Slashdot Mirror
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.
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)
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.
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.
The common flu is killing several orders of magnitude more each year. The problem with Ebola is that once it reaches a certain level, society collapses. Then then you need to contain what is left by force, just to prevent panic. And _that_ is what will kill a lot more people that the disease itself ever could.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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).
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.
(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