native fruit bats and must be considered suspect.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Good luck with the latter. Unless you live in a bat- (and mosquito-) free country. Which is pretty unlikely.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"