Racing To Contain Ebola 112
An anonymous reader writes "Ebola, one of the most deadly diseases known to humans, started killing people in Guinea a few months ago. There have been Ebola outbreaks in the past, but they were contained. The latest outbreak has now killed over 100 people across three countries. One of the biggest difficulties in containing an outbreak is knowing where the virus originated and how it spread. That problem is being addressed right now by experts and a host of volunteers using Open Street Map. 'Zoom in and you can see road networks and important linkages between towns and countries, where there were none before. Overlay this with victim data, and it can help explain the rapid spread. Click on the colored blobs and you will see sites of confirmed deaths, suspected cases that have been overturned, sites where Ebola testing labs have been setup or where the emergency relief teams are currently located.'"
Damn English (Score:3)
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Re:Damn English (Score:4, Informative)
I wouldn't put it past him.
Is Ebola a "rapid burnout" disease? (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought I had read someplace that severe hemorrhagic fever diseases (and maybe it was Ebola specifically) weren't large-scale pandemic risks because they incapacitated and killed people too quickly, inhibiting their spread. Whereas other diseases like pandemic flu or smallpox were a bigger pandemic risk because the host wasn't knocked down so fast and could be mobile and communicable for longer.
Re:Is Ebola a "rapid burnout" disease? (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the mid 1900s sure, but today even Ebola's average of 13 days between infection and onset of symptoms is plenty for someone to get on a plane with a transfer in JFK International...
Re:Is Ebola a "rapid burnout" disease? (Score:4, Insightful)
A partially immune host, one who's symptoms delay or remain minor, could conceivably have much more time to spread the often fatal disease, but it's not going to "take off" due to poor transmission rates.
Humans have exhibited an ability in past plagues to leave oozing, infected bodies alone... but if something this virulent ever learns to spread like the flu there will be no more overpopulation worries.
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This Ebola strain is not communicable via air, but others are, e.g. Ebola Reston. Luckily, Ebola Reston is not as deadly to humans, but it still dissolves monkeys. We are one mutation away from an air-born deadly strain which can cause a pandemic.
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It will be a fine balancing act to ensure transport routes sea and air are cut off to prevent transmission of Ebola before it reaches out from less populated regions to major cities where direct contact between persons becomes possible, keeping in mind sneezing, transfer of perspiration from person to person in public transport systems and other transitory methods of transfer that can extend physical contact be actual direct physical contact.
So major cities throughout the world are under direct threat an
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Shrug.
We were receiving cargo onto the boat less than 48 hours out of Guyana, less than 2 weeks ago. Since then 1/4 of the crew will have crew-changed to (mostly) Louisiana, another 1/4 to Europe, another 1/4 to various places in Africa (including Guyana and Liberia), and half of the Philippine labourers will be lining up for their crew change.
Stabl
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Sorry, "Guinea"
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... for about 3 generations.
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Depending on the strain, an ebola infection is lethal upon c
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Add on your 69 years for 3 generations and we'll be back to a population situation of 1933 + 69 = 2002. In short, we'd be back to the
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one of the interesting things about this outbreak is that it is close to the Tai forest in Cote d'Ivoire, so we can guess where it came from.
Except that it turns out not to be that strain, it's similar to the strains found in the RDC, 2500 kilometers away.
How does a disease move 2500 kilometers in less than 14 days?
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My guess would be a bird, or that it was carried by an animal or person that for whatever reason wasn't affected.
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The only way you could get from the RDC to Guinea in less that 14 days is by plane. There are no usable roads for much of the distance. (It can take more that 14 days to get from the interior of the RDC to the capital, never mind getting from there to Guinea).
(Maybe by boat, but I doubt it).
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So bird is a distinct possibility then, as is concurrent infections from pre-existing sources.
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A bird is extremely improbable - Ebola is a mammalian disease.
As I've said before, the pre-existing disease in the close geographical area (near to where my wife's family live :-)) is a different strain.
It seems to me that this virus is airborne (with a little help from big-brained primates).
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A bird is extremely improbable
Because it's not like a pathogen has ever learned to hop from one species of host to another leaving utter devastation in its wake.
Swing Flu [wikipedia.org]
Bird Flu [wikipedia.org]
Goat Flu [youtube.com]
(funny I meant the last one as a joke but searching for the family guy video, it appears goat flu is real [google.com])
Anyone know someone who'll make book on what the next animal flu will be? My money is on a karma induced pangolin flu wiping out poachers...
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Let me know when you find a non-mamalian rabies virus.
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Good thing there's no such things as mammals that fly OH WAIT
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2500 km?
Why would bats migrate from the RDC to Guinea?
Which animal species are you going to suggest next? Fish? Insects?
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Do I LOOK like an expert in bat psychology to you? All things being equal the simplest explanation is most likely to be correct. Either there was a pocket of the disease in the other location already or it was somehow carried there. Maybe it was an animal, maybe a person in the incubation period, we don't know and probably never will.
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Errr, because it was caught in a cargo shipping container?
(It might be an idea to read my previous - last 15 minutes - posts in this thread.)
Do I sound unconcerned? Of course I am. It's the same risks that I am exposed to in searching for oil to fuel your lifestyle.
Do you sound concerned? [I shrug] It's the same risks (etc) but they strike at your home. [Shrug.]
Welcome to the globailsed economy, where any organism anywhere in the world, be they plut
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How does a disease move 2500 kilometers in less than 14 days?
Perhaps some form of mechanical horse or - and I'm being crazy here - some form of mechanical bird!
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That's the point - there is a natural reservoir, it's the Tai forest in the Ivory Coast.
But the strain in Guinea turns out to be from the RDC.
So it seems highly probable that Ebola has already taken it's first trip on a plane.
Have an appropriate amount of fun.
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How would that explain the 1979 outbreak of Ebola in N.Kenya/ S.Sudan in 1979?
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I didn't say that Tai was the only reservoir, it's just the obvious one for an outbreak in the Guinea - Sierra Leone - Liberia area.
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I suspect it involves coconuts and swallows.
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Only time my flue was ever spread quickly was when the hurricane pushed my chimney over.
Or did you mean "flu"?
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That is true.
However, a complication is that people do move about in the short time before they become incapacitated.
Plus, we really don't understand well how it is transmitted and where the natural reservoirs exist so it's hard to find the source and eradicate it.
just escape to Madagascar (Score:4, Funny)
just escape to Madagascar, the virus won't probably reach you there.
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Fuck you. The population of Conacry is between 1.5 and 2 million.
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Have you even bothered to find out _how_ it spreads? It is not airborne. The thing that is wrong here is that you are clueless and vicious.
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Well, for starters, the world's nuclear arsenal isn't capable of sterilizing the entire African rainforest system, or even killing all the people living there. Therefore, all you'd get is the fun task of enforcing a guarantine in a radiactive area with devastated physical and social infrastructure.
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If that shit gets loose ... you have already lost the Conacry choice. You'd probably be safer by turning every port of entry into the Continental US into radioactive dust, and a hundred kilometres around.
Let the Hawaiians die - they've got native fruit bats and must be considered suspect.
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Paranoid bullshit. Maybe see a shrink before you go on a killing-spree?
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Well, clearly you are a psychopath. And likely a severe danger to everybody around you. Or maybe you are just evil and thrive on death?
Animal carriers (Score:2)
It seems this one is being spread by birds, but frankly doesn't it seem like other diseases are killing way more than this instance of ebola?
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The common flu is killing several orders of magnitude more each year. The problem with Ebola is that once it reaches a certain level, society collapses. Then then you need to contain what is left by force, just to prevent panic. And _that_ is what will kill a lot more people that the disease itself ever could.
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I would call it mutual annihilation through war, not self annihilation through war. Unless it is the most inept war ever.
Better to let it burn itself out (Score:1)
At worst a few thousand people die. That's fewer than die in the Arab world because they keep murdering health workers, because THAT's disrespectful of Allah or some such shit.
Don't forget to contain other places (Score:2)
I'm currently in Columbus, OH - currently undergoing a mumps problem, with almost 200 cases reported. The number is still growing. This is a dumb problem to have to worry about. Get your vaccinations.
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That said, because I'll be back to work in Africa (to fuel your lifestyle) shortly, I'll be getting a booster on my typhoid jab tomorrow. Because ... that disease didn't stop killing people with Mozart.
Re:Is this a crowd-sourcing thing? (Score:4, Informative)
(Full disclosure, I am one of the lead coordinators of the mapping effort discussed in the article and in my post below.)
Yes, the OpenStreetMap project is where the mapping is being done. The map linked in the article shows outbreak information overlaid on top of the OSM database of roads and buildings. It is this underlying map data that the croudsourcing is about.
If you go to this site [hotosm.org] you can create an OSM account and then start edititng the map immediately (think wikipedia, but for maps). You normally would edit by just going to the main OSM page and then editing the map there, the site I linked is the HOT task manager. We create areas on the task manager that need mapping done, the area is then broken up into a grid of small square tiles, and then people 'lock' a tile to work on, map all the roads and/or buildings in that tile, and finally mark the tile complete after the map has been updated. This tool was used to map all the roads and buildings in 3 large cities (Gueckedou, Macenta, and Kissidougou), where the outbreak originally started; all three of these towns were mapped completely, down to the last building, within 24 hours of HOT getting satellite imagery for them.
Right now the focus is to find and map all the small residential areas outside of these main cities, and to draw in the main connecting roads to each village. This helps the medical teams track the spread of the disease from village to village, as well as making it easier for them to travel around to do their own work. I really encourage slashdotters to help out on these kinds of projects. The mapping tools are easy to use (the in browser iD editor especially), but the technical knowledge of the slashdot crowd makes it easy for the average ./er to learn more advanced tools like JOSM and also to help with analysis and writing code to do cool stuff with the map data. You can really help out this (and a lot of other humanitarian efforts) by doing a bit of mapping anywhere in these areas, every little bit of extra data helps.
-AndrewBuck
No quarintine = no containment (Score:3)
Let's see what we are working with:
(1) 90% mortality rate,
(2) No known vaccine,
(3) Spreads by bodily fluids,
(4) Area with poor hygiene,
(5) All experts recommend letting the virus "burn itself out."
Objectively, is there really anything to do other than to strictly and conservatively quarantine every country (and sub-quarantine cities as necessary) with a positive case?
We should not even be sending in aid workers, who could potentially be exposed. Medicine and water can be airdropped.
That's the short term solution. In the long term, you need to educate the population, improve hygiene and infrastructure, and figure out where the infection is coming from. In general, the African governments have not really been interested in doing any of the above.
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We need the MDT-MRPQ tool that we sent back to that field base for service last month, and we'll need them at the end of next month.
Are you going to pay the consequential costs of your "advice"?
(Bear in mind - the lead time to manufacture an MDT-MRPQ tool is around 8 months. Which is why we rent them from Franco-American corporations i
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That's where the ancestors of most of our athletes and 2.3% of our Presidents hail from.
Re:Africa, eh? (Score:4, Informative)
That's where the ancestors of everyone hail from.
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For most of the rest of the world, "America" refers to the pair of continents nestled between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Technically everyone on those continents is American, and people with a better handle on geography and a more... robust world perspective recognize the need to specify. For better or worse, our culture has appropriated the term American to mean those within the U.S., but that's not really accurate. I mean, it's literally inaccurate; it's like saying Florida when someone asks you
Arfica, eh? (Score:2, Offtopic)
Can we just be NANCs, rhymes with yanks,
and acronym's for North American Non-Canadian?
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USians is just not catching on.
Can we just be NANCs, rhymes with yanks,
and acronym's for North American Non-Canadian?
It would need to be NANCOM for North American Non-Canadian Or Mexican. Of course, for Mexican citizens living in the USA it would have to be NANCCRM for North American Non-Canadian Currently Relocated Mexican...
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it's like saying Florida when someone asks you what city you're from.
Yet, you argue that someone from Brazil should be called an American because the continent they come from is called South America. I'd buy that if they changed the country's name to "The Brazilian States of America".
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For most of the rest of the world, "America" refers to the pair of continents nestled between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
In Chinese, the word used for North/South America means the United States when used in isolation. This is also true in most other languages I am familiar with. The only exception I know of is Spanish. Spanish speakers are not "most of the rest of the world", although they are most of America (in the Spanish sense).
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What country uses the expression "US American"?
The rest of the American ones. You know... Canada, Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guyana, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Chili, Argentina, Uruguay, The Falklands, The Sandwich Islands... A lot of the world substitutes "Fucking" for "US" to separate us from the rest of the Americans.
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Bullshit, and you'd know it was bullshit if you'd ever been to any of those countries. They refer to themselves by the name of their Nation, not the continent it's located on, just like pretty much everyone else on the planet does.
Actually, my personal favorite is Mexico where the word for norther visitor and the word for diarrhea is the same. Turista. And I guess you are right, as those European's don't seem to be on the same planet most of the time...
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I predict a low posts count.
The most terrifying book I have ever read is "The Hot Zone" by Richard Preston. http://www.amazon.com/Hot-Zone... [amazon.com] If this gets out and goes global, it is THE END of civilization as we know it. I suspect a few more people might be following this than normal.
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Well dang, best post I seen for a while and I just gone and used up my mod points, M-O-O-N, that spells mod points.
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I predict a low posts count.
The most terrifying book I have ever read is "The Hot Zone" by Richard Preston. http://www.amazon.com/Hot-Zone... [amazon.com] If this gets out and goes global, it is THE END of civilization as we know it. I suspect a few more people might be following this than normal.
No ebola, while a very nasty and unpleasant disease isn't a "global killer" for the same reason it is so feared: it kills most* of it's victims and that in a relatively short time. That makes fast spreading of it very unlikely unlike other diseases like variants on the flu. That also makes it possible to contain outbreaks even on a larger scale: at worst a pure isolation of the affected people for some weeks is enough.
(* depending on strain, up to IIRC 90% lethality)
Re:Africa, eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
I predict a low posts count.
The most terrifying book I have ever read is "The Hot Zone" by Richard Preston. http://www.amazon.com/Hot-Zone... [amazon.com] If this gets out and goes global, it is THE END of civilization as we know it. I suspect a few more people might be following this than normal.
No ebola, while a very nasty and unpleasant disease isn't a "global killer" for the same reason it is so feared: it kills most* of it's victims and that in a relatively short time. That makes fast spreading of it very unlikely unlike other diseases like variants on the flu. That also makes it possible to contain outbreaks even on a larger scale: at worst a pure isolation of the affected people for some weeks is enough.
(* depending on strain, up to IIRC 90% lethality)
In todays world I can contact a lot of people in two weeks... Even without flying every day. One Liberian ambassadorial aid could really mess some stuff up.
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Yes but unless an air-borne variant strain that can infect humans exists the spread is still not as problematic than some super-flu. How many persons will be in contact with bodily fluids of your aid?
And even if an air-borne variant exists the short incubation period means it will be easier to detect and contain. The misdiagnosis of the flu will be much higher too loading the "care" system more and exposing people having some allergic symptoms or the common cold to the flu virus. When it comes to a disease
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Unless a Reston style variant decides to transfer to humans. Then we're pretty fucked.
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Even then only for usages of the word "fucked" that include a mere 75% mortality.
We're humans ; we'd make that up in a couple of generations. 40 years. No, 50 years. No, maybe as little as 60 years.
Actually, stepping back the human population by (say) 75% might be one of the best moves a "Mad Scientist" (or "Rogue Government") could make for the species. Might be death for you, or for me (I was handling equipment 2 days
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Prediction fulfilled - even including this reply to a (spit) AC.
And I work in the area. But I've been watching it for a couple of months now.
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Dude, that's just racist, monkeys need love too...
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Good luck with the latter. Unless you live in a bat- (and mosquito-) free country. Which is pretty unlikely.
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Somebody is a psychopath here.