Originally Posted by Birdwatcher

Oh cripes jiminy....

It would be obvious to anyone who has spent ten minutes over there that....

1) Many folks don't ever make it to a hospital ergo the impact of doctors or the lack thereof on the death rate will be minor.

2)In regions of high population density (most of West Africa) there is no way of accurately measuring how many people are infected with, let alone exposed to, the disease.

3) Unless you build a wall, or a fence, there is no way of restricting people to a sizeable area. Folks have been routinely crossing borders on their own hook forever over there, in ain't like those countries are fenced in.

This applies in spades where the disease has a longer incubation time, such that folks can look and feel healthy while all the time carrying the disease.

The MOST effective way of addressing this disease would be mass vaccinations, the way smallpox was eradicated. Vaccinations are the facet of Western medicine that has been most applicable and accepted over there, being relatively inexpensive and at the same time not very accessible to local quack "doctors" in the same way that antibiotics and malaria medications have been. But then maybe I'm biased; I worked on a travelling vaccination team out of a local mission hospital.

I will say though that a brief perusal of the number of people crippled as toddlers by poliomyelitis and the attendant limp (in the case of the fortunate) or withered and dwarfed legs (most) will attest to the number of people who don't ever get vaccinated, even against that easily preventable disease.

As to the famine question; yep, that was my first concern as well. People in urban areas are not growing all their own food, and many poor folks, especially children, would have been living on the thin edge of malnutrition even before this outbreak.

ANYTHING that disrupts the supply of and/or causes the price of foodstuffs to increase in these areas will have dire consequences.

Birdwatcher



Don't fall into the trap of thinking those doctors are not trained in epidemiology. They are. They also know that documenting who is infected and where they are is critical to defining the epidemic. They've done well keeping an accurate count in the past. Isolation (quarantine) has stopped every outbreak thus far and may yet stop this one. Quarantine is certainly the best tool we have at this time.

Vaccinations would work, but for the fact that we don't have a vaccine.

The stuff we should be worrying about is why this has lasted nine months. Why it hasn't blown completely out of control. This is different than in the past. It's in a different area.
There are big differences in the mortality rate from place to place.