Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire I've Seen This Movie, It Doesn't End Well

I guess I should stop worrying. After all, what could go wrong?

NEW YORK (AP) -- A government scientist kept silent about a potentially dangerous lab blunder and revealed it only after workers in another lab noticed something fishy, according to an internal investigation.

The accident happened in January at the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. A lab scientist accidently mixed a deadly strain of bird flu with a tamer strain, and sent the mix to another CDC lab and to an outside lab in Athens, Georgia.

No one was sickened by bird flu. But unsuspecting scientists worked with the viral mix for months before it was discovered.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/storie...TE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-08-15-12-04-44

Excellent reading list. I've read all but Betrayal of Trust, and I'm downloading it from Amazon today.

See my answer to FLARick.

If you are asking how many infected persons have been in the US, discounting E. Reston I am unaware of any. That we have had the virus in the country for nearly forty years without infecting a single person simply buttresses what I have said. It is readily manageable. That you do not comprehend that this is easily manageable also buttresses what I said about your comprehension.

Adopting your position, I should be mounting a campaign to euthanize idiots in Florida on the basis of your presence and the possibility you could reproduce or be cloned. Blind irrational fear like you are exhibiting is simply ignorance run amok.

The books I listed for you are very good tools to gain a place to begin to decrease the degree of ignorance. I am quite sure most physicians have read most if not all of that list. They will tell you as well it's a good place to start. All you need do is ask.

This story is 2 days old, but it's more comprehensive than the post put up by FLARick earlier.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/13/s...400000&bicmet=1420088400000&_r=2

reports keep surfacing that says Ebola is more of a potential problem than some want to admit.
link to story

Until you have a rational reason to worry about Ebola, yes! Stop worrying.

Lots of things can go wrong. There are checks and balances. People pay attention and do not hesitate to turn in respected colleagues when they make a simple mistake. 100,000 or so people die every year from in hospital mistakes. That's getting close on five million deaths during our experiments with Ebola in this country. Closer to a million die every year because of what they put in their body. Would you advocate an absolute ban on tobacco, alcohol, and daily intake of more than 2000 calories?

If the published numbers are even close to right, it would take 500 years for Ebola to kill just what we kill annually with alcohol, tobacco and excess consumption based on it's entire known history.

Hypocrite. You have often responded to a demand like yours by referring to a previous answer.

There is an enormous difference between aerosolized droplets/particles and an airborne capable like Smallpox. True airborne pathogens are very much like water vapor in the air. Aerosolized particles are like a fine (maybe not so fine) mist.

At this point I am pretty sure that no one quite for sure knows the point of infection for the medical personnel infected. Of those which are known, I would bet the person was aware of the exposure when it happened. The probability is greatest that they simply got careless or tired and made a mistake. My belief is that in a situation where such hypervigilance is required that it is inevitable the odds of a mistake or exhaustion will expose even the best trained most vigilant doctor at some point. Given that, the less time you place them under that stress without a substantial break the less likely they'll make a mistake. Conversely, stress them more/longer and more mistakes will happen.

It's why BSL 4 labs are so rigidly controlled and the users as well.

if professionals get tired, make mistakes, when they KNOW they are working with a deadly pathogen, then what chance does the guy on the street, or plane have, when exposed?
I think taking a stricter view, from the average laymans's point of view, is just as important as what you are saying.
Of course, I don't know your bona fides, when it comes to dealing with deadly pathogens, but opinions are just that.

How many have there been since??? There are some that are currently isolated because of suspected contraction, but the only link is them having recently returned from west africa. It has nothing to do with the two brought in intentionally...For a supposed teacher, you are INCREDIBLY fuggin stupid...

Sam, MILES58 is pretty savvy in this area. He and I have been discussing this in more detail by PM for a while and I'm confident he really knows his stuff.

His point about the difference between droplet transmission and aerosolized transmission is pretty solid. A lot of us are guessing that Ebola has some capability of droplet transmission, but it's mostly a direct contact kind of deal. It appears to require relatively low viral load to cause infection, but I'm not reading anywhere what that level is. If it's something like Hepatitis C virus, which requires a very, very low exposure, that would explain the deaths of all these healthcare workers. But the probability that direct contact with body fluids is necessary for transmission in the vast majority of cases is high, given the fact that since the index case back in March we've had as few cases and deaths as we have.

MILES58's comment about the role of exhaustion in healthcare workers' infection is well taken. I know that wearing full surgical gear for even a few hours leaves me sweaty, cranky, and tired. Wearing the full Ebola rig, especially in non-air-conditioned hospitals in equatorial Africa, is a form of torture I can't even imagine. Staying in one of those suits for days on end would be impossible to tolerate, I'm sure.

When you consider that Lagos, Nigeria is a city of some twenty million and your dreaded exposure has occurred, the less than ten cases makes for a lot better odds than smoking or drinking or being 30 lbs overweight. Does it not?



Do not mistake my very small concern about airborne Ebola for a cavalier lack of concern for say Lagos. Unless the quarantine efforts in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia are pretty bullet proof, Lagos is likely to be a major problem. The peculiarities of this outbreak are worrisome. It should have burned out by now. It has not, and therefore it is to be expected that it will hit the exponential rise portion of the curve or should already have done so. We could well be seeing 1000 deaths/day, and we are not. That's cause for alarm and scrutiny to learn what is different. The variance in mortality from one place to the other, a low of maybe 30% and as high as 80% from what is supposedly the same strain raises serious questions.

It begins to have the appearance of an endemic disease which would make practicing medicine there an ungodly clumsy effort because anyone with diarrhea, fever, nausea, or a bloody nose would mandate full protective gear for all personnel handling the patient, his samples, his bedding, his seating, his documents, etc, etc, etc.

You know perfectly well I wasn't speaking of germ samples. When one says a disease is unknown to a geographic region, it refers to cases of the disease never having been seen there.

here ya go hawk...I answered your question but you conveniently skipped it over...

You don't begin to know what you are talking about, how in hell do you expect anyone else to divine what you think you're talking about?

Ebola is one of the most infectious diseases we know about. Handling the virus intensively for forty years without incident tells you it's manageable. It really is that simple. Smallpox is a comparably dangerous virus. only a very, very limited number of people even know where we keep it. It is locked in a secure facility in one of a number of secure nitrogen freezers and the freezers are rotated periodically. To get permission to work with it require very carefully designed experiments for very compelling reason, plus committee approval, plus supervison, plus a companion, plus an act of god. There are probably less than five people in the world who could accomplish that. Ebola is close to that hard to get permission to work on.

What we know well about Ebola, is that it is not persistent in the environment. When an outbreak burns out, the virus is gone. Period. We do not even know where it goes and/or what species may harbor it in an infectious form. Antibody tests suggest some likely candidates, but we have no proof of anything.

Can an idiot panic over extremely remote possibilities... Yes.

But we Know what we are dealing with. We know and have demonstrated how to handle it safely, whether it is an infected person or cultured virus. We've done it for almost forty years.

We know that once you survive Ebola and it has cleared your body it's gone and we know of no following infection from a "cured" person. When we are done studying our two test subjects we will know a lot more about that with a lot more specificity. Brandt and Writebol as precious beyond imagining. The antibodies that they are contributing already are part of making the whole world safer. Even idiots who'd rather they didn't.

This is a brilliant piece of writing. You should be on farkin' CNN, man.

Of course, after exposure and infection, surviving Ebola is step one. Most don't.
That the average Joe is concerned about Ebola, does not make him an 'idiot'. Not everyone in America has the detailed, scientific knowledge of these organisms, from Medical or Biological education or experience.
The Ebola germ seems to be a lot more wide spread in Africa than it was, and with the ability to spread around the world now, it will become even more so.
It is not the only pathogen that was found in small geographical locations before, but is now more wide spread.

Worry if/when Ebola becomes airborne. Until then, don't.

I suspect Miles has more than a clue and I think he and I probably know some of the same people. Their advice is what I put in the first paragraph.

?????

Why on earth would I think that?

Ain't questioning the training of the doctors, just the accuracy of their data, which as it turns out doctors on the scene are the first to admit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/16/w...amp;emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0

Staff at the outbreak sites see evidence that the numbers of reported cases and deaths vastly underestimate the magnitude of the outbreak,� the group said in a statement on Thursday.

Not their fault, just inherent in the situation

Have you been in places like these countries affected?

I'll say it again; there'll be lots of folks in the countries in question never come into contact with a competent clinic, let alone a doctor. In addition to the aforementioned frequency of polio, go to a few funerals of children and adults dead of easily preventable causes ranging from measles to rabies, this within a two-hour journey of a well equipped mission hospital, and it becomes apparent.

The World Health Organization is exactly right when it says the epidemic is much bigger than reported. The reason they didn't give a figure of what magnitude larger is because at this point they are just guesstimating, like everybody else.

Birdwatcher

Sam,

It's not that everyone without training is an idiot. It is that some like TRH who don't have a clue keep ignoring fact and settled knowledge in order to deliberately fear monger.

The E. Zaire strain is unquestionably more wide spread than it was if we only consider our very limited historic knowledge of Ebola. This outbreak has killed more people than all the others we know about combined.

For a trained person, what follows is a lot more worrisome than the current outbreak:

The gene guys tell us that Ebola is not a new beast. It has been around a long time. From that you have to ask if it was ever possible that we missed Ebola in the past. Greeks, Romans, Europeans, Arabs, Persians, Asians, Indians, and Indonesians all have been exploring and trading with Africa for several thousand years. Ebola is guaranteed to get your attention once you see an end stage patient. Trained or not. The slave trade spent a fair amount of time (a couple centuries) in West Africa trading in human commodities kidnapped from well inside the known reservoir zone of Ebola. We have no known descriptions of it until 1976. There is anecdotal evidence that the people from Equatorial Africa knew of Ebola and other highly contagious highly fatal diseases and knew enough to quarantine themselves and infected families/villages.

If we accept that the disease has been present for a long time, that the resident people knew about it and quarantine, that we had no knowledge in the outside world of the disease by people who had association with the people of Equatorial Africa, then we have no option but to conclude that ALL prior outbreaks were consistent with what we have seen between 1976 and 2013. Very small, intense, very short lived and very well controlled by simple isolation. Likely also, is that these outbreaks were sufficiently common as to be unremarkable to the people of the region.

That demonstrates an extended history of a stable virus. That demonstration is pretty compelling evidence that IF the current outbreak falls outside the standard deviation of prior outbreaks THEN, our best bet is to be looking for a change in the environment or the infected population for an explanation of the difference. Just like the control of the outbreak, the examination of the evidence and the search for explanations must be absolutely disciplined and methodical. You must wear blinders until you have exhausted every possibility you can. You must also relentlessly document every step.

That last, that's why Brantley and Writebol as so incredibly valuable. You can bet that a hub (literally a faucet) was placed into a vein on them to facilitate hourly blood draws to satisfy the demands of the pathologists and immunologists working the problem. The knowledge we gain from those hour by hour comparisons is unbelievably important.

We have no explanation for why we held no knowledge of Ebola prior to 1976. Is it possible it did not exist prior to 1976? That answer is as close to certainly no as we can get. We know of five separate strains of Ebola. Four can produce comparably severe disease in humans. For a virus to expand that rapidly and mutate that much in such a short time just doesn't happen. Particularly so when you consider it did not diminish it's virulence (E. Reston is comparably virulent in monkeys).

The comfort in that for us is that for centuries Ebola has coexisted with the people of Equatorial Africa with minimal health care capability present and it did not depopulate the region, and there isn't even evidence to support that it may have been much of a problem for the overwhelming majority of them.