Grim Ebola Prediction: Outbreak Is Unstoppable for Now, MD Says

a reply to: ArchAngel_X

...The main reasons ebola is spreading through the rural areas of Africa....

Erm. It's spreading in cities and international travel hubs, NOT rural areas. The main reason it's spreading is the lack of health infrastructure (doctors, nurses, hospitals, clinics and like that).

originally posted by: jadedANDcynical
a reply to: soficrow

Do you see all stops being pulled out?

I don't.

I see denial and foot dragging and more stuff like this:

This comes even as a Liberian student was hospitalized and quarantined in Nakuru with Ebola-like symptoms.

Joshua Saka, who was referred to Rift Valley General Hospital from Valley Hospital, sneaked into the country three days ago via Burundi.

Joshua, who is a pupil of Greensteds International School, and his mother had tried to enter Kenya through JKIA from Liberia nine days ago but were denied entry before they flew to Burundi and managed to fly into Kenya on Monday.

Both Jushua and the school nurse who attended to him first have been quarantined and are showing Ebola signs

source

Yes it can be stopped but it doesn't look like they're getting the help they need to stop it.

Too true. Time to exert public pressure? ...What will make everyone get on it, and behind the WHO (seeing as no one else wanted to play chief poo-bah coordinator)?



PS. S& ....Meant to comment on this before don't know how I skipped it. V. groggy day. ....???

originally posted by: soficrow
a reply to: ArchAngel_X

...The main reasons ebola is spreading through the rural areas of Africa....

Erm. It's spreading in cities and international travel hubs, NOT rural areas. The main reason it's spreading is the lack of health infrastructure (doctors, nurses, hospitals, clinics and like that).

This annoys me people seem to be using previous outbreaks as a model for now
Including the 99.99% of doctors who have never seen ebola let alone treated it and are just repeating text books
agreeing with you if anyone is in doubt

I figured that article would vanish. So I took a screen shot when I saw it. I couldn't help but notice the "click on me" diversion "RELATED:...Ice Bucket Challenge".... don't worry, no one will notice if this hits, it's not like the common people even know their neighbors anymore. How long would it take to notice they aren't even alive? It's like the article about the lady that died and had all auto pay bills that kept getting paid until her account ran out of money.

a reply to: joho99

Repetition is key. From new_here:

....hope is something worth hanging on to. We mustn't stick our heads in the sand, but drowning in despair is equally counterproductive. Staying abreast of the situation, informing the clueless, and putting pressure on those in power seems logical and productive.

eta PS. Got that you agreed, but thanks for clarifying/confirming.

a reply to: soficrow
the agreeing was not aimed at you but anyone else who read it

a reply to: jhn7537

looks like your moderator this site, i am totally new to this site,
i am not able to create thread, whenever i click "new Thread" blank page is coming like this
Image

a reply to: Ujwaleshwar123456789

Here is what you need, just click below. And welcome
www.abovetopsecret.com...

I would really love to see the science and math behind these percentages and statistics.

How are they arriving at their conclusion?

a reply to: soficrow

I am a he, btw.

Yes, I know quarantine is counterproductive and favor self isolation.

Looking at the range of that bat doesn't give me much hope that won't see another outbreak even when (I truly hope) we get this one under control.

All I can hope for is that enough people wake up to the danger this poses soon enough to wake enough other peiole up who then need to start making the kind of noise that is impossible to ignore, then we might see substantive progress by our so-called leaders.

Which is why I've latched on to this subject like a pit bull.

originally posted by: gatorboi117
I would really love to see the science and math behind these percentages and statistics.

How are they arriving at their conclusion?

The study:

Method: We use the Global Epidemic and Mobility Model to generate stochastic, individual based simulations of epidemic spread worldwide, yielding, among other measures, the incidence and seeding events at a daily resolution for 3,362 subpopulations in 220 countries. The mobility model integrates daily airline passenger traffic worldwide and the disease model includes the community, hospital, and burial transmission dynamic. We use a multimodel inference approach calibrated on data from 6 July to the date of 9 August 2014. The estimates obtained were used to generate a 3-month ensemble forecast that provides quantitative estimates of the local transmission of Ebola virus disease in West Africa and the probability of international spread if the containment measures are not successful at curtailing the outbreak.

Results: We model the short-term growth rate of the disease in the affected West African countries and estimate the basic reproductive number to be in the range 1.5 − 2.0 (interval at the 1/10 relative likelihood). We simulated the international spreading of the outbreak and provide the estimate for the probability of Ebola virus disease case importation in countries across the world. Results indicate that the short-term (3 and 6 weeks) probability of international spread outside the African region is small, but not negligible. The extension of the outbreak is more likely occurring in African countries, increasing the risk of international dissemination on a longer time scale.

Asses sing the International Spreading Risk Associated with the 2014 West African Ebola Outbreak

And bits from a related news story:

The probability of seeing at least one imported case of Ebola in the U.S. is as high as 18 percent by late September, researchers reported Tuesday in the journal PLOS Currents: Outbreaks. That's compared to less than 5 percent right now.

As time goes by, it becomes more of a certainly; when, not if.

"What is happening in West Africa is going to get here. We can't escape that at this point," says physicist Alessandro Vespignani, the senior author on the study, who analyzes the spread of infectious diseases at Northeastern University.

To be clear, the projection is for at least one imported case of Ebola — not for the kind of viral mayhem afflicting Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

"What we could expect, if there is an importation, would be very small clusters of cases, between one and three," Vespignani says.

This is the scientist whom ikonoklast references in this post.

This is where I choose to differ from the experts, I do not think it will be as easy to contain here as they seem to think.

There's a 25 to 28 percent chance that an Ebola case will turn up in the U.K. by late September. Belgium, France and Germany will have lower risk. "But it's not negligible," Vespignani says. "Sooner or later, they will arrive."

The closer to Africa the more likely it is to show, and sooner.

The researchers calculated the impact of severe restrictions on flights from Ebola-affected regions. An 80 percent reduction in air travelers would do no more than delay the impact of Ebola by a few weeks. (A 100 percent choke-off of air travel is considered impossible.)

Impossible by choice.

"Unless you can completely shut down the transportation systems, these kinds of efforts will, at best, buy you a little time," Longini says. "And they can be quite counterproductive because you're interrupting the flow of help, goods and services. It can make the epidemic worse in the country that's being quarantined."

All commercial traffic should have been halted weeks ago and only allow aid/food/supply flights, but that was deemed too damaging economically.

A Few Ebola Cases Likely In U.S., Air Traffic Analysis Shows

a reply to: jadedANDcynical

Sorry. ...I'm a she but people always assume I'm a he. Anyway....

Ebola will escape Africa sooner or later. Some think it would be better if we hold it off until there is a treatment - but given the propensity for bugs to mutate faster than we can keep up, not sure that reasoning is valid. ....? Do you honestly think if we stop it now we will have stopped it forever? Or what?

originally posted by: soficrow
a reply to: jadedANDcynical

Sorry. ...I'm a she but people always assume I'm a he. Anyway....

Ebola will escape Africa sooner or later. Some think it would be better if we hold it off until there is a treatment - but given the propensity for bugs to mutate faster than we can keep up, not sure that reasoning is valid. ....? Do you honestly think if we stop it now we will have stopped it forever? Or what?

I'm all for going in and going in yesterday.

And no, I don't think it will be gone forever when it's stopped. I hope we stop it rather than it runs out of hosts to infect.

And if not this, then some other bug.

We need to pull our heads out of our collective asses and look up from sports and celebrity gossip and fix the underlying issues facing our species.

The problem being, those who are in charge and that have the capacity to affect those kind of changes seem much more interested in keeping things how they are.

I can't find the link but I read an article that basically said Ebola has a large chance of hitting the United States by the end of the month and a higher chance every month following. It will happen. It then went on about how it will only infect pockets of 1-3 people at best before it is contained because "USA". I love that logic.

Our hygiene can't be much better than anywhere else in the world. We are all human and humans all have nasty habits when no one else is looking... Just sayin'.

I agree this outbreak is unstoppable at this point.

Why might we have a problem here?

The Atlantic’s America scenario goes like this: “You wake up and feel a little weak. It’s almost like you have the flu. You stumble to the medicine cabinet and grab a thermometer. You have a fever, so you pop two Tylenols and go back to bed. The fever does not go away. You see your primary care physician, who says it looks like flu and to call her if the symptoms change. The next day, the fever is going strong, and you feel even worse, wracked with chills and a headache. You remember that you recently butchered a West African fruit bat, for some reason. You call 911

Web Roundup - Ebola

Now replace the emphasized portion with, "what you have no way of knowing is that you've recently sat next to an early symptomatic person who has recently arrived from one of the Hot Zones on a student visa, and are now thus unknowningly helping to spread one of the most deadly diseases known to man."

Add in "you don't call in to work because you can't afford the time off, you're a student working to pay your way through school and a server at a local very popular restaurant..."

This exactly where is contact tracing would hit a brick wall.

I'm sure there will be some kind of "treatment" or vaccine offered to the unwashed masses relevant to it all. A solution that is fast tracked and experimental...2 words ya love to hear in regards to something that may be mandatory to inject into our bodies. I feel better already.

This entire Ebola thing has sure blown up so fast and furious and there are more than one strain and anything novel could be a mutated strain or man made.

It is also interesting that a map showing where the Ebola problems started lines up perfectly with a map of where all the major Gas/Oil facilities in Africa are located. It would be easier to acquire land for their purpose with the locals out of the way...providing there was protection for the folks that would need it. Who knows...or maybe, WHO does know.

Regardless of the causes, if it shows up here...it could serve a lot of agendas...even the "Never let a good crisis go to waste" one.

a reply to: soficrow

the sanitation over there is despicable. This picture should give you some idea what the conditions are like:

originally posted by: Thurisaz
a reply to: PaulTheDuke

Ebola Victims/Health Authority

(much more available online... scary stuff)

a reply to: shrevegal

It is also interesting that a map showing where the Ebola problems started lines up perfectly with a map of where all the major Gas/Oil facilities in Africa are located. It would be easier to acquire land for their purpose with the locals out of the way...providing there was protection for the folks that would need it. Who knows...or maybe, WHO does know.

If it lines up with where the major gas and oil facilities are, then they've already got the land they need.

originally posted by: gatorboi117
I would really love to see the science and math behind these percentages and statistics.

How are they arriving at their conclusion?

There's an old saying, be careful what you ask for because you might get it. Here are some links to get you started.

[NOTE: The first word in the link text below should be "assessing." If there is a space between the 5th and 6th characters in the first word, it's some glitch in the BBcode or something inserting a space that is not there in my post. Strange, but it does make for an unintentionally humorous variation of the tech paper title...]

Asses sing the International Spreading Risk Associated with the 2014 West African Ebola Outbreak

2014 Ebola Outbreak: Worldwide Air-Transportation, Relative Import Risk and Most Probable Spreading Routes

2014 Ebola Outbreak: Worldwide Air Transportation and Relative Import Risk

There is an overwhelming amount of data out there, but sometimes it helps to see the data visually in graphs. I've been compiling and graphing the data from WHO and the New England Journal of Medicine for about a month as new data comes out, and also making projections based on the data. Here is a link to the start of the latest charts:

Latest Ebola chart updates start here

originally posted by: 59demon
It then went on about how it will only infect pockets of 1-3 people at best before it is contained because "USA"...

Actually, I think there's a pretty big difference. Here are just a few factors:

1. People and institutions in first-world countries can easily afford disinfectants & protective gear
2. We're less superstitious about these things - we know we're dealing with a virus. In rural areas of Africa, this can vary.
3. There are fewer people living in each structure and the structures are larger
4. We have running, hot, chlorinated water in nearly every building
5. Human wastes go down the drain and are siphoned away to a treatment plant, so we have control over the release of the biological effluents
6. We can put soiled clothes and bedding into the washing machine and treat them with bleach - if we're careful, we can do this without coming into contact with fluids at all

a reply to: Thurisaz

While that may be an extreme picture, it's true that basic sanitation and cleanliness doesn't even occur as an afterthought in many African communities or any part of the third world for that matter. I have been to Ethiopia and seen the nastiness of open sewers and busted sewers bubbling up in peoples back yards where the kids play. Sick cats running around in the Hospitals (no joke.) It's a mess in so many places.

I wonder though why this outbreak hasn't burned itself out like all the previous ones for the last 40 years. After all, it's not like the unsanitary conditions we're talking about here are anything new in Africa. Something's different about this outbreak, and that's why many of us are a little skeptical that the first world would just so easily nip it in the bud if it comes our way.

At this stage for me it's something to be mindful of with an eye on the developments and data.