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WHO Declares Ebola Outbreak An International Emergency
mdsolar (1045926) writes with news that, with the Ebola outbreak growing out of control, the WHO has declared an international health emergency. From the article: With cases rapidly mounting in four West African countries, the World Health Organization (WHO) today declared the Ebola outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), a designation that allows the agency to issue recommendations for travel restrictions but also sends a strong message that more resources need to be mobilized to bring the viral disease under control. ... This is only the third time the health agency has issued a PHEIC declaration since the new International Health Regulations (IHR), a global agreement on the control of diseases, were adopted in 2005. The previous two instances were in 2009, for the H1N1 influenza pandemic, and in May for the resurgence of polio.
They're an English band.
Too late to become a prepper?
love the taste, hate the texture
I like preppers, they rarely, if ever, actually understand the consequences of social collapse, and falsely view increased individualism as the primary consequence of major institutional failure.
They don't consider the social structures that arise in post-governmental situations. The importance of community connectivity increases with importance as rigid social structures fail. You want a local warlord, a gang, a tribe, or some other primitive power structure, if you want to survive in a "lawless" world.
Well, in this case, hundreds of people have already died, but, sure that's "nothing". Nothing is going to happen in the US, thanks in part to large scale international public health planning of exactly this sort.
They need Doctor Who...
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature. ...
10. Be not a cancer on the earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature.
I like that someone modded him up, as if flu vaccines don't substantially lower fatality rate among at-risk populations, such as young children, the elderly, and those with compromised immune systems.
Just because catching flu doesn't tend to kill healthy adults, they just write-off the rest of the world in the perfect mixture of selfishness and ignorance, all the while acting smugly superior about the conspiracy only they can see.
Ebola, while a horrible deadly disease is not the doom and gloom its being made out to be for anyone not living in a 3rd world country., and even for those living in 3rd world countries for that matter. more people die in 1 month from the flu in africa (over 5 K from the last article i saw ) than they die from ebola last year. to put it in prospective, less than 1000 people died from it last year.
Unless you are literally playing in a sick persons bodily fluids, the risk is almost 0
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
The same bunch, who profited massively from selling "flu vaccines" by stirring up a flu panic.
Still waiting for that Ebola vaccine....
This is nonsense. The WHO doesn't sell flu vaccines. It does purchase and distribute vaccines to places that can't afford them. Long live rock.
Ebola is real if you live in one of the countries in Africa that has and Ebola outbreak. But for most of the rest of the world, "Worldwide Outbreak" sounds a bit like hyperbole. More like "Continent Wide Outbreak". But it is the WHO, not the CHO, so you get what you get.
Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.
I think that it's as insightful as it can be. There are too many humans around. We do see Ebola which is bad and is propagated through contact which means that it's not very contagious. Hand us something that's at least as deadly as Ebola, contagious as the common cold and with an incubation time of several weeks and you have a "winner".
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The same thing will happen that happens every other time there's some outbreak "emergency": Nothing.
That's exactly the goal: ensure that as many people as possible continue to have nothing happen to them, rather than exciting hemorrhagic fever or Quarantine Zone.
E-bola is so 1990. it should get with the times and be called iBola. Then everyone would wait in line to get it.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Yep, pretty much. Still though, I'll keep my 357 on my hip while I help out my local neighborhood 'tribe' fend off the Palinistas from the countryside.
It seems you get your information about preppers from reality TV shows. The actual reality is much different. Take some time to read prepper blogs, they are all about community and tribe.
Am I the only one who views these things differently after playing a few hours of Plague, Inc?
I like preppers, they rarely, if ever, actually understand the consequences of social collapse, and falsely view increased individualism as the primary consequence of major institutional failure.
They don't consider the social structures that arise in post-governmental situations. The importance of community connectivity increases with importance as rigid social structures fail. You want a local warlord, a gang, a tribe, or some other primitive power structure, if you want to survive in a "lawless" world.
Oh sure, grouping up provides an immediate boost to strength, but It'll only last for so long. This australian case study from 1985 http://tinyurl.com/h4otx proved that such a social structure is only as strong as it's weakest link. A stronger individual will always appear in time and take your group apart. It's pretty much proven as the same results were witnessed in 2 previous studies. I hear they are going to run it again. I expect the same outcome.
Heres a similar sociological study demonstrating the feasibility of individual survival. It's not as targeted at catastrophic social collapse, but i think it's safe to extrapolate. http://tinyurl.com/3xpd3n
It's never to late to go insane.
more people die in 1 month from the flu in africa (over 5 K from the last article i saw ) than they die from ebola last year.
But those people dieing of of the flue are often compromised in some other way, such as old age or malnutrition.
you might as well say that more people in africa die of old age every day than all ebola deaths combined.
The reason people fear ebola is that unlike old age, it spreads and attacks the healthy.
Unless you are literally playing in a sick persons bodily fluids, the risk is almost 0
the exact same exaggeration is true of flu. You catch flu by being in close proximity to someone with the flu or some a vector that can temporarily support the flu's transmission, just like ebola.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has been working with WHO, MSF, and Red Cross since the outbreak began in march to map roads and villages in the affected areas. These maps are used by medical teams to move people, medicine, and equipment around, as well as to do "contact tracing" of infected people to see who they might also have infected. The maps are crowdsourced and released under a copyleft license like wikipedia uses. If you want to help out you can check out a task to work on on the HOT task manager and help improve the maps these organizations are using to do their work. There are some instructional videos on the MapGive site run by the US State Department which has donated a bunch of imagery for us to better map the affected areas.
Please take some time to learn how to help with this mapping and help these doctors do what they need to do.
-AndrewBuck
If you think Israel is evil, okay, that's what you think, but please, this is /., not some Hamas fanboi club
You wanna talk about Ebola, talk about Ebola. Why the need to drag Israel into this discussion ??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Which is why you're not on a computer right now, but instead trying to secure a future by nakedly chasing down a cow and killing it with your bare hands.
yes, unfortunate. This has now become now a PHEICal matter.
Perhaps their local Wal*Mart was out of farm raised, GMO-free bats.
slashdot makes sense.
The WHO's timing is impeccable. 5:15 on the dot.
Why not both?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Best post ever.
Abbott: You have a disease outbreak in Africa.
Costello: Then WHO declares it?
Abbott: Naturally.
Costello: Naturally.
Abbott: Now you've got it.
Costello: The outbreak is declared Naturally.
Abbott: No, it is declared by Who!
Costello: Naturally.
Abbott: Well, that's it—say it that way.
Costello: That's what I said.
Abbott: You did not.
Thanks! I was hoping people would enjoy it! I feel like i really bettered the world today!
Ebola has an incubation time of about two to three weeks, after which the symptoms appear. Death follows in two weeks after this, unless the patient survives. The virus can be contagious up to seven weeks after the patient has been cured, depending of the type of contagion.
Madagascar has closed their ports.
The judge said I wasn't allowed to do that anymore.
Wait, what? Oh, never mind, forget I said anything.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Heres a genetic study demonstrating the feasibility of mutation. It's targeted at catastrophic social collapse, and I think it's highly appropriate for this discussion. http://tinyurl.com/4ckyxw
I'll get rated down for this, but I agree with you. People don't want to look at a lot of hard facts. We currently have about 7.046 billion people alive (based on 2012 numbers). Our global human population is increasing by approximately 1.1% annually, which means we will double to 14 billion people in 63 years (following the rule of 72). Nearly about 870 million people are currently suffering from chronic malnourishment. 780 million lack ready access to water. Realistically, do we think logistical changes to provide food and water for another 7 billion people are possible in the next 63 years? Another 14 billion in 128 years? Another 28 billion in 193 years? Worse, some countries see growth rates as high as 1.8%, which would shorten that doubling rate to about 40 years. Exponential growth is a bitch. While ebola is no where near a nice way to go, a pandemic that wipes out a significant portion of the world may be preferable to experiencing water and food wars that will occur if we aren't able to institute logistics to provide for the constant influx of mouths to feed. Otherwise, we are going to be looking at global population controls within our childrens' or our grandchildrens' lifetimes.
Post-collapse, sure. During the actual collapse though we'll have tons of people in utter desperation who are short on water, food, firewood and all the basic essentials for survival and has absolutely nothing to lose and who'll totally overwhelm what nature can provide. The first wave of power structures will be all about stealing what other people have, totally unsustainable but sure to cause great grief until they run out of easy targets or run into a bigger pack.
A good example is nuclear holocaust - it's not about the ones killed directly, after an all-out nuclear war global temperatures would drop 10-35C. Can you imagine the massive crop failures world wide we'd have? Billions would starve. And even if you could grow crops, they'd take months of defending in the field so little would in practice be even less. Game would be wiped out, lakes fished empty, survival today before worrying about tomorrow.
Preppers expect to survive the initial chaos by bugging out, locking down and basically waiting it out in a bunker for a year or two. Personally I think it sounds like a rather good plan, once the initial dust has settled there'll be plenty of time to come out of hiding and try to find allies and barter supplies. Sure some 1% may be "winners" and warlords and such, but 9% are probably serfs and 90% dead and that's mostly a lottery.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Sure more people might get the Flu and die, but they would eventually die from what? Dehydration? Suffocation?
It isn't quite the same as getting the "Flesh Eating" disease having your tissue go necrotic and dying from either the above, organ failure or bleeding out due to lack of clotting. It also looks a hell of a lot scarier in the media.
So yeah, while the numbers are not really there, any increase, even small increase compared to others, are taken as more alarming.
You probably have a better chance of dying of getting hit by lighting while winning the lottery, but if the alternative is gruesome enough, it will be a big concern to folks.
As has been pointed out, one of the problems Ebola has with becoming a horribly infectious disease is that it isn't airborne, it isn't likely (or possible) to mutate to become so, and because the death rate is so high (which is one of the scary parts), it is hard to transmit, as people tend to die before they can pass it on to anyone else. It is also only communicable once symptoms are showing, meaning it is more easily identifiable as well.
I just want to restate your argument so you can see how stupid it is:
"People die from other causes, therefore people should not concern themselves with this cause, ever"
This makes me want to move to Madagascar before they lock down their borders.
Screw that. I'm going to Greenland, and dreaming of large women.
Why are you calling him a WHO? I thought he was just "the doctor".
It'll either die out as it kills too many people too quickly, or it is becoming less lethal.
Well, until the US starts shipping actively infected individuals to densely populated cities inside the US. You know like what is happening now.
During a collapse the number of people who are desperate - by definition - is a lot bigger then those who have everything they need. Guess who's going down first? It's not going to be the guy who tries to supply them with things, it's going to be the guy with the lights on who keeps shooting at everyone near his property. An active threat to everyone.
For people who want to base opinions/conclusions on actual data, here's one chart of the progression trend as of Aug 8, tracked since beginning of July (data taken directly from WHO):
http://bl.ocks.org/santanubasu/aa75ada045560ec4f4c8
Time to move to Prepperville, USA? Not really.
Global epidemic? Not at this point.
Getting worse? Yup.
Tapering off? Maybe, but the most recent data tends to get revised.
So maybe this will get much worse, maybe it will peter out. Either way, whoever looks at the data will have the best take on what's really happening.
You are failing to take into account the steady decline in the global birth rate since the mid 1980s. While we are at 1.1% now, we were over 2% in the 60s and have steadily dropped from 1.6% in 1990 and will go under 1% by 2020 and hit 0.5% by 2050 at the current rates. The current prediction for an extra 2 billion is 30 years time and to reach a peak of 11 billion in the early 22nd century before beginning to drop off.
The driving forces behind 3+ children were lack of basic education, religious beliefs and poverty. As the information evolves, the first two factors are fast disappearing. People are fast gaining an understanding of the growth issues globally and are adjusting their behaviors because of that understanding.
What may require intervention are the farming processes and the distribution of foods. The calorie requirements in developed countries have dropped because of the less manual labour nature of the economies, but the calorie consumption has increased dramatically. That is something that should be rectified both for the health of the population and to increase the availability of food in areas where needed. Easy access to higher density cultivars and reversion to soil management techniques from previous centuries is also essential. This might need a breaking of the business models of food, fertilizer and seed companies, but we don't like Monsanto anyway, don't we.
There is a growth issue and a food/water issue, but it isn't an exponential issue.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
Desperate people are all but organized. The guy who has things and cannot defend himself is the first to die, even if he is trying to help everyone. Those that can defend themselves are likely to last or to the the among the last to die.
You make living in a bunker for two years sound so simple and easy.
This will, in fact, increase a prepper's social status since they can a) not be a burden on others in a group b) help others in a group and c) be viewed as intelligent, forward thinking, etc.
"Just wait until the world as we know it ends! Then they'll HAVE to like me! And, my boss, he'll need to listen to ME for a change!"
Required reading for internet skeptics
Too late, they closed their borders and... there goes Madagascar too.
...
Both their borders just closed, you are too late.
...
Yea, but if thou dost upgrade birds + rats + sheep to their second levels, another tile appears in between all of them (I forget what it's called).
Anyway, that tile will occasionally lead to spontaneous animal-to-human infections, which gives you another crack at Greenland. At least with bacteria, iirc.
It's not. That's why you have to be...uhh....prepared
Here's the problem: there's a difference between desperate and starving. You can go a long time without food if you were previously well-nourished - upto 3 weeks or so with no real problems. Which means you have a long time to realize you're in trouble, rally your allies etc.
People think that people turn on each other at the drop of dime - but they don't. The first thing desperate people do is forge alliances they might otherwise not consider, and then go looking for a solution to their common problem. They might eventually fall to infighting, but so goes the entirety of human civilization. We are fundamentally a tribal species, if we weren't then there wouldn't be a civilization to fall in the first place.
And it's not like this is a particularly difficult benefit to sell to people either: if someone's stockpiled enough food for a year, and there's 10 of you, then you have enough food for over a month if you knock over their hamlet. Heck, you can sell this idea to people who might be morally opposed, because you can leave them enough food for a month, and reasonably expect to knock over another hamlet before that time is up.
The economics and history support the only sensible conclusion: people who go it alone die out. The Mongol horde wasn't so much a horde as one of the most well-organized and powerful empires for its time, it only seemed like a horde because every village was happy to sell out its neighbors and hope they would be passed over. And the exact same problem applies to survivalists: they think the way they do, because they've misunderstood some very important things about the human condition. Worse, they think they're smarter then everyone else which means they're constantly underestimating potential allies and actual enemies.
If the global temperature dropped that much crop failures would be the least of peoples' worries. The sudden reappearance of 10km thick glaciers over much of the northern hemisphere would be a little more pressing.
Related suggestion: http://vitamincfoundation.org/...
More: https://www.google.com/search?...
And in connection with scurvy: https://www.google.com/search?...
Would be good to have better software tools to try to make sense of all this often-conflicting health information...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Nice theory, unfortunately it is completely removed from reality. Your nice ideas of cooperation and civilization only apply when resources are plentiful and the social structure is in place. In extreme situations where food is scarce and the social structure has collapsed only the strongest survive, and those are likely to be those that are most aggressive, well armed and trained for combat. A single person well armed and well trained can slaughter a whole lot of people. A well trained and coordinated group can slaughter thousands and take everything they want from them.