After Dallas Ebola Diagnosis, CDC Raises Estimate of Patient's Possible Contacts

As reported by Bloomberg News, The Washington Post, and other outlets, the Liberian patient whose diagnosis of Ebola infection marks him as the first such case to have been first diagnosed within the United States may have had contact with more people than previously estimated, and 80 people in the Dallas area are now believed to have come into contact with him. While Bloomberg reports that this larger group of potential contacts is "being monitored for symptoms," the Washington Post's slightly later story says that, in keeping with the best current knowledge about Ebola's spread, "Dallas County Health and Human Services Director Zachary Thompson said that these [newly identified contacts] are not being watched or monitored and are not showing any symptoms of the illness. Only the immediate family members of the victim are being regularly monitored for Ebola symptoms; they've been ordered to stay at home and avoid contact with others."

Comments

I feel like we are living in an 'outbreak' movie

[hsmith]

Amazing how the government freaked out over H1N1 years ago and simply nothing happened. Yet, a real virus is on the move and "everything is a-ok" is the word from everyone.

Yes yes, you only get it if you come in contact with feces, vomit, etc, but that perception is there now that it is in the US.

Do some research first please?

[sjbe]

Maybe blown out of proportion but Ebola is far more lethal virus than H1N1.

Variants of H1N1 have killed tens of millions of people. You should probably spend 30 seconds researching the issue before spouting off nonsense publicly.

Also, deaths were mostly people who were ill already or had other issues.

Again, demonstrably not true in previous H1N1 pandemics.

Re:Do some research first please?

[TheTerseOne]

Saying that something is more lethal doesn't mean the same as saying it kills more people. What it means is that it is more "sufficient to cause death". So, while it's very true that more people have died from H1N1 than from EBOV, EBOV is still far more lethal.

http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/est... says that between April 2009 and April 2010 there were 61M cases of H1N1 resulting in 12.5K deaths. WHO says that, so far, there are 7192 cases of EBOV in the West African outbreak, and 3286 deaths.

I'll let you do the math.

Re:Do some research first please?

[Anonymous Coward]

You sir, are a fucking retard.

H1N1, like all influenza variants is of mild lethality. While thousands die from influenza every year, the percentage that die of those who contract the virus is extremely low. The percentage of those who contract ebola that die, is extremely high. The people that die from influenza are people that have other, MORE SERIOUS health issues.

You are the one spouting off nonsense publicly, and by doing so you are doing serious damage to those around you. If you still insist that you're right about this, I encourage you to contract ebola (the safer of the two viruses between that and H1N1) as a form of protest.

Re:Do some research first please?

[Anubis IV]

Maybe blown out of proportion but Ebola is far more lethal virus than H1N1.

Variants of H1N1 have killed tens of millions of people. You should probably spend 30 seconds researching the issue before spouting off nonsense publicly.

And you should probably spend 30 seconds before you choose to deliberately mislead people or else spout off out of ignorance on the subject.

1) The fact that other H1N1 strains have killed millions of people has little bearing on how lethal the particular, modern-day H1N1 strain they were referring to happens to be. "H1N1" is merely a subtype expressed using a classification technique that makes it easier to refer to flu strains, but we've had numerous H1N1-subtype strains over the years, some quite lethal, some not so much, and as the link I just shared indicates, many of the strains we're familiar with have gone extinct, even though the subtype that it belonged to still exists. Your implication is clearly that "H1N1" has killed millions of people, and it has...in much the same way that "white person" has killed millions of people. You can't just leave it at that; you have to be more specific, and once you are, you realize that the particular H1N1 strain they're talking about in this thread (the 2009 strain) wasn't actually that lethal in comparison to Ebola.

2) You're clearly confused about what "lethal" means. Something is "more lethal" if it is more capable of causing death, not because it has actually caused more deaths, and it's a fact that Ebola is significantly more lethal than even the 1918 Spanish Flu, which is widely regarded as being one of the worst (50-90% mortality rate for Ebola vs. 10-20% mortality rate for Spanish Flu). Surely if you're on Slashdot you've heard about the LD50 for various substances and whatnot? The "L" stands for "lethal". It doesn't mean that that substance has killed more people than another substance. It just means that it is capable of doing so.

Also, deaths were mostly people who were ill already or had other issues.

Again, demonstrably not true in previous H1N1 pandemics.

Again, you're linking to an entirely different strain that just happens to belong to the same subtype as a modern-day strain. The reason people panic about H1N1 strains today is because we know that because they belong to the same subtype, they are potentially very similar to the dangerous strains we've seen in the past and thus could very easily mutate into something that is as deadly as those strains...but that does not mean that they are dangerous strains like the Spanish Flu, nor that they are as lethal as it, nor that they exhibit the same characteristics as it, nor that your links to the Spanish Flu are in any way relevant or indicative of the 2009 H1N1 strain's traits. Pointing out that the Spanish Flu was indiscriminate in whom it killed in no way takes away from his claim that the 2009 H1N1 strain's deaths were primarily those who "were already ill or had other issues."

Even so, in a cursory search, I couldn't find any evidence to support his claim either.

Re:Do some research first please?

[Jarik C-Bol]

"if it goes airborne"

Just the other day, I thought to myself "How many viruses have we ever seen mutate to become airborne?"
So I checked. Now, its a little tough to google right now, because the top million or so results are news articles screaming that ebola will go airborne and kill us all, but I did manage to find some solid articles on the subject stemming from a more scientific standpoint, and a less "WE ALL GONNA DIE" clickbait standpoint.
What I learned is this:
In the 100 or so years we have been really studying viruses, we have seen a virus mutate and change its infection vector exactly ZERO times.
As it turns out, viruses are pretty specialized at what they do. Some, like the influenza virus, have nailed down the trait of surviving for long periods in aerosolized droplets of mucus that are so small that local air currents are more powerful than gravity, and have adapted to surviving in lung tissue very well. (airborne)
Others, like say, ebola, are adapted to surviving in the liver and blood, and can survive for a bit of time outside the body, in much larger volumes of bodily fluids. (not airborne) The ebola virus does build up in the lung tissue the way influenza does, nor does it have the specialized structures that allow it to move into the mucosal secretions of the lungs, the way influenza does. (all of which are needed to be a successful airborne virus)
Another thing influenza has going for it is that multiple variants of influenza can infect a single cell, and spawn forth a new variant of influenza. Apparently, this is not something ebola is capable of *at all* meaning it mutates at a much slower rate than influenza.
The net takeaway from all this is, while the chances of ebola mutating and becoming airborne are non zero, the actual odds of its occurrence are vanishingly small.
Long story short, viruses come in a lot of forms, and people are expecting the behavior of one to match up with the behavior of another, when in reality they are entirely different creatures. One article I read likened it to saying Cars fly, and Airplanes drive on the ground, where Ebola is a car, and Influenza is an Airplane. While the statement is not entirely false, because cars can fly short distances in special circumstances, and planes do taxi to the terminal, your not going to fly your Volkswagen to Paris from NY, and your not going to drive a boing 747 from Detroit to Houston on the highway. Specialized structures for specific purposes.