Senate So it looks like the Ebola outbreak is getting more serious

The CDC has sent 24 people to west Africa. CDC has been hammered by sequestration, so I'm surprised they sent even that many people.

 

The biggest factor is that they incredibly dumbed down their content when they opened an American channel. Their old 80:20 resource distribution to focus on the Third World was novel and important. However, they seemed to have stepped back from that to one of a half dozen "me too" news/commentary channels on events that are already very well covered, like American politics. It's exasperating.

 

Why the Ebola outbreak has been underestimated

• Many families hide infected loved ones in their homes
• Others believe that care in an isolation ward will lead to infection and certain death
• Many treatment centres and general clinics have closed
• In rural villages, corpses are buried without notifying health officials
• In parts of Liberia, a phenomenon is occurring that has never before been seen in an Ebola outbreak. As soon as a new treatment facility is opened, it is immediately filled with patients, many of whom were not previously identified. This phenomenon strongly suggests the existence of an invisible caseload of patients who are not being detected by the surveillance system.
• “shadow-zones” that cannot be investigated because of community resistance or lack of adequate staff and vehicles.
• In some areas, most notably Monrovia, virtually all health services have shut down.

The article doesn't offer any guesses about how badly the epidemic is being undercounted. Is the real death toll already above 2,000? 3,000?

One of the reasons that the death rate in this epidemic seems so low (53%) relative to other ebola outbreaks may be that the people who are being counted at all are more likely to be the ones getting the very best care.

 

You can switch AJA back to AJE on their website. Makes the coverage online worlds better.

 

As I told wocky (he never listens when he's on one of his tracts), AJA has plenty of non-U.S.-related international coverage-- they use AJ's bureaus, after all-- and they have stories on domestic issues the major outlets largely ignore. Of course it's going to have more U.S. focus than AJE, but criticizing it for that is like criticizing BBC Wales for focusing on that little corner of the island. It's not really dumbed down in an attempt to compete, otherwise they would have changed the Arabic name and logo too. Jesus, and people call me hipster when I say I like Al-Jazeera America much more than the cable channels.

 

well i mean that's a pretty low bar. id cant think of any source id be less interested in relying on for information than the major cable news channels

 

Sure, and it also doesn't mean AJA is a bad source.

 

not saying it is, that just struck me as a really low standard of comparison and i felt like pointing it out. id get my news from the town rag before id get it from cable news channels

 

It's the comparison I made because AJA itself is a cable channel. And, really, I could've chosen a random major newspaper to compare it to and it probably still would be a low bar.

 

no im talking about some village paper that runs stories about ethel moynihan's 102nd birthday party. like, id rather get my news from that than any of the major cable news channels

 

The problem, and look it may have been this way for all time, but the instant gratification era has made it worse, is that you're always getting bias in the stories. You can do more for the agencies who feed news out, like AP or Reuters; or you can go the tried and testing Beeb, or you can go to Fox and be told what to think. Either way, you're getting an incomplete bias coloured by someone else's perception.

In other news, I see the American doctor who survived has credited his survival to a cruel, random, capricious, evil arse named Bod or God or somesuch. It's good that his invisible friend saved him and let thousands of unworthy, punished by Satan blacks die. proof I guess that this Dog fellow was created in man's image?

 

oh yeah, certainly, but bias is completely unavoidable. its a part of the human experience, though i think its also very true to say that the medium (24-hour news cycle that people watch like entertainment while pretending that they're enriching themselves/feeling like responsible adults) makes it worse. the major cable news channels are particularly egregious about bias WHILE pretending that they're not, which makes it worse and frankly insulting to any intelligent person

 

Democratic Republic of Congo

 

edging into central africa now. that's peachy

 

apparently unconnected? May be a different strain entirely.

 

perf

 

Re my earlier post, the Washington Post tried to get a handle on how much WHO believes the number of ebola cases are being underestimated:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...break-is-over-world-health-organization-says/

If WHO believes 20,000 could become infected, that means at least 10,000 deaths. And if, as they suggest in the article, some places like Liberia have maxed out their ability to monitor the disease (or their ability may actually be eroding due to the public health infrastructure collapsing under the strain), and the actual caseload there may be 2-4 times higher than is being reported, that suggests an actual mortality pace of at least 60 people per day, as of the latest report. If that rate remains fairly steady, those 10,000 people could be dead by mid January.

The pace of reported deaths in Liberia alone exploded in mid August, climbing from 6-8 deaths per day to nearly 50 per day. If the infection rate isn't brought under control, then 10,000 deaths could come a lot sooner.

The much lower pace of new infections and death in Guinea and Sierra Leone has been fairly steady for a month, and there's no reason to believe that the disease is in any position at present to overwhelm the governments there.

But in Liberia, the scariness of the disease in a densely populated impoverished urban setting has helped immunize the virus against an effective public health response.

 

Jesus. Still really worried about Lagos. That's the real nightmare scenario.

 

That article offers very little int he way of optimism, Jabba (the virus mutating, 40% of infections being in the last 3 weeks) but the positive development i do note is that GSK are starting trials on a vaccine. It was widely understood or at least believed to be the case that a vaccine was doable and understood to exist in some capacity. It was just not rolled out due to the cost constraints - or, if one is being accurate, it wasn't profitable.

 

Of course they didn't consider it profitable. No Americans had died/became infected up until very recently. /cynical partly sarcastic tone.

 

I'm not sure if pointing out that GlaxoSmithKline is British at this point would only enhance the irony of Americans assuming they're the centre of the world; or merely tickle it.

 

Also, things like coral snake anti-venom, which we have the power to make, saw a stoppage in production because it wasn't profitable, with 100 Americans a year being bitten. Same goes for how the US went a decade without antivenom for the 250 people stung by scorpions each year.

It's always a money calculation. If something doesn't effect enough people, they don't bother because they need to make up the R&D costs.

 

Yeah, what Lowie said.

Like, I don't want to pretend pharmaceutical companies are saints, they're not. But they hate everyone equally. Their hate is colourblind.

 

agreed

Love seeing the BBC resort to clickbait:

Follow these five tips to avoid the deadly Ebola virus!

Allow me to sum up:

1) don't be a healthcare worker in Sierre Leone
2) don't be anybody in Liberia
3) don't eat bushmeat
4) and don't eat any African wild animals, either
5) ideally, be a white upper middle class male living in west suburban Chicago. But that's just good advice in general.

 

So this current outbreak will, most likely, burn itself out. The world is already starting to -slowly - engage the problem, but Ebola is a bigger worry than just what we see. Please put your tinfoil hats on.

In the recent study that discussed this current outbreak's genetic history, we were told the virus has been mutating many times over as it filters through its victims. So far, nothing has changed to make us worried, and I'm convinced that nothing will.

A hallmark of viruses is mutation, and something scary about ebola Reston (which has been discussed) is the probable dual paths to infection: aside from fluid transmission, it was airborne. So you have an airborne, albeit asymptomatic, strain of Ebola that infected a small cluster of people. While it did nothing, the question remains did it spread further to other humans before anyone was the wiser? Has it, over the last several decades been working through more and more, masquerading as a flu bug as it gets more virulent with each mutation? What doctor would check for Ebola when you pop into their office with cold symptoms? Reston presented with cold or flu-like symptoms in the monkeys, and it was the simian hemorrhagic fever that did the worst to them.

We've had certainly difficult winter cold seasons the last few years. It's a bit out there, but I posit it COULD happen that Ebola Reston spread ever outward after that first Virginia "seeding" and has been steadily mutating as it infects more people. Millions of times. Furthermore, the virus is gaining in strength and virulence and hides amidst a crowded low-mortality field of nuisance "bugs." Wild theory? Yes. Plausible? Tell me next time that cough and runny nose just won't go away.