Laurie Garrett: Opinion. You Are Not Nearly Scared Enough about Ebola

[Andre DuMouchel]

Re: Laurie Garrett: Opinion. You Are Not Nearly Scared Enough about Ebola

Worst Case:

21 days of travel, followed by five days of flu symptoms, followed by accidental death (car accident for example) Now patient 2 through what ever number you would care to project, followed by two more weeks of incubation (and Travel) Followed by even a few days of flu symptoms before any readily identifiable typical symptoms.

You might then expect people to look for patient one, cremated or buried and potentially very hard to identify.

Clusters will then pop up, but getting ahead of them at that point might well require Draconian measures.

Up to 21 days of incubation and up to 5 days of shedding virus before typical readily identifiable symptoms creates a potential to be quite concerned about.

Perhaps that is the concern evinced by Laura Garrett.

 

[Vibrant62]

Re: Laurie Garrett: Opinion. You Are Not Nearly Scared Enough about Ebola

When I talked about 'eradication' in my post above, I meant eradication of ebola virus from the human infected pool arising from this outbreak. Eradicating the overall threat including its natural reservoirs is a problem that cannot be addressed for now, as we dont even know (for sure) where the natural reservoirs lie, but we dont want humans to become a natural reservoir for the disease itself.

If we do nothing, ebola will continue to circulate in humans indefinitely, or until the entire population within the region has been exposed and either died or developed immunity - but in such circumstances, populations will flee the area to adjacent countries taking the virus with them. Except for the roads, borders are simply lines on a map... it would not be hard to do.

 

[GardenSpider]

Re: Laurie Garrett: Opinion. You Are Not Nearly Scared Enough about Ebola

When I talked about 'eradication' in my post above, I meant eradication of ebola virus from the human infected pool arising from this outbreak. Eradicating the overall threat including its natural reservoirs is a problem that cannot be addressed for now, as we dont even know (for sure) where the natural reservoirs lie, but we dont want humans to become a natural reservoir for the disease itself.

If we do nothing, ebola will continue to circulate in humans indefinitely, or until the entire population within the region has been exposed and either died or developed immunity - but in such circumstances, populations will flee the area to adjacent countries taking the virus with them. Except for the roads, borders are simply lines on a map... it would not be hard to do.

Well said!