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Medicine

CDC: Ebola Cases Could Reach 1.4 Million In 4 Months 280

mdsolar sends this report from the NY Times: Yet another set of ominous projections about the Ebola epidemic in West Africa was released Tuesday, in a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that gave worst- and best-case estimates for Liberia and Sierra Leone based on computer modeling. In the worst-case scenario, Liberia and Sierra Leone could have 21,000 cases of Ebola by Sept. 30 and 1.4 million cases by Jan. 20 if the disease keeps spreading without effective methods to contain it. These figures take into account the fact that many cases go undetected, and estimate that there are actually 2.5 times as many as reported. ... In the best-case model — which assumes that the dead are buried safely and that 70 percent of patients are treated in settings that reduce the risk of transmission — the epidemic in both countries would be 'almost ended' by Jan. 20, the report said.
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CDC: Ebola Cases Could Reach 1.4 Million In 4 Months

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  • Some Hollywood-style end of world scenario right here.

    • by sycodon ( 149926 )

      Send in Brad Pitt!

    • Yep. Of course the dead aren't being buried safely. Decades of experience watching movies tells me that the dead are rising to feed on the living.
      • Sometimes I hear people talk about how they would survive the Zombie Apocalyspe; but if one removes Zombie, and Inserts Ebola; people get quiet.
        • Re:Black pest 2.0 (Score:4, Insightful)

          by swb ( 14022 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @04:25PM (#47978257)

          I think there's some disturbing parallels to the zombie/ebola outbreak scenario.

          The movie "Contagion", while kind of lame, sort of came close to delivering it. 28 Days Later wasn't bad, either, but a little too zombie-like to be "realistic."

          It's not hard to imagine a real pandemic where there's a disease with a very high mortality rate, a long incubation period before debilitating symptoms occur but a very short period before obvious but benign symptoms occur that make the infected easy to identify.

          I could see a situation like that being a lot like a zombie outbreak -- the infected know they are infected and likely to die but have several weeks without symptoms that make them unable to cause havoc. At some point those infected would probably start to react/strike back at the uninfected as the uninfected pulled back and stopped wanting to have anything to do with them.

          • I think there's some disturbing parallels to the zombie/ebola outbreak scenario.

            A lot of people laughed when the CDC put out their "Zombie Survival Guide", but this is why it wasn't just some big joke. The CDC published what is really just a guide for handling an outbreak of a major contagious disease, like Ebola, and just called the disease "Zombie" for fun.

  • eyebrows raised. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Noah Haders ( 3621429 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @02:22PM (#47976915)

    In the worst-case scenario, Liberia and Sierra Leone could have 21,000 cases of Ebola by Sept. 30 and 1.4 million cases by Jan. 20

    ok, so considering that Sep 30 is one week away, I think it's unlikely that the disease will spread four-fold in that tiem.

  • Because that just means the virus has a longer horizon to hop somewhere else.. like Mumbai.
  • by smooth wombat ( 796938 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @02:32PM (#47977049) Journal
    Considering there was the recent killings of doctors [latimes.com] who were trying to educate the unwashed masses on how to prevent or mitigate the spread of Ebola, along with the other attacks [nytimes.com] and general mistrust of health workers [cbsnews.com], letting the disease spread might not be a bad option.

    Those who don't want to listen to experts die off, those who are too panicked to touch the dead bodies live, and things work themselves out.

    Cruel? Maybe. But when you're already putting your life on the line trying to help people and those people attack and kill you, sometimes you have to make the tough decision to let nature take its course.
    • At lot of the mistrust of outside people in those regions is very, very well deserved. Even when it's their own "government".

      And your sentiment isn't really a new idea it's pretty much how the world has treated most of Africa for a really long time, the same Africa most of the world has exploited for long periods at one time or another.

      • Re:Too be fair... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by smooth wombat ( 796938 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @02:58PM (#47977337) Journal

        Well then, I guess the decision to be uneducated and ignorant will serve them well when their carcasses are being zipped up in a double-lined black bag and tossed into a common grave.

        Yes, many, many injustices have been perpetrated against the African continent and its peoples, but when your people are dying and people are coming in, risking their own lives to try and help you, and your response is to attack and kill them, trying to use the injustices of the past to justify the mass deaths of the present won't win you any friends, will it?

        • I it all depends on the context, really. Was it a large majority of the populace that acted or felt that way or was it a bunch of local thugs? Did they announce their intent beforehand or just show up unannounced so the people had no idea what the intent was?

          I guess my point is that I'm not going to write off whole populations of people because the actions of a few. There are and always will be risks in dealing in tribal areas that have been used and abuse for centuries. Maybe better organization and se

        • when your people are dying and people are coming in, risking their own lives to try and help you, and your response is to attack and kill them, trying to use the injustices of the past to justify the mass deaths of the present won't win you any friends

          This isn't about justifying deaths or winning friends. This is about if you want to try to help people, you have to craft your message in a way that they are ready to receive.

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @03:40PM (#47977841)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by Alomex ( 148003 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @02:34PM (#47977079) Homepage

    1.2 million? I call BS. When things start to look really bad people will voluntarily stay at home, dramatically reducing transmission. And this is before we consider government action. This already happened during the swine flu scare in Mexico where everyone stayed home for a week and then on top of that the government ordered restaurants, schools and other businesses closed.

    • Re:BS (Score:4, Informative)

      by RealGene ( 1025017 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @02:42PM (#47977175)
      This isn't Mexico.
      Ebola is not spreading from contact in restaurants, schools, or businesses. It is precisely from staying home (which is a sentence of death by starvation in the countryside), in contact with an infected family member, and/or handling the infected corpse without a bunny suit, gloves, and a face shield, none of which are in stock at the (non-existent) local CVS / Home Depot / Target, that the pandemic is spreading.
      • by Alomex ( 148003 )

        ...and you think people are going to be handling corpses once the dead toll exceeds the tens of thousands?

        • Re:BS (Score:5, Informative)

          by idontgno ( 624372 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @03:23PM (#47977637) Journal

          Probably. Funerary practices in that part of the world are very home-centered, generally administered by the grieving family. That's a major current transmission route, and its emotional and traditional base gives it resistance to quarantine pressures. No one is just going to pile corpses outside waiting for the body cart, if they've spent weeks locked away caring for their dying loved one.

          Dealing with the dead is a big part of epidemic management, and "doing it right" (to minimize infectiousness) is expensive, as well as insensitive to the survivors. So yeah, the dead will continue to infect the living, until it burns itself out, or until someone imposes draconian responses.

    • Re:BS (Score:4, Informative)

      by BarbaraHudson ( 3785311 ) <barbara DOT jane ... T icloud DOT com> on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @03:10PM (#47977485) Journal

      1.2 million? I call BS. When things start to look really bad people will voluntarily stay at home, dramatically reducing transmission. And this is before we consider government action. This already happened during the swine flu scare in Mexico where everyone stayed home for a week and then on top of that the government ordered restaurants, schools and other businesses closed.

      Despite the drug wars, Mexico at least has a functioning government. Sierra Leone and Liberia? They're at the bottom of the barrel. Their Human Development Index sits at 175st and 183rd> on the planet respectively. In terms of per capita income, they rank [wikipedia.org]180th and 181st [wikipedia.org].

      Sierra Leone has already gone through the process of being a failed nation-state, and will be right back there if ebola continues to spread. Liberia has already admitted they could just cease to exist.

      Besides, the H1N1 virus had a death rate of just 0.02 percent not the eye-popping 50% to 90% of ebola.

      • by Alomex ( 148003 )

        A high mortality rate works against the spread of the disease. Most lethal diseases in terms of epidemics have a long incubation period and a mortality rate below 30%.

        • With a disease with a high infection rate, even if more than half die within a month, you still have this huge pool of newly infected people to draw from. Thus, you can have both an increase in the number of carriers and an increase in the number of dead month-over-month, until you simply run out of people.

          You are also continually playing "catch-up", as both the number of cases and the number of deaths continues to ramp up faster than your response.

          Now throw in mistrust of western medicine, lack of treat

  • by CanHasDIY ( 1672858 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @02:35PM (#47977095) Homepage Journal

    From my experience, CDC estimates should be taken with a grain of salt, as they often seem dubious at best.

    Then again, I suppose that should apply to any estimate, especially when the estimator is using ceteris paribus in order to reach a certain conclusion...

    • I take them with a whole salt shaker. An estimate is just an estimate and when it comes to human behavior and viral behavior, both of which tend to be very unpredictable, it's nigh impossible to provide any sort of meaningful prediction. Bottom line: The sky is falling, or it's not, nobody is really quite sure. ...Except the PTSD guy that broke into the white house the other day, he was pretty sure of himself.
      • The CDC lost a lot of street cred with me once I found out how their SAMMEC algorithm determines "smoking-related deaths:" basically, if a person dies, and their medical history shows that they smoked at any point during life, the system calls it a "smoking death." Doesn't matter that the person was morbidly obese and died of a heart attack, he smoked when he was 18.

        • by LF11 ( 18760 )
          Do you have a source for this? Honest question, as my Google-fu is coming up blank apart from a FreeRepublic source.
        • Yeah but how do you separate smoking deaths from non-smoking deaths?

          "Smoker diseases" like lung cancer afflict non smokers as well. For instance, 10-15% of lung cancers come from non-smokers:
          http://lungcancer.about.com/od... [about.com]

          When you consider cancer is often caused by mutations, and smoking encourages gene mutations, this makes sense.

          So really, smoking makes it more likely to die early, not that you are shooting yourself with a gun.

          Thus the reason why you might assume anyone who actively has smoked above a

    • by taustin ( 171655 )

      From my experience, CDC estimates should be taken with a grain of salt, as they often seem dubious at best.

      They're not the least bit dubious, or hard to understand. CDC estimates, like all their actions, are designed o get them more tax dollars to play with. They're reasonably good at it, and never ones to miss an opportunity to profit from public hysteria.

      More people die in Africa every month from dysentery than have died from ebola ever. But there's no public hysteria, and thus no tax dollars, in that.

  • by BarbaraHudson ( 3785311 ) <barbara DOT jane ... T icloud DOT com> on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @02:38PM (#47977123) Journal

    Assuming that the dead are buried safely just isn't going to happen. When you have that many people dying, nobody's going to be in a rush to join them by burying them. "Let someone else do it." And eventually, there just won't be enough people to bury all the dead even if they were willing. They'd be spending way too much time meeting their own basic survival needs in countries that are falling apart.

    Nobody's going to be running to the local clinic for examination when they know that they can't even be fed there if it's confirmed they have the disease - and that's already happening [sky.com].

    The patient escaped from Monrovia's Elwa hospital, which last month was so crowded with cases of the deadly disease that it had to turn people away.

    One woman at the scene said: "The patients are hungry, they are starving. No food, no water.

    More and more, it appears the "best-case" scenario is that the disease burns itself out while being contained to only a few countries. And please keep in mind, even the UN agrees that we're going to see more of this once more diseases gain antibiotic resistance.

    • I guess we're somewhat fortunate that this virus doesn't stay viable long outside of a host.

    • by LF11 ( 18760 )
      When the bodies rot in the streets, dogs eat them. Dogs are asymptomatic carriers. Think about that.
  • by mythosaz ( 572040 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @02:48PM (#47977231)

    From The Onion, America's Finest News Source:
    http://www.theonion.com/articl... [theonion.com]

    CONAKRY, GUINEA—With the death toll in West Africa continuing to rise amid a new outbreak of the Ebola virus, leading medical experts announced Wednesday that a vaccine for the deadly disease is still at least 50 white people from being developed. “While all measures are being taken to contain the spread of the contagion, an effective, safe, and reliable Ebola inoculation unfortunately remains roughly 50 to 60 white people away, if not more,” said Tulane University pathologist Gregory Wensmann, adding that while progress has been made over the course of the last two or three white people, a potential Ebola vaccination is still many more white people off. “We are confident, however, that with each passing white person, we’re moving closer to an eventual antigenic that will prevent and possibly even eradicate the disease.” Wensmann said he remained optimistic that the vaccine would not take considerably longer than his prediction, as waiting more than 50 white people for an effective preventative measure was something the world would simply not allow.

    • Replace "white people" with active and retired military servicemen and women, and it's pretty much reality.

      They do a lot of infectious disease combat testing on our troops. It probably started out of necessity, and that's still the excuse, but it evolved into just treating our soldiers as an easy supply of ideal human test subjects. Makes you wonder if those troops they're sending over were exactly for this purpose.

  • Ebola is young in humans. There is no immunity to it like we have some immunity to Flu and various other diseases.
    It being young is scary in other ways.
    Before now, the virus had about 500 hosts in which to evolve a more spreadable version, and did not.

    Even if it mutates to a version that 'only' kills 10% of the population, the truly scary thing is not global Ebola.
    In western countries, Ebola in its current form would be a few cases per 'patient zero' coming from outside.

    The scary thing is if it evolves, and

  • The New York Times Opines [nytimes.com]:

    The ideal of contamination has few exponents more eloquent than Salman Rushdie, who has insisted that the novel that occasioned his fatwa "celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotch-potch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world." No doubt there

  • This will be the next global pandemic that will devastate the human population. Just like Swine flu. Just like Avian flu. Frankly, I've got less fear from these horror stories as time goes by.

    And before someone points it out, yes, I'm aware the mortality rate from Ebola isn't comparable to the flu, but the overblown hype about it stands.

  • If we started air-dropping Ebola victims over Chinese cities.

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