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Health Advisor: Ebola Still Spreading, Worst Outbreak We've Ever Seen
Lasrick writes After four decades of confining Ebola outbreaks to small areas, experts acknowledged in an October 9 New England Journal of Medicine article that "we were wrong" about the scope of the current situation. At the present transmission rate, the number of Ebola cases in West Africa doubles every two to three weeks. Early diagnosis is the key to controlling the epidemic, but that's far easier said than done: "And there are several complicating factors. For one thing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that 60 percent of all Ebola patients remain undiagnosed in their communities." A transmission rate below 1 is necessary to keep the outbreak under control (instead of the current rate of 1.5 to 2), and the authors detail what's in the works to help achieve early detection, which is crucial to reducing the current transmission rate.
So it must not exist any more. Right?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
you're right, that is a crazy dream because the ebola outbreak tracker shows that the number of new cases has been relatively stable (albeit noisy) for the last couple weeks. contrary to the summary, however, the tracker shows that ebola cases are doubling every 46 days, not 2-3 weeks.
Source is 'Wikipedia'. Hmmm. Be more inclined to take it seriously if it was sourced from WHO, or MSF, etc...
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
respecting culture is one thing, but not pointing out that a custom they're practising is directly responsible for the death of their families and likely eventually them selves.. doesn't seem like a bigoted attitude
your retort on the other hand.
What did he say that is even the slightest bit racist? It is actually what the WHO and many other organisations are saying. The burial customs involve in many cases, touching, kissing and washing the body, these are massive problems and have been one of the primary vectors of infection. Their culture is killing them, for the time being they need education that they must restrain from those customs, which if I understand correctly is actually happening.
Quit being such an entitled white racist asshole with your critiques of their culture.
No, the entitled assholes are the ones who feel no reason to stop doing the very things that are spreading the disease. You're the one with the skin color obsession, everyone else is talking about what people actually do. Like laying hands on the corpse of someone who's just died of Ebola, while simultaneously asking the rest of the world to risk their lives and spend their money and time to come help ... even as they refuse to stop their idiotic, suicidal customs. That is a sense of entitlement, and a ridiculous part of a culture that simply has to stop if they want to quit spreading that disease around.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
If Ebola was that easy to catch don't you think some of the people on the airplane with the Dallas nurse or some of the people who were on the subway with the New York doctor or especially some of the people Thomas Eric Duncan was staying with in Dallas would have caught it? The only people I know of who have caught Ebola are medical workers caring for those who are at the vomiting/diarrhea stage of the disease. I think the chances of a major outbreak in the US are close to zero.
Hyperbole much?
Ebola, and it's like, have come and gone countless millions of times over the years. Granted, our population density helps them spread a little, but that's vastly outweighed in scale by just the existence of simple hygiene - let alone medical knowledge. A few hundred years ago, in some European countries, it was normal to defecate inside the house, and wear one long shirt that was also your underwear.
We're talking about a disease spreading in one of the poorest and most deprived regions of the world where medical assistance is almost non-existent and where getting some means mingling with thousands of others who are also ill.
In the entire history of humanity, we have "cured" exactly two diseases. Smallpox (which recent science articles suggest may be making a comeback in a mutated form) and rinderpest (ever heard of it? I haven't - because it only affects cattle).
Ebola might well kill people. Lots of people. It may even creep into first-world countries, even with proper medical control. But the fact is that there are ten times worse things out there, spreading just as virulently, and we are either ignoring them or we have them under control because they can be made not as deadly. Before the 1980's, nobody had heard of AIDS. Now your life expectancy with it is about the same as that without it, so long as you live in range of a hospital that can diagnose and treat it.
Ebola is nasty. I sure wouldn't want to come in contact with it. But if you think that it poses a threat to the human race as a whole, you're sadly mistaken.
The Black Death may have killed up to 200 million people - estimated at around HALF of the population of Europe at the time, before America was even discovered - in less than 10 years. It killed nearly a quarter of the entire world.
That's a serious pandemic. It's still around, 700 years later. There are outbreaks every now and then still. And it can be effectively wiped out with simple antibiotics. And we don't even have it on the notification list for the World Health Organisation any more.
Ebola is localised, contained, vulnerable to basic medical practice, and actually pretty treatable. And all the cases outside Africa have been contained and nobody containing them (apart from one very stupid nurse that can't obey simple medical practice) has died. That tells you just how vulnerable it is. And most of those cases were seeded by people HELPING OUT Ebola patients in the origin countries.
The problem is not that Ebola is going to come over into the first world countries and wipe us out or decimate the population. It's that the countries where it is present at the moment have notoriously inadequate medical facilities generally. But nobody focuses on that. Everyone is much more concerned with whether their health insurance would cover them if they got it.
And, I'll be honest, in Europe (who are much closer to Africa and have already seen Ebola-infected refugees cross the notoriously-difficult-to-police waters into Italy, and who have free-movement laws across the continent - except for the UK), it's not even a news story. Hasn't been for weeks. Nobody is worried.
Your worries about Ebola are caused by watching too much Fox News blowing things out of proportion for the sake of entertainment, not any basis in fact. If you were that worried, you'd send $10 to Médecins Sans FrontiÃres.
The biggest problem with the economy is wage stagnation. I think that supply and demand is a terrible way to set wages as a job is a necessity for nearly everyone. Demand for workers can shrink but the supply will not and wages will bottom out and as they do so will demand for goods, effectively creating a catch-22.
At the time I'm reading this submission, it's tagged with "nothingofvaluewaslost". I can't fathom what this is supposed to mean. Lives in West Africa are worthless? Deaths in a developing country are meaningless because there's no economic impact? Am I missing some subtlety or other message here?
What a cynical, awful tag.
They'd be fools to do so merely on the word of a clearly hostile outsider, and even if they believe you, the perceived risk from Ebola might still be smaller than the perceived risk from social isolation.
Luckily, they (say, a village family in rural Ghana) are equipped with essentially the same meat computer your are. They are perfectly able to perceive the fact that the neighbor is dying with blood pouring out of her body, just like tens of thousands of other people just have. They are able to perceive that the ultimate social isolation is having everyone you care about die. It's nice to see you're not one of those people who thinks that a farmer in Liberia, who deals with life and death every day as he tends to livestock or hunts, isn't somehow too dim-witted to grasp cause and effect when he has the basic facts. This is about social behavior DESPITE knowing the facts.
Culture has value
Unless it's what's just killed off everyone you know. Or look at places like Ferguson, MO, where culture just decided to burn down local shops in a tantrum over reality disagreeing with an instantly concocted bogus media mythology. Culture, like the culture of castigating your neighbors for daring to go get an education or acquiring a broader vocabulary - as seen in swaths of urban culture or patches of, say, Appalachia - is often destructive, the opposite of valuable. Pious political correctness, which employees poisonous moral equivalence in the name of assuaging misplaced guilt over the fact that some cultures actually work better than others, preserves and actually perpetuates that destructiveness.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.