

What We’re Afraid to Say About Ebola - nostromo
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/opinion/what-were-afraid-to-say-about-ebola.html

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danieltillett
It seems everyone here is afraid to say anything too.

This is one of the few NYT articles where the comments actually add to the
discussion rather than become a partisan shouting match.

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chakalakasp
It is perhaps not relevant to this community. Yet. Give it a couple months.

Though I can't excuse the general public. It is astounding to me just how very
little most people in the world care about Africa.

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danieltillett
There is usually a pretty good response to important science stories here so I
am not sure why the lack of interest.

There are four really worrying aspects to this outbreak:

1\. It is showing no sign of burning itself out unlike the other 18 outbreaks
we know of. Every single person that it passes through increases the
probability of it becoming fully adapted to humans. We really have no idea of
the case rate, but it is at least a 1000 per week - that is a lot of rolls of
the dice.

2\. It is occurring in west Africa where implementing any containment is near
impossible. An aspect of this that has not received much attention is the
genetic diversity of the human immune system in west Africa population is very
high. If the virus does breakout then we can’t rely on it having adapted to
limited HLA subset - basically if the virus is able to spread in west Africa
then it can spread in any human population (a kind of reverse new world
problem).

3\. A very high percentage of the medical staff dealing with this are getting
infected despite taking extraordinary effort to avoid person-to-person
contact. How are they getting infected if not by airborne transmission? This
suggest that ebola is already airborne, just not highly efficient yet. Every
person infected increases the chance that airborne transmission will become
efficient.

4\. We are doing almost nothing to prepare.

