An AI Hunts the Wild Animals Carrying Ebola 45
the_newsbeagle writes: Outbreaks of infectious diseases like Ebola follow a depressing pattern: People start to get sick, public health authorities get wind of the situation, and an all-out scramble begins to determine where the disease started and how it's spreading. Barbara Han, a code-writing ecologist, hopes her algorithms will put an end to that reactive model. She wants to predict outbreaks and enable authorities to prevent the next pandemic. Han takes a big-data approach, using a machine-learning AI to identify the wild animal species that carry zoonotic diseases and transmit them to humans.
Vaporware (Score:1)
If we can predict which species may carry infections capable of jumping to humans, we can monitor the potential hot spots where people interact with these creatures. One day, I hope that biologists will forecast disease outbreaks in the same way meteorologists forecast the weather.
That's a noble goal. But there was nothing in the article indicating it actually works.
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
FTFA:
Re:Vaporware (Score:4, Informative)
Well, did you keep scrolling?
Sure sounds to me that, for the North American populations they tested this one they actually did demonstrate it actually works.
I'm sure it's not perfect or complete, but it sure sounds like it actually created some testable results.
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Sure sounds to me that, for the North American populations they tested this one they actually did demonstrate it actually works.
Not really. While they were crunching numbers, other scientists not connected in any way with this project identified a couple of rodents that are disease vectors. It turned out that those two rodents were in her "maybe a vector" bucket. All that demonstrates is that those two are not false positives.
Ebola gets deadlier (Score:1)
A new strain of ebola causes animal to start bleeding as if they'd been shot...
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(For the humor impaired, the "hunt" is identifying species likely to harbor ebola based on matching various traits such as number of litters per year).
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If you confuse a serious response as an explanation of a joke, then you're a shitty moron.
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Isn't it just a matter of time? Pandemics have swept through humanity fairly regularly. Modern countries seem to have escaped them for the most part recently, partly because they've got stuff like fresh water and septic systems, partly because medical science inoculates against some of them, and partly because self-awareness has enabled us to minimize others (AIDS).
But it seems like eventually something will come along that none of those things does much for, at least in the short term.
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Sometimes I think we are like the fire-suppressed forests. We have been putting out fires for a hundred years, letting the understory build up until finally a fire feeds on this accumulated fuel and rages unstoppable. As disease suppression allows the human understory to build relentlessly, one day a disease will come along that rages through the population.
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The min-use of antibiotics and the decreasing vaccination rate is going to set the stage for a pretty bad epidemic.
It's only a matter of time.
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Yes, I guess I am.
easy to prevent (Score:2)
She wants to predict outbreaks and enable authorities to prevent the next pandemic.
it's easy to prevent, you just need good sanitation laws. the problem we face is corrupt governments who don't give a flying fuck about their people. there is a reason that outbreaks start in poor areas with bad/no sanitation practices.
Re:easy to prevent (Score:5, Insightful)
Ebola gets a lot of attention because it's high-mortality, spreads fast in the right conditions, and is a wonderfully messy way to die - and that means lots of newspaper sales and TV ratings.
It's the influenzas you have to look out for. People don't pay attention any more after the bird flu and swine flu fizzled out without producing the pandemic everyone was fearing - and perhaps the next one will do likewise. Eventually, though, we'll get another really nasty strain and it'll be 1918 all over again. Fifty million dead last time - people forgot quickly.
Ask most people today about the 1918 pandemic and most wouldn't know about it - and of those that do know, half of it only know it from a passing mention in Twilight.
How Ebola spreads .. (Score:3)
I though Ebola spread because of the traditional burial practices of the indigenous peoples. Namely some traditional healer traveling from the next village over, performing a 'purification' ritual, consisting of a crude form of embalming and 'sitting in' with the deceased. The healer goes back to her home village and dies from Ebola. People from miles around attend the funeral and go back home and spread Ebola. Over three hundred cases from the one funeral ref [who.int].
"Are you carrying Ebola?" (Score:2)