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  • EADD Moderators: Shambles

Ebola outbreak - West Africa

Shambles said:
The powers that be do not say that at all cos it is a silly thing to say. When your internal organs are haemorraging you are unlikely to go out for a stroll in a public place. This is why one of the traditional methods of containing the disease in Africa is to just lock the poor unfortunates in their home and hope they emerge alive at some point later on. Same as they did here during the plague epidemics. People who are that ill are going nowhere fast.
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Mate doctors were explaining the exploding, look up the action of how the virus works -it melts your organs and by that time you are bed ridden but anyone near stands a high chance of infection. Its not as dramatic as you may imagine but it does and can make you explode.
 
5StarSquatHotel said:
Even that would not work mate, you cant really contain it at all and that why its one of if not the worst virus/pathogen going.
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Is it one of the worst? I know it has a massively high mortality rate but does the infection generally spread that much or, like Shambles said, does it kind of fizzle out because the mortality rate is so high?

Aids and ebola both supposedly came from roughly the same place at roughly the same time (1970s I think). Are there people dying from ebola all over the world? No. I don't think it's relatively all that bad and I certainly don't think it's anything to worry about unless you are living in the place with the outbreak. It is a nice scary story to sell some newspapers though.
 
5StarSquatHotel said:
Mate doctors were explaining the exploding, look up the action of how the virus works -it melts your organs and by that time you are bed ridden but anyone near stands a high chance of infection. Its not as dramatic as you may imagine but it does and can make you explode.
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I'm not buying that. It does not 'melt your organs' - that's pure tabloid drivel. There's no reason why even extreme haemorraging would cause a body to explode. What would cause a body to explode is when somebody dies in a hot 'n' humid environment - like West Africa - and they're left for a day or two whilst gases build up internally which can cause a body to explode.
 
The transmission of HIV would likely be a lot less if it had visible symptoms. If you know there is ebola about and you see some bloke with a fever and possibly haemorrhaging blood you would give them a bit of a wide berth.
 
It spreads through close contact, with bodily fluids, mainly blood, as there is so much of it being splattered around via coughing, and bleeding out through eyes, ears, nose, mouth, arse and any other bodily orifices, including puncture sites from I.Vs and injection sites.

The fatality rate depends upon the strain, ebola quickly kills infected hosts but has a latent infectious host period. ebola zaire being the most deadly, ebola sudan is somewhat less lethal but still downright nasty, same goes for tai forest strain and the ugandan strain. There is a latent infection period of up to 20-something days during which the person shows no symptoms of infection but is still highly infectious.

Then there is the Reston strain, which was discovered first in a shipment of lab monkeys in an american bioscience facility. This does not kill humans, it does however, infect them. And worryingly, it is airborne. All it would take to create an airborne deadly strain of the virus would be for the two to infect a host at the same time and transfer some genes in the cells of the unfortunate host, that would result in the birth of a hybrid between the infecting deadly strain, zaire, sudan, tai forest etc. and ebola reston.

Interestingly, it is thought that reston may represent an asian filovirus population, whereas the other known strains of ebola, and of marburg virus are known to be african in origin, zoonotic viruses meaning they have an animal reservoir, in the case of ebola, it is bats. Possibly other animals as well but the primary host appears to be bats. I'm not certain about marburg but there have been cases where visitors to kitum cave in kenya contracted marburg, some fatal cases. Again, whilst the marburg virus hasn't afaik been isolated from kitum, it has been found in ugandan fruit bats.

One wonders, what other such nasties may be around in asia, if there is one, nonlethal strain of ebola present, are there more dangerous strains around, or other filoviruses unrelated to ebola and marburg, which thus far are the only two known species in the genus.
 
If the area of infection is an isolated village, then it will typically storm through the inhabitants and burn itself out, when there are no more hosts to infect. In a crowded city, with easy transport and air travel, I think chances are things would get ugly, and fast, without very aggressive quarantine instituted from the outset.

Apparently a carrier state, at least temporarily is possible, with male victims of infection who survive all the haemorrhaging, diarrhea-ing and projectile blood-vomiting it entails, able to transmit the virus sexually for months.
 
parttime crackhead said:
While I agree with the principal, if there was no way to make mega-bucks from it why would "Big Pharma" even try to cure cancer? Why would they spend money developing an aids cure? What would be the point? We all know that these companies aren't in it to help people, they're in it to make lots of money.
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But they've got no real incentive to cure diseases right now. Working around patents to make yet another weight control / hair loss / stiffie drug as a direct alternative to one that people have already been convinced they need is where they're all at.

There was still a pharmaceutical industry before, when drugs used to be unpatentable.

And anyway, I am not even sure that "mega-bucks" works as an incentive. It ends up attracting the wrong sort of The rich and powerful people at the top of any business always forget what they are supposed to be doing (notice how the privatised railway companies started referring to passengers as "customers", as though they cared less for the process of getting people from A to B than for taking our money?) and concentrate on making money.

The people who are in it for the right reasons, wouldn't care about the money.
 
Like I said, if by chance the reston strain hybridizes in an ebola patient with one of the other, deadly strains such as EBV-zaire or EBV-sudan then we are in for something a whole lot less pleasant than ebola as it is now.

And thats saying something considering just how virulent it is. If one of the african ebola strains got airborne, then its going to make a mess. I'd be interested to know more in particular about EBV-reston, just WHAT makes it nonlethal, although infective, and what its reservoir is, assuming it is, like the others, a zoonotic virus.

Quite fascinating just how complex a field of study it is, and how complex the mechanisms behind even relatively simple viral translation and transcription are once you get down to the molecular level.

Looks like I've got quite a lot of reading to do tonight.
 
BecomingJulie said:
But they've got no real incentive to cure diseases right now.
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If they don't develop the cure now another company will develop it and thus hold the patent which means they are out of the game. Surely that's incentive enough? The company that develops a cancer cure will generate so much money they could probably buy all the other big pharma companies, strip their assets and liquidate them.
 
Just to say there is unlikely ever to be a single cure for cancer as it's not a single disease. There's fortunes to be made for all concerned... not quite as much as there is to be made from not quite curing but mitigating symptoms so it becomes 'only' a chronic condition requiring lifelong medication though, naturally...
 
Limpet_Chicken said:
Like I said, if by chance the reston strain hybridizes in an ebola patient with one of the other, deadly strains such as EBV-zaire or EBV-sudan then we are in for something a whole lot less pleasant than ebola as it is now.

And thats saying something considering just how virulent it is. If one of the african ebola strains got airborne, then its going to make a mess. I'd be interested to know more in particular about EBV-reston, just WHAT makes it nonlethal, although infective, and what its reservoir is, assuming it is, like the others, a zoonotic virus.

Quite fascinating just how complex a field of study it is, and how complex the mechanisms behind even relatively simple viral translation and transcription are once you get down to the molecular level.

Looks like I've got quite a lot of reading to do tonight.
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Here's a man who knows.

This story could easily have slipped away by now, Ebola outbreaks normally self limit themselves. In places like Africa where huge amounts of travel over great distances takes time, the virus burns itself out. But this shit IS still spreading & is becoming an even greater cause for concern. The risks in a city such as London, of Ebola spreading, are definitely present, & altough this 90% death rate applies only to those who fail to recieve any treatment, once the hospitals are full & all the staff have it too, no-one in London will get any treatment & you'd be no more or less likely to survive it here as you might if you had Ebola in Liberia.

But more to the point, as an expert on the subject, how do you feel about the "exploding corpses spread the virus" cobblers from further up? ;)
 
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Si Ingwe said:
Here's a man who knows.

This story could easily have slipped away by now, Ebola outbreaks normally self limit themselves. In places like Africa where huge amounts of travel over great distances takes time, the virus burns itself out. But this shit IS still spreading & is becoming an even greater cause for concern. The risks in a city such as London, of Ebola spreading, are definitely present, & altough this 90% death rate applies only to those who fail to recieve any treatment, once the hospitals are full & all the staff have it too, no-one in London will get any treatment & you'd be no more or less likely to survive it here as you might if you had Ebola in Liberia.

But more to the point, as an expert on the subject, how do you feel about the "exploding corpses spread the virus" cobblers from further up? ;)
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The problem with trying to draw direct comparisons between an ebola outbreak in West Africa and one in "The West" is that one of the big problems the aid workers have been having is that large numbers of the local population refuse to accept or believe the information on ways to help avoid infection and many think the aid workers are "witches" who are deliberately spreading - and indeed the cause of - the outbreak. I'm presuming that's more of an issue in the more rural areas but has been a regular complaint as such beliefs clearly hamper aid and containment efforts really quite considerably. Ebola is a virus not a black magician's spell - basic hygiene and quarantining measures work a lot better when the population understands and believes in their efficacy rather than deliberately avoiding them in the belief that is the thing causing the disease.

Not saying an outbreak doesn't have the potential to turn very nasty wherever it happened but there's way too much scaremongering and paranoia going on and I don't recall that ever being useful to any situation. Quite the opposite usually. Rumours about 'exploding bodies spraying gallons of blood and liquified organs' around and about the place are little better than rumours of witchcraft. A little common sense and perspective goes a long way.

Or more succinctly, what Cracker's pic sez.
 
Read this sad but interesting article about the toll of fighting ebola on hospital staff: http://www.theguardian.com/global-d...tters/2014/jul/17/ebola-sierra-leone-epidemic

There's a lot of superstition and ignorance about what ebola is in West Africa which is definitely hampering attempts to contain things. The other big issue is the lack of clean, modern hospital facilities, obviously going to be a huge problem considering how it spreads. Then this is all compounded by traditional practices which means families are in contact with infected corpses and that people's bodies are not disposed of properly to prevent further spread of the virus.

In light of these issues I'm not overly concerned about the threat of an ebola epidemic say here, because we are unlikely to have these compounding factors. Still, so much respect for the doctors nurses and other health care workers helping these patients, not sure i'd be up for it.
 
nor me, I'm keeping away.

Does anyone see Ebola, Marburg or any other of these rapid, often fatal viruses being used as a Biological Weapon? Rough scenario... Man acquires a litre of Ebola blood, somehow gets it to London & just starts dripping the stuff on escalator handles etc

Ebola survives for sometime outside the human body, if even a fraction of the people who touch that blood end up getting it into their blood-stream, I fear that the desease would spread like wildfire in a population as dense as Londons.

I'm not paranoid, I'm aware. BA seems a little "aware" as well, having cancelled all flights in & out of Sierra Leone & Liberia. This even as the disease begins to spread in Nigeria, a country not just riddled with Muslim extremists (see Bio-Warfare Paranoia above!) & with some of the most densely populated cities in the world, but one that also has a huge amount of human traffic to & from London. We should be cancelleing flight to & from Nigeria NOW! We need to get ahead of this stuff, we've been playing catch up from the start.

If it doesn't happen accidentally, it could happen deliberately!

Here paranoiacs, here, come come, feed off my fevered Ebola fear sweat! ;)
 
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