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NY Doctor Recently Back From West Africa Tests Positive For Ebola
An anonymous reader writes An emergency room doctor who recently returned to the city after treating Ebola patients in West Africa has tested positive for the virus, Mayor Bill de Blasio said. It's the first case in the city and the fourth in the nation. From the article: "The doctor, identified as Craig Spencer, 33, came back from treating Ebola patients in Guinea about 10 days ago, and developed a fever, nausea, pain and fatigue Wednesday night. The physician, employed at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, has been in isolation at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan since Thursday morning, the official said."
Yep, that's all true, but there are other options, possibly no less scary.
This virus is well established in humans now in this outbreak, whereas before it was mostly a zoonosis (caught from animals). Mutations will now be being selected by their efficacy in prospering in us, not in the original host(s).
Some scientists believe this is already happening, we know it is mutating and there is evidence that it is mutating to become more infectious, to us: http://www.businessinsider.in/...
If it is true that viral loads are coming up earlier and higher than before, then it could be shedding before symptoms. Wouldn't be entirely surprising - containing it through hazmat-after-symptoms will probably select for strains that infect before symptoms. That would screw up all our containment measures rather well. Even if it just accelerates symptoms it could get a lot harder to contain - if first symptoms are a fever _and_ the infected is monitoring and gets themselves straight into care, further infection can be limited, but if first symptoms are fever and projectile vomiting you have much more of a problem.
All that said, scariest thing to me is that this is an African zoonosis that hasn't been out of Africa before except in the lab. We have no idea what hosts it may find in the non-African animal population, should it get the opportunity. If it finds an easy first-world reservoir host (maybe it likes our bats, or our foxes, or our rats) then it will become endemic, rapidly. Endemic ebola (in the absence of vaccine or cure) will be a game changer for 1st world medicine - think about every fever case to be isolated and treated using hazmat until tested negative (probably twice X days apart). Africa's health system, such as it is, is already feeling that pain - Ebola may well kill (already) more people via malaria than it does directly: http://www.reuters.com/article...