Not sure if anyone cares about issues besides the middle east turmoil, russia/ukraine, catholicism etc., but this situation in west africa has been deteriorating for the past few months:
1201 cases as of july 23:
http://www.afro.who.int/en/clusters-a-programmes/dpc/epidemic-a-pandemic-alert-and-response/outbreak-news/4233-ebola-virus-disease-west-africa-25-july-2014.html
2 american medical workers infected:
an infected liberian has died in Lagos, Nigeria:
I’m more worried about the diseases the central american crimmigrants are bringing over as they illegally cross into the border of the US
[quote]kevinm1 wrote:
I’m more worried about the diseases the central american crimmigrants are bringing over as they illegally cross into the border of the US[/quote]
Why?
I have been telling my friends that once Ebola reached the Lagos airport, humanity would be doomed.
And now it is happening.
If there are panicked flights to Europe in the next 2 weeks, expect quarantines and suppression of news from Rome, Amsterdam, Frankfurt…
[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:
I have been telling my friends that once Ebola reached the Lagos airport, humanity would be doomed.
And now it is happening.
If there are panicked flights to Europe in the next 2 weeks, expect quarantines and suppression of news from Rome, Amsterdam, Frankfurt…[/quote]
My alarm levels just increased by a whole hell of a lot.
I thought that Ebola tended to present and kill quickly and might thus have a hard time getting itself around the world?
Edited
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:
I have been telling my friends that once Ebola reached the Lagos airport, humanity would be doomed.
And now it is happening.
If there are panicked flights to Europe in the next 2 weeks, expect quarantines and suppression of news from Rome, Amsterdam, Frankfurt…[/quote]
My alarm levels just increased by a whole hell of a lot.
I thought that Ebola tended to present and kill quickly and might thus have a hard time getting itself around the world?
Edited[/quote]
Its never hit such a dense area before. In the past major outbreaks have been isolated in central africa, also the current west african governments have possibly mismanaged the outbreak
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
I thought that Ebola tended to present and kill quickly and might thus have a hard time getting itself around the world?
[/quote]
Having unfortunately served in the shithole that is Africa, my briefings on this were to the contrary. Notably that Ebola presents itself as any other disease — fever, chills, etc, for some time. Frequently it is mistaken for malaria or even the flu. People that recover (about 10%) remain contagious for 3-10 months.
It is primarily transferred by bodily fluids, but that can include: diarrhea, sweat, saliva (including sneezes that hit the eye or a kiss) and sexual contact. Fluids remain contagious for some time on surfaces, such as counter tops, subways, etc.
It’s going to be a disaster.
One of the problems is quarantine measures are being undermined by locals who believe Ebola is a white man’s trick to steal their blood or eat them. Families are refusing to hand over infected patients and bodies. People are blocking ambulances and attacking clinics and hospitals. In Sierra Leone a mob of thousands converged on a hospital. MSF had to close a hospital in Guinea due to threats of violence. This sort of mentality is far more common than you’d think.
Last time I was in hospital a Nigerian guy on my ward was refusing blood tests and screaming at the top of his voice that the white man was trying to steal his blood. The guy had recently come out of surgery and had a raging fever from an infection. Even though his IQ was probably below 70 they had to treat him as someone who was of sound mind/mentally competent and it took them days to convince him to provide a blood sample to identify the infection.
Oh, it is happening.
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
My alarm levels just increased by a whole hell of a lot.
I thought that Ebola tended to present and kill quickly and might thus have a hard time getting itself around the world?
Edited[/quote]
News reports are saying incubation is as long as 3 week.
That is 3 weeks too long for me to feel safe.
I don’t care if I’m being a paranoid fool right now. Ebola terrifies me more than just about anything else and now it’s actually on a raging epidemic throughout several African countries.
A GROSS overreaction is totally appropriate at this stage, imo.
[quote]magick wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
My alarm levels just increased by a whole hell of a lot.
I thought that Ebola tended to present and kill quickly and might thus have a hard time getting itself around the world?
Edited[/quote]
News reports are saying incubation is as long as 3 week.
That is 3 weeks too long for me to feel safe.
I don’t care if I’m being a paranoid fool right now. Ebola terrifies me more than just about anything else and now it’s actually on a raging epidemic throughout several African countries.
A GROSS overreaction is totally appropriate at this stage, imo.[/quote]
I find rabies to be a particularly insidious virus. I don’t know much about virology but I think an airborne rabies/flu mutation or something similar could potentially be pretty scary. Rabies infects the brain and can cause violent behaviour.
[quote]magick wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
My alarm levels just increased by a whole hell of a lot.
I thought that Ebola tended to present and kill quickly and might thus have a hard time getting itself around the world?
Edited[/quote]
News reports are saying incubation is as long as 3 week.
That is 3 weeks too long for me to feel safe.
I don’t care if I’m being a paranoid fool right now. Ebola terrifies me more than just about anything else and now it’s actually on a raging epidemic throughout several African countries.
A GROSS overreaction is totally appropriate at this stage, imo.[/quote]
If you can get guys to blow themselves up for the promise of 70 virgins, you can certainly get them to purposefully infect themselves then hop on a plane to JFK or Logan. Between sneezing and wiping their snot and spit on door handles, you could have hundreds of dead in NY in a matter of weeks, not to mention those travelers who then take it with them to their final destinations.
[quote]Dr. Pangloss wrote:
[quote]magick wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
My alarm levels just increased by a whole hell of a lot.
I thought that Ebola tended to present and kill quickly and might thus have a hard time getting itself around the world?
Edited[/quote]
News reports are saying incubation is as long as 3 week.
That is 3 weeks too long for me to feel safe.
I don’t care if I’m being a paranoid fool right now. Ebola terrifies me more than just about anything else and now it’s actually on a raging epidemic throughout several African countries.
A GROSS overreaction is totally appropriate at this stage, imo.[/quote]
If you can get guys to blow themselves up for the promise of 70 virgins, you can certainly get them to purposefully infect themselves then hop on a plane to JFK or Logan. Between sneezing and wiping their snot and spit on door handles, you could have hundreds of dead in NY in a matter of weeks, not to mention those travelers who then take it with them to their final destinations.
[/quote]
Yeah that tactic has been used by homosexual terrorists:
The Southern Poverty Law Center also incited a homosexual to attempt a homicidal rampage at the Family Research Council:
[quote]Dr. Pangloss wrote:
[quote]magick wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
My alarm levels just increased by a whole hell of a lot.
I thought that Ebola tended to present and kill quickly and might thus have a hard time getting itself around the world?
Edited[/quote]
News reports are saying incubation is as long as 3 week.
That is 3 weeks too long for me to feel safe.
I don’t care if I’m being a paranoid fool right now. Ebola terrifies me more than just about anything else and now it’s actually on a raging epidemic throughout several African countries.
A GROSS overreaction is totally appropriate at this stage, imo.[/quote]
If you can get guys to blow themselves up for the promise of 70 virgins, you can certainly get them to purposefully infect themselves then hop on a plane to JFK or Logan. Between sneezing and wiping their snot and spit on door handles, you could have hundreds of dead in NY in a matter of weeks, not to mention those travelers who then take it with them to their final destinations.
[/quote]
As far as West Africa is concerned, Lagos IS New York City, at an estimated 21 million residents it is the most populous city in Africa. The potential of disseminating from there is very high if the epidemic takes hold there
This article is somewhat mollifying: Ebola only a plane ride away from USA
The growing Ebola outbreak in West Africa serves as a grim reminder that deadly viruses are only a plane ride away from the USA, health experts say.
The outbreak is the largest and deadliest on record, with more than 670 deaths and more than 1,200 infections in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Fatality rates for Ebola have been as high as 90% in past outbreaks, according to the World Health Organization.
The virus â?? which has an incubation period of a few days to three weeks â?? could easily travel to the USA through infected travelers, says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
“A case very well could fly out of Africa, only to be detected in some distant country,” says Osterholm, who served as an adviser to the George W. Bush administration on bioterrorism.
The CDC on Monday announced that it has sent an alert to health care providers in the USA to help them spot symptoms of the disease.
Health experts at the CDC have been working with African nations since the Ebola outbreak began in March. But officials are on alert now, after news that a man with Ebola was able to board a plane and arrive in Lagos, the capital of Nigeria. He later died.
Two Americans providing humanitarian assistance in West Africa have become infected with Ebola. Family members of one of them, Kent Brantly, a doctor, had been living with him in Africa, but returned to the USA before he began showing symptoms. To be careful, however, the family is on a “21-day fever watch,” in which they are being asked to monitor themselves for symptoms, says Stephan Monroe, deputy director of the CDC’s national center for emerging and zoonotic infectious diseases.
Yet while Ebola is a fearsome disease, the virus “would not pose a major public health risk” in the USA, Osterholm says.
That’s because people need to be in intimate contact to spread the virus, Osterholm says.
Ebola is actually much harder to spread than respiratory infections, such as influenza or measles. Those viruses pose a much greater threat on a plane or in any confined space, says Osterholm, who notes that people cannot spread the Ebola virus simply by sneezing or coughing.
Ebola also can only be spread by people with active symptoms, Monroe says.
“No Ebola cases have been reported in the United States and the likelihood of this outbreak spreading outside of West Africa is very low,” says Monroe, who says that the CDC has sent 12 experts to Africa to help with the crisis. “While it’s possible that someone could become infected with Ebola in Africa” before boarding a plane to the USA, “it’s very unlikely that they would spread it to other passengers.”
Ebola does spread readily through body fluids, such as blood and saliva, Osterholm says. On a plane, a sick person could potentially contaminate the bathroom if he or she vomits or has diarrhea.
Stephen Morse, an epidemiologist at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, says the issue of how Ebola spreads is complex. Sweat and saliva carry much lower levels of the Ebola virus than blood and stool, so the virus spreads less readily through those fluids.
“I don’t think we’ve seen actual cases (passed through contact with sweat or saliva),” Morse says. “There may someday be a strain that’s more capable of doing that, but so far it’s more theoretical than actual.”
Ebola has spread in Africa partly because of religious customs, in which family members wash the bodies of deceased relatives to prepare them for burial.
The virus also has spread to health care workers in Africa, where six or seven patients may share a single hospital room. Hospitals in developing countries also may lack certain infection-control measures â?? such as special containers to dispose of syringes â?? that are standard in U.S. facilities, Osterholm says. Wearing full-body protective garments â?? commonly called “moon suits” â?? is also more of a challenge in open-air clinics, because the restrictive outfits can cause people to quickly overheat.
More help is needed from around the world, Morse said. He received an e-mail today from a friend who is treating patients in the region and working 12- to 24-hour days. “When people tell me they’re working flat-out 20 hours a day, obviously more resources are needed,” he said.
The region needs more health care workers, especially those well trained in infection control procedures, he said, more equipment to keep health care workers and family members safe while treating patients, and more training for the general public about how to avoid and cope with the virus. “With something this size, it’s obvious that we’re under resourced right now,” Morse said.
Symptoms of Ebola include fever, muscle aches, chills, sore throat, vomiting and diarrhea and a rash, according to the WHO. Advanced cases also can cause heavy bleeding, both internally and from the mouth and nose. Ebola can damage multiple organs, causing kidney and liver failure.
Only about half of patients begin hemorrhaging, Monroe says. That makes it easy for health care workers in Africa to mistake Ebola for diseases with similar symptoms, such as malaria and Lassa fever, another viral illness common in that region.
“Most people who contract Ebola are those who live with and care for those who have already caught the disease and are showing symptoms,” Monroe says.
Hospitals in the USA are on high alert for Ebola, however, and would quickly isolate anyone with suspicious symptoms who has recently returned from Africa, Osterholm says.
“Right now, we’d have to assume every case is an Ebola case,” in people with suspicious symptoms, Osterholm says.
In a worst-case scenario, Osterholm says, a handful of emergency room workers could be exposed before a sick person is diagnosed.
Once people are infected, however, there is no effective treatment, Osterholm says. Anti-viral medications used for other illnesses, such as the flu and HIV, don’t appear to work on Ebola. Instead, hospitals could provide supportive care, dealing with symptoms as they occur.
Among the federal travel restriction procedures the Centers for Disease Control can use to protect travelers and the public from communicable diseases that pose a serious threat is to put travelers’ names on a “Do Not Board” list that is enforced by the Transportation Security Administration.
However, it’s unclear how well the list works. CDC still has not released records requested by USA TODAY in 2010 under the Freedom of Information Act relating to failures of the “Do Not Board” list to stop passengers from flying. As of April, CDC had transferred the gathered records for further review by officials at CDC’s parent agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, according to e-mail correspondence.
Scary stuff, but on the other hand it’s not the only hemorroidal fever killing people. Crimea-Congo (carried by tics) has been for some time in Eastern Mediterranean, especially Turkey. It hasn’t affected tourism adversely, probably because people don’t realize what it is.
[quote]kaaleppi wrote:
Scary stuff, but on the other hand it’s not the only hemorroidal fever killing people…[/quote]
Yeah…but it sure is a pain in the ass.
[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:
[quote]kaaleppi wrote:
Scary stuff, but on the other hand it’s not the only hemorroidal fever killing people…[/quote]
Yeah…but it sure is a pain in the ass.[/quote]
Minus the fever, been there, done that, don’t want to revisit.
[quote]SexMachine wrote:
One of the problems is quarantine measures are being undermined by locals who believe Ebola is a white man’s trick to steal their blood or eat them. Families are refusing to hand over infected patients and bodies. People are blocking ambulances and attacking clinics and hospitals. In Sierra Leone a mob of thousands converged on a hospital. MSF had to close a hospital in Guinea due to threats of violence. This sort of mentality is far more common than you’d think.
[/quote]
LOL
I’ve been following this for a while now. Apparently what makes this outbreak different from all the previous ones is the earlier ones occurred in small villages in very rural areas so it killed off it’s victims before they could get out of the area. This time it occurred near a town that has some roads running through it that are regularly traveled by trucks. That is why it has spread.
I don’t want to be too alarmist but this outbreak could be when it finally makes it out of Africa. Certainly something to keep an eye on and a good time to review ones pandemic preparations.