Will Ebola find it's way to America and do you think it will be a few cases here and there. Or a full blown, ass kicking, Epidemic ?

It seems to thrive best in the tropics, so likely it will not do particularly well in the United States, but you never know. No reason to tempt fate by intentionally bringing it in, that's for damned sure.

TRH - Agreed ... some Doctor wants to go to west Africa and fight Ebola
that is all well and good. But if they get it then cure it in Africa.

It's already been here.

Got here in a shipment of monkeys almost 20 years ago. But luckily, it was a strain from the Phillipines, and while it is very similar to Ebola Zaire (the really nasty strain with 90% mortality) the Reston strain is only deadly to monkeys.

It will get here, and we best learn how to fight outbreaks.

Until it goes airborne, we don't have much to worry about. If it goes airborne, there is likely to be several million (if not billion) less people on this celestial rock.

"Give us your Plagues, your AIDS and your yellow fever. Give us your malaria, your scabies and your tuberculosis. Give us your EBOLA and your Dengue fever. Give us all of your filthy and deadly diseases yearning to be freed on the American people."

- Barack Hussein Obama

Yeah, an Influenza isn't likely to do well either because it originates in China and it doesn't speak English worth a damn.

The historical pattern of outbreaks of the deadly form of ebola is that of a tropical disease. The tropics is where conditions sustaining its outbreaks are found, particularly the tropical regions of Africa. Not saying it's not possible for it to be transmitted to people in the US. I said quite the opposite, in fact, i.e., that it's stupid in the extreme to bring active patients into the US, or to send US soldiers in large numbers there, due to this threat of transmission, especially to healthcare workers, their families and close associates.

Technically, it's already here; we've brought several aid workers back for treatment. If it does get out, we may get some fatalities, but I don't expect it to take off the way it did in Africa. From what I've been reading, antibiotics, IV, etc. are largely effective. Give obamacare a few years to work, and the answer may change, but I would expect some fatalities, a lot of panic, but nothing close to apocalyptic.

Antibiotics should be ineffective against it, since it's a virus. Main treatments amount to supportive care, preventing dehydration, giving the body time to mount its own defenses via the immune system's production of specific antibodies.

it's unavoidable that Ebola will be in America, and I am pretty certain it will be a real problem. We have great health care facilities and doctors, but they could be quickly overwhelmed.

The U.S. Centers for disease control and prevention are now saying the Ebola epidemic
could infect up to 500,000 people by the end of January 2015.

Yeah, but almost all in the tropics I bet.

If it does well in the tropics, you guys in the South need to be worried. If it's going to thrive anywhere in the US, it's in the southeastern states.

Apparently, human to human transmission is difficult enough that, outside of the tropics, its transmission is almost exclusively through close contact, like that required of healthcare workers with patients, thus outbreaks outside the tropics shouldn't be possible. Within the tropics, by contrast, there appear to be other modes of transmission supported by environmental conditions there, thus encouraging and sustaining outbreaks. Still no reason to intentionally bring it here, as who knows how modes of transmission can change via mutation. Why tempt fate?

The World Health Organization said that the outbreak is increasing so rapidly
that the total number is almost certain to be much higher.

You've studied evolution. The problem with bacteria and viruses is they go through generations quickly, and as a result evolve quickly. If it gets here, we will have to kill it quickly or well have a real problem on our hands.

True, but even Key West is quite a bit north (by over a thousand miles) of the northernmost location of any recorded Ebola outbreak. It historically clusters very neatly between 20 degrees north and 20 degrees south of the equator. One must assume there's an environmentally-based reason for that.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph on a piggy powered pogo stick!

How the f--k do you people get from one day to the next without your head exploding from all the stupid??? The only thing I can figure is that leaking it out in posts like these relieves the pressure.

Ebola is extremely unlikely to evolve into something more deadly. How the f--k is it going to get more deadly??? it already kills between 50 and 90 percent of those infected depending on strain and locale. And, at that it kills them in about ten days, less when untreated, and only a little more with treatment.

Ebola has a tropical host species. That species is not humans in that the disease dies out in humans for years at a time. That has absolutely no bearing on whether the disease can or will do well outside the tropics. Ebola is spread by person to person contact and contaminated equipment/facilities with which people come in contact. It appears to have a limited period of viability on surfaces of days, not weeks. Tincture of time has in all prior outbreaks seemingly rendered the facilities/equipment non-infectious. Provide those conditions elsewhere and you can only expect similar results.

As far as Ebola "going airborne"...This is stupid deluxe! It has to change it's entire process. Ebola is a wet disease. Ebola is not a disease of the respiratory system. Ebola is a septicemia like process, it is blood borne and breaks down the smallest of vessels, vessels feeding the mucosa, vessels lining the gut, vessels around the eyes. Ebola does not produce pustules that dry up and release dry particles like pox viruses. The pathology of Ebola is a complex interaction between the cells the virus infects which once infected are retasked to producing massive quantities of virus particles, and your immune system trying to kill off those particles. The virus particles themselves ARE NOT direct actors. For Ebola to change that much to "go airborne", it would become a wholly new disease. Most viruses, and there are millions of types, produce minor or no disease. Simply put, what kills people infected with Ebola is their immune system waging chemical warfare on a massive scale. The byproducts of that war do you in.

The profound ignorance that suggests f--k 'em, let 'em all die over there is truly mind boggling. There is no way to isolate any portion of the world today. At least not in the real sense of anything larger than a very small village. The thought of trying to enforce a quarantine of an area the size of the north central United States is laughable. Would that we had enough people in uniform to establish a blockade on land, in the air, on the sea, we would be putting millions of armed personnel into much more dangerous (disease wise) situations than sending in a limited number to set up field hospitals as proposed. Anyone who can't figure that one out probably needs to take their shoes off to count past ten. And... the little consequence of exposing so many people to the disease would just create a whole new vector. Trying to stop it at our borders will cost an ungodly amount of money, and given that fact that we haven't managed to stop any disease at our borders doesn't even give us a working model to apply to this disease. The last disease we tried to stop at our borders was HIV, another "tropical" disease. Tell me how well that worked out.

Lastly, the though of someone like TRH teaching children anything with the absurdly illogical thought processes he exhibits here is truly stunning. How the f--k can a person provide answers when he clearly cannot grasp the question(s) is one thing. But to go off like he has here with no basis, no comprehension of what he's talking about, and no logical connection between what he says and reality... This people is the land of too stupid to live in the most literal sense of the word, and TRH is king.

Relax Francis.

I think you know what you're talking about. And I agree with your assessment of the disease.

Could have been a tad nicer about it. Just sayin

some of us have explained it in the last month over and over again.....same people choose to live in their fantasy world.....unfortunately most the US preception of ebola stems from a book writen 20 years ago called 'The Hot Zone' by Douglas Preston....while i am a big fan of Preston's fiction writing he aint so good at fact checking cause his description of how ebola works in that book contains alot of fiction.....if you are truly interested in diseases like ebola, Lyme, SARS and even AIDS read 'Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic' by David Quammen because while being easily readable to someone without a background in microbiology Mr. Quammen also spent a hell of alot of time in the field with researchers where it appears Mr. Preston never left his desk and forgot he wasnt writing another fiction novel...

will warn yah though it aint the book to read shortly before traveling overseas.....took all the fun of even seeing the flying foxes in the Adelaide zoo, let alone just traveling through airports in Asia show up in Australia,land of deadly critters and im scared chitless of an inch long ant and a phuggin bat

Nicer??? These ass clowns are advocating letting this disease burn out of control over there and kill who knows how many people (and I believe that anyone putting a number on it is using OTA numbers at this point) when we have the means to help? Not to mention our own self interest in doing so.

I used up all my nice trying to explain something this simple to them.

It's things like these that make me sometimes thankful I can't afford to travel further than Nevada.

I'm just playin around cuz this is probably the 20th thread about this

believe me that aint gonna help, given the author chats about a couple US native diseases in the book plus there is the whole air travel thing and as MILES pointed out, you cant quarantine off somewhere the size of West Africa from the rest of the world......hell one other he talks about in the book just popped up recently and it didnt show up in some third world backwater, it showed up and was discovered in suburban Australia and no one had ever seen it before in an area that had been settled for over a century....brand new disease related to rabies

Great. I'm stayin in bed

For my own part, when we talk about stuff like this in class I usually ask the kids "Do you know what the good news is....???"


".....I'm already fifty-seven"

Miles, it would be helpful if you could focus precisely on what specific statement I made in this thread (actual quotes, please) with which you so vehemently disagree. That would help us to have a discussion, rather than a mere pissing contest. Start, if you would, with one statement (assuming there's more than one). Then we can discuss its merits and/or demerits before moving on to any other point on which you take issue.

why so when you start getting you arse handed to you you start arguing semantics so you can try and save face? every time it devolves to a Clinton-esq "depends on what your definition of is is"

There is no basis whatsoever for the first statement. A disease from the same part of Africa with similar transmission characteristics has already demonstrated that in spades. Worse, at the time we discovered HIV, our understanding of it included at or very nearly 100% mortality. It also would be the poster disease for the absurdity of trying to close the borders to disease.

As demonstrated by nearly forty years of having the virus here in the US with ZERO infections with E. Zaire, and only infection with E. Reston which occurred before we knew it was here (or even existed for that matter) Our record is not only good, it's perfect. To not bring infected people here to treat them, to not bring the virus to the best labs in the world to learn what we need to know about it is illogical in the extreme and to expouse such an illogical position is the result of very, very flawed thinking and deep ignorance that probably is beyond repair.

Failure to learn from both successful and unsuccessful experiment is the hallmark of too f--king stupid to live.

Failure to grasp your inability to comprehend the above is confirmation that you are too f--king stupid to live.

With evidence of the inability to learn, and your inability to understand you lack that ability is compelling evidence you are in the wrong line of work and precisely why people on this forum treat you like the idiot you are.

Really?? Look at any map recording the history of Ebola outbreaks of any demographic significance. There are clear north and south borders suggested, paralleling specific latitudinal lines, centering in the middle tropics of the African continent, and this over many decades. I'd classify that as constituting at least some basis for concluding that its nature is that of a tropical disease.The obvious difference being a long track record with Ebola of outbreaks of significance being contained within the tropics of Africa.

The mere fact that a disease originates in the tropics, of course, doesn't by itself imply the absence of potential for expansion (in terms of significant outbreaks) beyond present latitudinal limits, but when there's a consistent track record of being so contained over many decades, that's at least meaningful information for the purpose of making predictions about its near future vis-a-vis geographic concentration.

You probably would classify it that way because you just haven't got the intellectual wherewithal to understand these are both diseases of humans, and that all humans are susceptible and they are not confined anywhere on the planet. You cannot have it both ways, either the disease presents a danger here or it does not. That is a simple construct. My dog can even get that. There are no indigenous green monkey host populations outside Africa yet HIV managed to continue transmission for one human to the next and does so to this day.



First, Forty years is hardly a long track record for human disease. Second, Ebola hasn't gotten out because it kills an astonishing number of it's victims and does so astonishingly fast, not allowing much time for infection to spread from person to person. We can control it and prevent spread with a very high degree of certainty with simple barriers and chemical control.



That it does imply the absence of potential for expansion is precisely the point of you falsely claiming that it has historically been confined to equatorial Africa and that represents "consistent track record over many decades".

You just don't get that this is a human to human transmission chain and that it incapacitates so quickly that people have a limited ability to infect others before they either survive and are no longer infectious (like Brantley and Writebol) or they die and are no longer infectious after few days.

You just don't get that you don't begin to understand what comes out of your mouth. How the hell do you think you can comprehend something that requires some thinking?

The first step in gaining knowledge is admitting you don't know something and then seeking out the knowledge to mitigate that ignorance. In your case, I doubt that the knowledge is going to help, I know what I have provided you is right, but over and over again you demonstrate singular inability to do anything with it or anything anyone else provides.

Perhaps you'd like to explain how my statements thus far indicate to you a belief on my part that humans outside the tropics aren't susceptible to contracting Ebola. Humans being susceptible to contracting Ebola outside of its normal range, and its propensity for significant outbreak outside its normal range, aren't necessarily identical with one another.

ever think it propensity for an outbreak outside its normal range might have something to do with the range of reservoir since ebola isnt endemic to people as a host....but since people are more mobile than any other critter that really means jack chit in the long run.....

Obviously you do not begin to understand the stuff you say. When you get that part in hand, come back and talk to me.

"I'd classify that as constituting at least some basis for concluding that its nature it that of a tropical disease."

Ebola is a disease that is all but exclusively a human to human transmission disease. Presumably, there is an index case caused by transmission from it's endemic host to a human and thereafter 100% of the transmission is presumed to be human to human. That means the percentage of people ever infected by whatever the host species is is in reality vanishingly small. THAT means considering it in any way a tropical disease is not just wrong, but so stupid as to be dangerous.

There is of course the possibility that humans are the host species since we have not definitively identified the host and the method of infection of the index case. Based on our knowledge thus far, we cannot absolutely rule out that it is latent in some people. Very unlikely, but we flat out do not know at this time.

actually i believe its been pretty much proved not to be latent in people or if it is its in percentages so small not to matter statistically....

Miles, I suspect you're either incapable of understanding what I'm saying, or you're going to great lengths to mischaracterize what I say for reasons of your own. In either case, there's little point in continuing our back an forth.

If you guy want an idea if how the CDC might handle an outbreak in the US, google "2003 Monkey Pox Outbreak"...quite a scare at the time as the initial victims were thought to have smallpox...

It's your head exploding, Miles, trying to reason with Hawkeye.

No matter what you say to him, he'll simply respond by saying that you're either too unintelligent to understand his meaning, or you're deliberately distorting his words for mysterious reasons.

You will get tired before he does.

Pete,

I remember that. Until we figured out it wasn't Smallpox there were a lot of people very worried. It was too close to 9/11/2001 and a lot of people were looking for an attack after the Anthrax scare. For some time before Michael Osterholm had openly worried about a smallpox attack.

Like I said to him... He doesn't understand what he's saying. How the hell could anyone else.