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Ebola Outbreak Continues To Expand
symbolset writes in with the latest about an ebola outbreak spreading across West Africa. The World Health Organization (WHO) continues to monitor the evolution of the Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea. The current epidemic trend of EVD outbreak in Sierra Leone and Liberia remains serious, with 67 new cases and 19 deaths reported July 15-17, 2014. These include suspect, probable, and laboratory-confirmed cases. The EVD outbreak in Guinea continues to show a declining trend, with no new cases reported during this period. Critical analyses and review of the current outbreak response is being undertaken to inform the process of developing prioritized national operational plans. Effective implementation of the prioritized plans will be vital in reversing the current trend of EVD outbreak, especially in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
That some religious nutjob out there hasn't been taking samples, or deliberately exposing themselves to it
Coming to a plane journey near you, has that chap near you coughing just clearing his throat or is he seriously ill ?
Is he sweating from the heat or fever ?
A shame evolution can't do anything about your vocabulary.
and Antibiotics1 and 2
At least it's not Anthrax-Leprosy-Mu!
FNORD!
Much Madness is divinest Sense --
To a discerning Eye --
Much Sense -- the starkest Madness
Disease outbreak...check
Pre-WW3 conflicts...check
Justin bieber...check
Ok im ready for Earth obliteration... time to reset society...
Created by someone with a TLA addiction.
-- Jeff Woods
Except people who get viruses die when they are shot. You don't even have to shoot them in the head. And real people don't cooperate in a herd like manner to climb walls even when they're NOT infected with some disease.
And real viruses have incubation periods long enough that you don't have scenarios where if Brad Pitt doesn't lop your arm off 5 seconds after your hand is bitten you instantly turn into a bloodthirsty rage zombie with a 100% infection rate when you bite someone else.
Could an ebola outbreak be bad? Sure, but don't just make shit up.
I, for one, am in favour of removing bread from the human gene pool.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The nice thing about ebola is it's not airborne, you need to actually touch someone's fluids to get ebola. So, it's completely avoidable, as opposed to airborne pathogens.
Probably someone who lives near the river Ebola who was tired of the stigma of being associated with a hideous disease. Not that I support the said TLA, but just guessing.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Not completly avoidable, you could touch something that someone with ebola has touched, your only seven(ish) handshakes away from a victim, lets hope it stays that way.
Seems to be working just fine...
Syphilis does better, as a disease, than Ebola for the same reasons you win at Pandemic-type games - the slow progression, the low-profile.
Ebola doesn't spread nearly as much, because it's non-airborne and rapidly fatal to a large number of people who contract it. This is why it stays confined to the butt-end of civilization.
Syphilis does more harm overall because it has numbers in it's favour.
People tend to focus more on Ebola because of the high mortaility rate. It has a couple of pretty horrible "What if?"s - principally, what if it goes airborne? I'm not sure a virus with such a high mortaility rate that's been around so long would actually ever go airborne though - from an evolutionary perspective it's a terrible combination.
A virus with high mortaility and rapid spread will rapidly kill all susceptible individuals within it's catchment area, so it's likely that such things have never really gotten off the evolutionary drawing board. The last thing that came close was the Spanish Flu, which was a more fatal mutation of a fairly innocuous airborne pathogen, rather than a more mobile mutation of something unpleasantly fatal like Ebola.
Of course, the above is true of a pre-air-travel world, because rapid spread would kill off everything in the travel radius - because the travel radius was dictated by walking pace, or driving pace... or the speed of ocean liners. In this day and age, it would be much easier for such a thing to have a serious impact.
Not the case. Reston virus, an ebola strain was airborne, and research labs from various countries, include USA and Canada have shown that ariborne ebola can be found.
However there are no reports that this strain is airborne, or at least the governments of the world are not letting that information out in fear of all the problems that would bring........
I knead to know why you think that.
syphilis kills and cripples more people annually [...] "What's all the hubbub, bub?"
compare slow progressing sexually treatable disease with ~80% mortality fast bleed-out disaster? get back in the womb, critter your brain is not fully developed yet
Or their mother's basement, whichever is more convenient....
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
I am not a virologist or an epidemiologist (nor do I play one on TV) but I always seem to remember the risk of a larger pandemic from Ebola or other similar severe hemorrhagic fevers was reduced due to the nature of these illnesses having a rapid onset and severity which limits the ability of infected people to be ambulatory and infect other people.
What I wonder and maybe worry about is a long-term low-grade outbreak leading to mutations which increase the amount of time the infected might be able to spread the illness. I don't know how likely this is, but it seems kind of a scary idea.
Someone who can't tell who's from whose?
Who was the sad f*ck who decided to make up a confusing three letter acronym for Ebola?
But "ebola" has three syllables and "EVD" only has three.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Sorry, as a religious evolutionist, you fail. Evolution doesn't work that way. You new age scientists (MBA's) really ought to study your Catechism more.
If the universe was so smart, I would have expected to see more hydrogen based life.
Seriously though, we've got to help these people. I've done my part by writing on Slashdot. I can only pray that enough people will join together, urging somebody else to do something before it's too late.
It's exactly as many syllables as "ebola" but carries more information, what's not to like?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
There are five viruses that cause EVD, only one of which is actually called "ebola".
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
And I just read that the doctor that's treated 100+ of the Ebola victims has been infected as well.
3 other nurses have already succumbed to the disease.
The high mortality rate is probably what scares people the most, despite it actually not being that infective through normal pathways.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
Or a whole lot less, considering how many other TLA's there are for EVD. It takes to the third page of google for there to be a page on ebola when searching for EVD. But if you say Ebola everyone knows what you are talking about.
Now I can understand wanting to abbreviate "ebola hemorrhagic fever", which is way more descriptive.
It's a technical term, so in its actual context it's very clear. As for lay accounts, they will generally explain what it means.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
From your sarcasm, I'm going to assume that you'd rather that AIDS was characterised as a disease of gay people and minorities who should therefore be ostracised, it wasn't spoken about, and where its very existence was denied?
That's what happened in the 1980s and it caused the fucking problem in the first place.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Speaking of bread in the gene pool, let's all hope that your hot dog never finds a hot dog bun.
get back in the womb, critter your brain is not fully developed yet
Or their mother's basement, whichever is more convenient....
Mother's basement as a convenient replacement for the womb. There's a joke in there somewhere...
This is not the sig you're looking for.
What's a "virii?" The plural of virus is viruses. Even if it took the latin form (and it certainly doesn't), it would be viri, not virii.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Maybe he means the people who board the planes
But that won't stop them making another sequel to the "zoo animals on safari" movie!
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
The story I read before this one was about a malaria vaccine that was developed in the early 90's, was known to be effective by '97, and has been awaiting approval since then, while ten million people died from the disease.
Really, though, it was only ten million families who had to lose their loved ones - that's a small price to pay for the paperwork being in order.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Is an External Ventricular Drainage a device or procedure in the treatment of Ebola?
- X/Y -
Can't really avoid it since you can get it from touching surfaces contaminated with the virus. Think of an airplane seat or a public shop or any public place. You can wall yourself up at home but what happens when you run out of food?
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Ebola has an incubation period of 21 days which is plenty of time for symptom free people to travel anywhere in the world.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Right. Just like bubonic plague isn't airborne--- until it mutates into pneumonic plague.
Ebola is a rapidly changing virus. Rather like the flu in that respects. That its initial symptoms are indistinguishable from the flu yet the victim is already contagious is a nasty touch.
Will
"A virus with high mortaility and rapid spread will rapidly kill all susceptible individuals within it's catchment area, so it's likely that such things have never really gotten off the evolutionary drawing board."
Generally speaking I agree, but only when the virus is lethal to all susceptible individuals.
If the virus is non-lethal to some susceptible individuals then those individuals could become carriers (a reservoir where the virus can continue reproduce but does not kill its host). Carriers are how a virus can have a high mortaility and rapid spread without becoming an evolutionary dead-end.
In the case of Ebola I have heard that it is suspected that fruit bats are carriers. If it is true that fruit bats are Ebola carriers then I think that means Ebola has some susceptible individuals (humans) where it is highly lethal and some susceptible individuals (fruit bats) where it is non-lethal.
Warning: This sig is not thread safe. For more information see Slashdot's sig policy.
The Virii were an ancient Roman noble family,
One of their descendents still roams free...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Then, posted not long ago, an update: 45 new cases and 28 deaths from July 18-20.
"I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein
Viri, the plural of vir (man), means 'men'.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
It was also not infectious to people. And some even think the airborne aspect as suspect given the locales and condition of those same locales, shit flinging moneys can transfer things through air but that isn't normally called airborne. ;)
Given the extremely few virus particles needed that mechanism could even explain the transfer between rooms, infected particulate can transfer surprisingly far.
Note that this assumes the information of the air circulation system being unfiltered and that doors between rooms were kept open to try to cool the complex down are correct. That assumption could be wrong.
Why? They would just close their borders and contain it from spreading.
So many of them would be Viriii ?
Well in his defense he at least isn't posting as an AC...
Statistically, AIDS is mostly a disease of gay people and minorities
*annoyed grunt*
I worked in public health informatics for many years, and it's a longstanding tradition to use three letter codes. I think this is the legacy of old systems which provided three or four character fields for codes, but it certainly speeds things along when you're keying data into a spreadsheet.
The tradition isn't formalized, and so it's application is somewhat irregular, but it's important in this case to realize that public health surveillance makes a strong distinction between a *disease* (a disorder of structure or function in an organism like a human) and an *infectious agent* (the parasite, bacterium, virus or prion that transmits the disease). That's because you can find the infectious agent without finding any cases of the disease -- for example in an asymptomatic human, in a disease carrying vector like a mosquito etc. Non-specialist use the same terms to refer to either the disease or the agent (this naming by association is called "metonymy", a word every system designer should be familiar with). So of course the abbreviations experts use seem nonsensical to non-specialists.
The abbreviation "EVD" maskes perfect sense -- it is the *disease* caused by the Ebola Virus (EBOV). A non-specialist uses terms loosely and would say things like "They found Ebloa in Freetown." A specialist wouldn't use such loose language. He'd say "We found a human case of EVD in Freetown," or "We had a serum with a positive titer for EBOV from Freetown."
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Being ignorant of modern medicine is not a genetically-encoded trait. So, despite your best attempts to rationalize it, no, there's nothing good about people dying in this way.
Moreover, you sound like you consider yourself somehow superior to the people who are dying of the disease, though you are undoubtedly too cowardly to actually come out and say it even as AC. You're protected by geography and the fact that the virus doesn't appear to have gotten into a major international airport. At the moment. If it did, you would yourself likely be bread out of the gene pool. You are in no way superior to the people who are dying. In fact, I think a corpse has you beaten on personality.
When I migrated to NZ, back in 2000/2001 my blood was tested (for HIV, amongst other things) and an X-ray of my lungs was taken. However (!) I was already in the country for some time as a tourist...
Perl Programmer for hire
It's exactly as many syllables as "ebola" but carries more information, what's not to like?
Indeed, it carries MUCH more precision than just "Ebola", which can mean any of the following:
"Ebola River" is a tributary to the Congo River.
"Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever" was the name of a disease first discovered in people living in the remote Ebola River watershed.
"Ebola Virus" (abbrev. "EBOV") is the infectious agent that causes "Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever"
"Ebolavirus" is the taxonomic genus to which the "Ebola virus" belongs.
"Ebola Virus Disease (abbrev. "EVD") is now the more common name for Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever. We can call it that because we have definitively identified the infectious agent that causes the disease (EBOV). Changing the name pre-emptively differentiates EVD from other hemorrhagic diseases that might arise from the same area.
Laymen simply say "Ebola" and let their audience sort out what they mean -- if indeed they mean anything precisely. I once had this conversation with an elderly relative.
Relative: 90% of bats have rabies.
Me: That's hard to believe.
Relative: It's true! I read it in the paper.
So I went to the paper and found out that she had it hopelessly garbled. TEN percent of bats SUBMITTED FOR TESTING had positive SCREENING tests.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
compare slow progressing sexually treatable disease
Do, go on ...
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
A lack of education about health care and a lack of access to healthcare for poor people is not a bad habit. Evolution will do nothing to fix that issue. About the most you'll get is a population that might eventually have a higher resistance to Ebola.
This is a scenario that rivals the old cold war for scary.
Except the cold war had a real possibility of MAD. Some sort of zombie rage Ebola strain is a figment of your imagination.
still waiting for the President of Madagascar to shut down everything.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
When you only talk in sarcasm, you say nothing. Your opinion is only as valid as the justifications you can make for it. Apparently, that's nothing. So we'll treat your opinion with all the respect you deserve.
Learn to love Alaska
They don't want to keep the disease out. They want to keep people with TB out of the health care system. If you were diagnosed as a tourist, they'd throw you out. If you are diagnosed as a prospective migrant, they throw you out. If you are diagnosed as a resident, they treat you. It isn't about the disease, but the treatment costs.
Learn to love Alaska
Statistically, AIDS is mostly a disease of straight white people.
Learn to love Alaska
the US government and the CDC disagrees with you http://aids.gov/hiv-aids-basic...
My daughter was born in NZ in a maternity center, we didn't have to pay a single thing. Back then we still had tourist state. So I don't think you're correct. But I have no idea how much TB treatment costs. In Mexico, where I live right now, in order to get married one has to be tested for HIV. I think that's a sane thing to do. No health tests where required for migration, if I recall correctly. Anyway, my point is: if you test immigrants only, it's pointless.
Perl Programmer for hire
I'm ready are you?
Since then, they changed the rules to throw out pregnant tourists. The TB test may have started out as prevention at one point, but at this point in time, it's about costs only.
Learn to love Alaska
From your link:
"MSM [gay males] accounted for 52% of all people living with HIV infection in 2009, the most recent year these data are available"[snip]"and 63% of all new infections"
So it isn't hard to extrapolate and guess that some date before 2009, the "gay male" segment was below half (as now, it's almost exactly half), but the gay male segment grew faster than others recently to overtake it.
The last time I had looked, straight people still lead the gay-male category, but it has been a few years. And its still more non-Black than Black, but it was more white than non-white when I last paid attention.
I don't check the statistics on an annual basis to see what the trends are. None of those results affect my behavior.
Learn to love Alaska
my statement was "gays and minorities", for example in the year 2000 that was over 60% of cases, most being in one or both groups
Clear, thanks for the clarification/correction. TBH, I was surpised that nothing had to be paid.
Perl Programmer for hire
Was the baby a citizen? I thought the rules were any legally-born child (not to an illegal entrant) was a citizen. And that was another reason they kicked them out more recently. But those rules also changed between your time here and mine. I just didn't follow too closely, as they didn't affect me.
Learn to love Alaska
At least an autistic wouldn't malke that mistake.