We are doomed. By 2017, we will all be dead. If you don't know who Ted Nelson is, you can ready his Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson

Ebola is apparently a serious matter. Quite a scary presentation if you care to watch it.

Everyone said Swine Flu was serious too. Look how that turned out.

AFAIK, Ebola is a lot more serious?

Well, even if he's right, what are we gonna do? Unless you're super rich or a genius virologist, or maybe have a lot of power, there's not much to be gained by freaking out.

You could plan to move far away from civilization (like a cabin in the wilderness, or a secluded island). Once you become self-sufficient in your new home, you can avoid physical contact with all other humans.

While this worst case scenario is possible for some future disease, I don't think ebola will kill us all. Most likely ebola will level off in 3 to 6 months and a year from now it wont be a problem.

I remember multiple health scares in my life time. There was mad cow disease, there was the swine flu, and now we've got ebola.

I don't really consider them major threats to western civilisation, though they do usually ravage third world countries without proper intervention from global disease control groups.

The reason people get freaked out by it is because the media hype trains it hard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_health_scares

I think the only way for a lethal disease to globally infect a population would have to be (a) airborne and (b) have a long incubation period period before becoming fatal, but an early period at which it can be transmitted to other hosts. This way by the time someone first starts showing symptoms it is already too late to contain the spread, as subject zero has passed it on to who knows how many people (depending on subject zero individually, of course, and his degrees of separation).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Oct 26 2014, 10:20 am by Oh_Man.

If I've ever heard of a pandemic or been worried about a health scare, this isn't one. 3 cases in the US to me does not say pandemic or end of the world.

Straight put, this is fear-mongering at its finest.


Incorrect, the death toll for h1n1 outbreak of 2009 is estimated to be 200k worldwide and nearly 20k in the US, despite vaccines being made available to the public.

Yearly death tolls from flu are estimated to be at 15k-50k in the US alone. There's a wide margin there from year to year.

So answer me this, how many of you have gotten a flu shot? How many of you have gone to work/school sick or running a fever, or have been with coworkers/classmates who are clearly sick? You have a much higher likelihood of both contracting it as well as dying from it over ebola.


Here are the reasons why a widespread infection in the developed world is highly unlikely:
Of over 10k cases reported of ebola, most of which are found in West African countries, almost 5,000 people have died. This is tragic - but the estimated death rate of ebola is 70%, so we're actually beating the statistics on this disease. As terrible and sad that the death rate is so high, we're kinda kicking its ass, and as soon as a first patient is found in a country outside of the starting points of the disease, so far we're doing a pretty good job at containing it.

Ebola is first contracted by eating bushmeat, something that many tribes rely on especially in times of famine. There is a strong correlation between when these wild animals start getting sick or shrinking in numbers and when an Ebola outbreak occurs. As such, the WHO has found that when these species start shrinking, they should start stockpiling supplies. Despite health organizations warning tribes of the dangers of eating bushmeat, they still do it. This might be a cultural thing, but it is also a survival thing - I either eat this and risk getting sick (not knowing the full extent of ebola's effects on themselves and society) or else I die of starvation.

For the western world, ebola doesn't appear to occur, luckily for us. We're also pretty wellfed despite the homelessness problems of the developed world. However don't expect that you can live in the wild, isolated from society without the risk of contracting a deadly disease; diseases like the bubonic plague can occur naturally in nature, and that's assuming you don't accidentally kill yourself through lack of medical care of infected cuts/bruises or exposure, eating poisonous fruit/plants, or eating otherwise infected meat.

Ebola is spread only when the patient is showing signs of sickness - a fever is the greatest indicator. You cannot get sick from ebola unless you come in contact with the bodily fluids of someone who has it. So simply, don't lick anyone you don't know.

Widespread panic and fear of the disease has caused a lot of unrest in the areas greatest effected by ebola. The WHO/CDC/Western world's original lackluster response, along with the western worlds terrible treatment of Africa in the past, has caused distrust. Violent coupes are breaking into hospitals, "saving" the sick by returning them to their families and stealing infected supplies for dispersal...which as we know increases the spread of ebola. The tribes this is effecting are afraid of losing control of their people. Unfortunately, give the hardship we have forced on Africa in the past, this isn't entirely an unfounded claim. The reasoning behind it is any of the following: doctors are giving the sickness to their people, or are intentionally letting them die, or are worshiping the disease, or are making the entire thing up; that this is only malaria. Which this is why fear mongering and panic is absolutely ridiculous...we know better. The information is out there on ebola. People are scared or worried thanks in part to elections in November - they're using this to charge their own personal agendas.

Since ebola victims discharge a lot of fluids - blood, bile, all that disgusting junk - health care professionals and those taking care of sick family members, etc. are at the highest risk of contracting the deadly disease. Couple this with ghetto like conditions, with rarely there being drinking water or sanitation of any kind and disease runs rampant. You will notice the full quarantine that has happened in Georgia - this is not the case in Africa, where open windows or open air hospitals are the norm. People who are infected or possibly infected are held together until they can be tested and discharged, which isn't sanitary and is very dangerous for those who are not sick but forced to stay in this quarantine. So far, the Western world has shown the foresight to alert medical professionals of possible contraction.

So why has it appeared here? Why are people getting sick, despite this? The first part: we don't care. We don't care about "those savages" in Africa and we didn't care until we flew the first health care professional to Georgia. We weren't sending aid because it didn't effect us. All of sudden, not only is it "here" but also it is starting to show an impact on trade. The Ivory Coast is the largest producer of cocoa that is sold to companies such as Nestle and Mars. The Ivory Coast has closed their borders against infected countries where they get their labor from. Without enough people to farm and produce these products for the chocolate industry, there is a huge concern on what this might mean for Nestle/Mars the world's chocolate supply and cost. Sounds silly, because it is "just" chocolate - until you realize it is because of this these companies have finally decided to care enough to send aid.

Secondly: mismanagement. We really screwed up when first responding to the outbreak, and it wasn't until it hit the media that these countries started getting the supplies they needed...and even now, over crowding, sending people away, lack of equipment is a huge problem in Africa. The man in Dallas went to the hospital as soon as he thought he had it, and they sent him away the first time even though he showed plenty of symptoms to confirm ebola. The nurse working with him contracted it because that specific hospital was not correctly set up to handle infectious diseases.

Third: Fearmongering. Stop. Just stop. Panicking, freaking out is not helping a damn thing. Panic and misinformation is one of the reasons the spread of ebola has occurred in African countries. This is an election year - it is in politicians' best interests to blame the "other guy" for causing the outbreak. The truth of the matter is that shutting down flights and going into isolation will only destroy the airline industry. The man in Dallas I believe flew in from Belgium, so we'd still see people come in. Even if we went into isolation mode, at most we might by 5 to 6 months before another case shows up. It is so completely ineffective it isn't worth doing.

In short, as much as I hate the saying, keep calm and carry on. And get a damn flu shot.

Nitpicking - this statement is conflating two separate things and gives a misleading impression unless read carefully.

Your chance of catching ebola is dramatically lower than catching the flu, given the current geographic spread of both illnesses. However, once you do catch ebola, you are significantly more likely to die from it than if you catch the flu.

So the absolute chances of you dying from the flu is much greater than dying from ebola, but that's only because the chances of your catching ebola are so ridiculously remote (unless you deliberately put yourself in harms way, of course).

I'm confident enough to say that we are not one step closer to The Walking Dead.

As I said above, just media hype.

Of course, it isn't something to panic especially if the risk is relatively low in the US.

It was very well contained. There are a number of vaccine candidates now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_vaccine
http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/31/health/guinea-ebola-vaccine/
http://www.wired.com/2015/08/100-percent-effective-means-ebola-vaccine/

If we looked at every outbreak of a new disease like we looked at Ebola, we would be freaking out every second of everyday.

Outbreaks happen, most if not all are contained to a manageable degree.

We have theoretical sciences, in part by help of Bill Gates, that can "simulate" all potential future viruses, and what forms they can take.

As far as Ebola goes, we are lucky that it started somewhere remote, or else we would of had much more to deal with at the time.

Also a random fact about Ebola, you are only contagious if you are experiencing symptoms of Ebola, and it is not necessarily the easiest

disease to pass on a global level, one, it is highly lethal, so the disease doesn't have much time to pass from p2p, and 2, the people who have it

know when they are contagious. If anything, Ebola was never truly that much of a threat to our modern practices, and the whole thing was

blown out of proportion.

People also panicked about the Swine Flu.

Firstly, there's nothing "random" about that fact, it is 100% germaine to the discussion at hand.

Secondly, you're talking about this with the benefit of hindsight. The WHO at one point was actually predicting a pretty bad global epidemic of ebola, because one it gains a foothold it requires rapid mobilisation of resources to halt the spread, which requires authorities to be aware of the new infected area - in many undeveloped countries (those at most risk from ebola) they have both limited resources and a cultural aversion to seeking health care from authorities, instead preferring to hide away and look after their sick friends and family themselves. The other key point you're forgetting is that viruses evolve. All known strains of ebola at the moment require direct physical contact, but if it had evolved to become airborne - and no-one can really say for 100% certain that that cannot happen - it potentially could have spread much more rapidly than it did.

Related to the above, the reason why Swine Flu was considered a threat, is because of previous experience with deadly flu' strains (1918) and the fact that it is transmissible through airborne droplets, as well as having a longish incubation period during which people do not show symptoms but are actively infectious to others.

Swine flu was initially so threatening because of the very high mortality rate; it's quite probable that the virus actually evolved to be less lethal and more infectious, thus making it much less of a concern to the WHO. Of course it's only possible to know these things *after* the fact, so when there is a paucity of information available, it is of course better to act with an abundance of caution than to take what could be very dangerous risks.