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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.
I had a crazy dream where it was 26th of November and the number of new ebola cases had been dropping for the last five weeks.
So it must not exist any more. Right?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Regardless of sourcing the information, the information is incorrect. According to this graph, Ebola is doubling every 60 days now -- so there has been some improvement.
Best way to keep up on this, that I can tell, is to google "ebola africa timeline wiki", and pan down to the timeline, near the bottom of the article. You'll see the graphs.
My favorite graph for keeping track is the logarithmic scale based on population , because it's easy to see where infection totality is: it used to be at 1 1/2 years, and now is about 5 years out.
Another thing of interest that I noted, though: The infection rates before a country mounts a serious response, can be as fast as doubling every 3 or 5 days. For that reason, I think our CDC's active attempts to STOP a proper response, was the worst thing they could do.
Just something to think about.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
...it's people and their vast ignorance.
Around here people treat the news about Ebola like it's just another H1N1 outbreak and think nothing further of it. The schools are literally a walk-in petridish and the hygiene at the cafeterias are terrible, kids just dash in for seconds and dab their spoons gleefully into the pots and pans for more, and the next week - half of the kids and teachers are sick with the common flu. Imagine that scenario when we've got Ebola on the move.
We have lots of people who have families in Africa, they come over with their friends ALL the time, and they attend the same schools as the natives do, it's just a matter of time before this becomes a uncontrollable problem.
Proper hygiene needs to be taught, and before we know how to control this, we should limit the traveling from and to infected countries.
Personally I've stacked up like crazy, I've filled my house to the brim with food and stuff needed to cope with that time when the outbreak will be at its worst. Again - it's not Ebola I fear...I fear the people who will get desperate when they reap the fruit of their own ignorance.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
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.
Actually the opposite is the case. Our economy has exactly the opposite, but nonetheless equally destructive, problem communism had: They had a shortage of supply. We have a shortage of demand.
Our economy produces enough. Proof? Go anywhere and behold how desperately everyone wants to sell. Be it goods or services, You'll be hard pressed to NOT find someone offering whatever you may want to you. What's lacking is the demand. And without it, there is no market either.
If you think people need any kind of incentive to be ravenous asshole capitalists, think again. Those that could invest already want to. Quite badly, too. There just isn't anything to invest in, because there is no viable business possible without consumers that would want to buy what you'd offer. And the main reason for this is simply that there are not enough people who have enough money to become consumers. And jobs are sadly not created when someone wills a business into existence. Well, you can do that, but it's not really viable to produce without a chance to sell what you produce. You'll be bankrupt in no time.
A job is created when the market situation of demand forces the supply side into hiring additional personnel to fill that demand. Nobody in their sane mind creates a job for the sake of creating a job, paying another person and putting more goods he can't sell on the stockpile. If this is the situation (and that is the situation currently), the sane option is NOT to hire someone and NOT to produce more of what you can't already sell.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
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.
That's why a universal basic income is such a beautiful concept. It would remove from the equation human survival as an individual incentive - thus reducing the supply of workers when the work offers are not attractive enough, solving that particular problem.
If everyone had their basic survival guaranteed through an unconditional minimum wage, the work market would be driven by individual initiatives to create pretty things and to improve from that basic status by pursuing luxury.
The main fear against the UBI is that those incentives would not attract enough workers to support the needs of mankind as a whole, but I don't see evidence that this would be the case - the drive to be creative and improve your personal status are pretty strong ones.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.