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Like I said earlier...

Ebola of and by itself is unlikely to be much of a problem. Historically it has been controlled by simple measures like quarantine of villages.

It's the cumulative insults to individuals and the health care system that we need to worry about. Take Lyme disease as an example. Lyme is caused by a gram negative spirochete (bacteria). It is currently vulnerable to virtually any antibiotic effective against gram negative bacteria, which is most of them. Some antibiotics are less effective and if necessity requires their use they need to be used for much longer periods at effective dosage. Failure to treat Lyme in an effective and timely manner can easily result in death. Death does not present the biggest challenge to the health care system though. Death from Lyme can come fairly quickly once clinical symptoms present. This occurs when the bacteria concentrate in joints or the pericardium. The immune system has cells called macrophages that attack foreign cells (or dead cells)tagged by other cells of the immune system. The are very large cells and they attack by surrounding the foreign cell and releasing lysing enzymes to break down the protein walls of the cells. In a massive infection which is not atypical for Lyme infection in joint linings or pericardium, that can result in massive amounts of protein and toxic byproducts of breaking down all those foreign cells plus the collateral damage done to the joint linings and/or pericardium cells as collateral damage. Those proteins and toxins then clog and damage the kidneys. hat requires substantial periods on IV the help dilute the waste going into the kidneys and closely supervised medical care.

Once the diagnosis is made, and the determination that treatment needs to begin the system resources become unavailable for the next person. When complications like allergic reaction to antibiotics, congestive heart failure, joint damage etc are also present more system resources get tied up keeping the patient alive.

If you impress GPs who normally do health care at office visits into managing cases which have become critical they are unavailable to do preventive care/early intervention which is vastly more effective time wise, and you have begun a downward spiral which can be very difficult to reverse.

As a whole, our health care system is insufficiently robust to deal with a just a major epidemic of a nasty influenza. Day by day we get in deeper against the small things like Lyme, food borne illnesses, resistant bacteria, etc. This is what is going to kill a lot of people. Worry about the small things, not Ebola.

Do they have an idea how this disease is transmitted?

Jim

The virus rapidly turns your insides into virus-saturated mush, the destruction of those membranes separating your insides from the outside being the source of those sudden catastrophic bleed-outs the disease is known for, the wonder being you can still actually have a pulse and draw breath up until the moment that happens.

Used to be and probably still is direct contact with the corpses was thought to spread the disease. A closely related form exists in monkeys that can be spread airborne like TB, the flu or the common cold.

If this outbreak is airborne, that could explain the losses of doctors and health-care workers who may not have been expecting that level of contagion. I expect everyone is watching closely the other passengers on the plane that guy was flying on.

Birdwatcher

Imagine being the guy who had the seat next to his.

Ebola Zaire, The current African strain, requires direct contact with body fluids/tissue. Body fluids when you have a high fever, diarrhea, and breakdown of capillary systems are characteristically abundant in infected people, but not necessarily in infected primates. Obviously medical personnel handling E. Zaire patients need to be hyper vigilant and follow decon procedure while degowning in an absolutely scrupulous manner.

E. Reston is a wholly different virus. I has demonstrated airborne infection with monkeys, but to the best of my knowledge has not produced epidemics in those species nor has it accounted for much if anything in the way of human infection or any deaths.

Barring deaths or illness for a period, E. Zaire infections die out and disappear for extended periods. That E. Zaire does not disappear forever once gone for extended periods is virtual proof of an unknown host which is not affected by the virus, or it is so minimally affected as to pass unnoticed so far.

Reasonable hygiene is all it takes to stop the spread of E. Zaire.

Ebola is a virus. Like flu and AIDS,it mutates. Previous outbreaks indicated that the virus became less and less virulent as it was passed on from person A to B to C and mostly petered out on its own. This outbreak IS NOT following that template. Previously the disease occured in very isolated areas. This one is making the jump to population centers. ALL it would need is to have ONE infected person land in Mumbai to really show its stuff.

Has anything positive ever come out of Africa? West Nile, HIV, Ebola...

Maybe Ebola is Mother Nature's way of thinning the world population like the last time the black plague hit and wiped out 2/3rds of Europe.

It's not nice to fool around with Mother Nature.

In it's early stages it can spread and once it it clear it is ebola the health care system could have a real problem

Snake

You want something that will scare the chit out of you? Check out the story at this link.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/s...train-for-pandemic-research-9577088.html

This "moron" developed a strain of flu that completely bypasses the immune system. Nah, nothing could go wrong with this.

It is true...some people just need killing, before they end up killing the rest of us.

Some fool somewhere will have a patent on that.

Unless of course it's mutated to become airborne...then quarantine of the village becomes a little harder, especially when the incubation period is what it is. Back in my youth, I traveled from Tehran to Sacramento in less than a day on three different planes.

The only known Ebola variant that can be transmitted wthout direct contact is E. Reston which either does not infect humans or produces no symptoms. Airborne trasnmission may not be bad.

There are a lot of things about this story that bother me.

First and foremost, I'm puzzled that the epidemic seems to have spontaneously appeared in 3 geographically separated urban areas in Africa, with no history of it appearing first in rural/tribal areas and spreading to urban areas. This doesn't sound like Ebola, which typically crawls out of the jungle, kills a [bleep] of rural Africans, and dies out within 2-5 transmission generations, making little impact in cities.

If I was a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist, I might say that this sounds like somebody has been monkeying with Ebola virus in the lab and has deliberately released it to test its efficacy as a biological warfare agent.

But I'm fresh out of tinfoil, so I'll just let that sleeping dog lie...

I'm kinda' glad to see that SOMEBODY gets the point I've been trying to make for about a damned week now.

Maybe some of these ?

A dirty SOB like THIS ?

One, or a bunch of his STUDENTS...?

Crap sakes, this is not "Tinfoil" realm, we've been fargin' WARNED about this for years now.

GTC

Ya, and people tend to forget just how big Africa really is.
All of the West African locations in question are like 1,500 - 2,000 miles away from the usual Central African outbreaks.

Birdwatcher

I have plenty of tin foil so I'll put the hat on for you.

Seriously, anytime something is to coincidental to be a coincidental it is.

It doesn't bother me yet. The difference between a few hundred and a thousand isn't really much in terms of epidemics. Given, the previous epidemics scared people enough to lock down villages, and the current epidemic is concentrated in more urban areas not conducive to lock down but with the same poorly educated general population(s) it might make perfectly good sense for it to be bigger. The spontaneous occurrence may just be the result of one (or more) travelers/peddlers. My understanding of previous outbreaks was not that the virus weakened or changed through successive infection but that people just learned (some the hard way) to not allow contact with infectious people, materials.

What bothers me most about Ebola is that it seems like relatively few virus particles (like smallpox) can cause the disease.

Fooling with the flu virus is not so worrisome to me as the guys who inserted interleuken 4 into a pox virus and then published. That has the possibility of doing some real harm.

At this point I'm not too worried.

But if anybody hears anything about an ape that starts talking, look out...

Ebola outbreak could be much worse than thought

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ebola-outbreak-could-be-much-worse-than-thought/

Also, take a look at Drudge Report today.