A Way To Stop Ebola Discovered!

a reply to: badgerprints
Yes. There is an epidemic in West Africa.
There is no epidemic in North America. The epidemic is not spreading.

originally posted by: Phage

originally posted by: NoAngel2u
a reply to: Phage

Health care workers that would not have been exposed ,and subsequently exposed others, if Mr Duncan had not been allowed to travel.

How can we prevent people from leaving their own countries? We sure as hell aren't very good at preventing people from entering ours. Stopping air travel from the region will not "stop ebola."

Didn't say it would stop ebola, said it would decrease the chances of someone infected with EBOLA getting here.

a reply to: NoAngel2u

Didn't say it would stop ebola, said it would decrease the chances of someone infected with EBOLA getting here.

Read the thread title.

Stopping air travel from the region would increase the chances of someone infected with ebola (it is not an acronym) arriving undetected. Because it would increase the likelihood of clandestine entry.

a reply to: Phage

I think clandestine entry would be more difficult to accomplish, thereby decreasing those chances.

a reply to: NoAngel2u

It is more difficult. Yes. But if more people attempt it more will succeed.

You seem to think that people are flocking to the US from the region. They aren't.

a reply to: Phage

Well then they won't be inclined to flock here by clandestine measures either.

There may not be many, but there was enough flocking to cause an outbreak here.

a reply to: Willtell

Sorry, I just can't help myself. You said

He is a rigid minded person that only moves off the dogma in his mind by the public getting on his case.

He has little independent wisdom, original thinking capacity, or just mother wit and logic. Obama is like a flimsy piece of paper in the wind he only gets blown from one thought to the next without EVER intuiting any profound thought. One the other hand when the obvious comes about such as to ban people from the Ebola smitten countries he seems to lose common sense.

.............which so reminds me of the saying 'you can tell more about a person's character when he is describing another person's character, than the person he is describing'.

Just a thought. No harm intended.

a reply to: NoAngel2u

There may not be many, but there was enough flocking to cause an outbreak here.

There has been no "outbreak."
There have been three cases. Two of whom who were infected by very intensive contact with the primary. Many others who had contact with Duncan have shown no signs of infection after 3 weeks.

a reply to: Phage

A disease outbreak is the occurrence of cases of disease in excess of what would normally be expected in a defined community, geographical area or season. An outbreak may occur in a restricted geographical area, or may extend over several countries. It may last for a few days or weeks, or for several years.

A single case of a communicable disease long absent from a population, or caused by an agent (e.g. bacterium or virus) not previously recognized in that community or area, or the emergence of a previously unknown disease, may also constitute an outbreak and should be reported and investigated.

WHO

a reply to: NoAngel2u

Well, you got me there.
I guess 3 people is an outbreak. Good thing it's being investigated.
Interesting though, don't you think. No one else has any symptoms, even those who were living with him.

a reply to: Phage

(Blows the smoke off the barrel end of my google it pistolla, spins it around my index finger and drops it back in my holster)

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: NoAngel2u

Interesting though, don't you think. No one else has any symptoms, even those who were living with him.

I do indeed.

originally posted by: Phage
Interesting though, don't you think. No one else has any symptoms, even those who were living with him.

It is interesting. I'm totally astounded after what we've seen in the news of how some things were handled. But apparently it's not unusual, in fact this rate of growth seems typical.

The first presumed case according to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine was a 2-year-old child in Guinea who developed symptoms on December 2, 2013.

The mother died on December 13, 2013, not sure when she developed symptoms. And the 3-year-old sister of the first child developed symptoms on December 25, 2013. Presumably all were in the same home, and since it was not realized until March that it was an Ebola outbreak, no one would have known any but the most general steps to take to prevent it from spreading. But it still took 23 days from the start of the first case for the sister to become ill.

The grandmother died on January 1, 2014. As of January 2, one month after the start of the first presumed case, there were only 4 cases, all within the same family. By February 2 there were 9 cases, and by March 2 there were still only 25 cases.

By March 22, 2014, Guinea's Ministry of Health realized it was an Ebola outbreak and notified WHO of 49 cases. Later it was realized that Liberia also had their first case on March 13, 2014. By March 27, Liberia had 3 cases and Guinea had 103. Flash forward to October 14, 2014 and there were a total of 9216 cases reported by WHO, including 1519 cases in Guinea and 4262 in Liberia.

On the other hand, Senegal was able to limit their first imported case to just one case and was declared Ebola free after 42 days of no new cases. Nigeria, despite a couple idiots traveling and spreading Ebola, has allegedly been able to contain their outbreak after 20 cases - although there sure do seem to be a number of Nigerians flying and vomiting on people and even one then dying on a plane, although we're told it couldn't be Ebola...

It's too soon to know how it will go in America. Hopefully it's contained, but WHO's standard is 42 days of no positive Ebola tests, and that seems to be the accepted standard for the moment. The clock's not even ticking yet on the 42 days in America, since there are still positive cases.

a reply to: ikonoklast

The clock's not even ticking yet on the 42 days in America, since there are still positive cases.

The standard is 42 days with no new cases. The clock (re)started with the nurses, four days ago.

Recent studies conducted in West Africa have demonstrated that 95% of confirmed cases have an incubation period in the range of 1 to 21 days; 98% have an incubation period that falls within the 1 to 42 day interval. WHO is therefore confident that detection of no new cases, with active surveillance in place, throughout this 42-day period means that an Ebola outbreak is indeed over.

www.who.int...

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: ikonoklast

The clock's not even ticking yet on the 42 days in America, since there are still positive cases.

The standard is 42 days with no new cases. The clock (re)started with the nurses, four days ago.

Recent studies conducted in West Africa have demonstrated that 95% of confirmed cases have an incubation period in the range of 1 to 21 days; 98% have an incubation period that falls within the 1 to 42 day interval. WHO is therefore confident that detection of no new cases, with active surveillance in place, throughout this 42-day period means that an Ebola outbreak is indeed over.

www.who.int...

You may be right on when they restart the clock, but I hope not. That would be a very bad idea, especially for fatal cases. The worse symptoms are, the more virus particles are present in bodily fluids (up to a billion or more per milliliter with this strain apparently) and the more bodily fluids are spewed everywhere. The most contagious time is at the end of a fatal case, during the death and after death.

On the same page they say:

The period of 42 days, with active case-finding in place, is twice the maximum incubation period for Ebola virus disease...

It's a bit interesting that they consider 42 days to be twice the maximum incubation period when you realize that 21 days is only the 95th percentile. Also, for health care workers an incubation period could begin at any time up until the end of the 'last infectious contact' which they define on the same page:

According to WHO recommendations, health care workers who have attended patients or cleaned their rooms should be considered as “close contacts” and monitored for 21 days after the last exposure, even if their contact with a patient occurred when they were fully protected by wearing personal protective equipment.

For health care workers, the date of the “last infectious contact” is the day when the last patient in a health facility tests negative using a real-time reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test.

I hope they don't restart the clock until after the "last infectious contact."

I hope they just need to word that page a lot better. Most people are not very good at writing clear requirements that can't be misinterpreted, and I suspect that's the case on that page.

a reply to: ikonoklast

It's a bit interesting that they consider 42 days to be twice the maximum incubation period when you realize that 21 days is only the 95th percentile.

"Only" 95th percentile. That's not exactly what is normally considered "only". But then by 42 days you're "only" at the 98th percentile. Are you looking for 100%? Over what time span?

You're good with numbers, how does that "only" 95% and only 98% influence the transmission of a disease? Seems to me it means it gets stopped in its tracks with those numbers.

I hope they don't restart the clock until after the "last infectious contact."

How would that be determined? Like this:

According to WHO recommendations, health care workers who have attended patients or cleaned their rooms should be considered as “close contacts” and monitored for 21 days after the last exposure, even if their contact with a patient occurred when they were fully protected by wearing personal protective equipment.

Most people are not very good at writing clear requirements that can't be misinterpreted, and I suspect that's the case on that page.

You'll find it stated elsewhere with different words and it means the same thing.

1 close borders to and from infected
2 shut down airtrafic to and from inf
3 only authoriced personel allowed
doctors etc, 2 is void for that pers.
4 6months quarantain after any visitation
in inf nation. For ALL personel.

a reply to: Miccey

What world do you live on? You aren't going to get many people volunteering for a 6 month quarantine and stopping air travel from the area won't stop people from getting here.

a reply to: Phage
True phage... As much as i would love to say
i live on THAT world... I dont...
Because people are inherrently bad... To the bone.

Aks your selfs, WHY... Every time an answer comes
ask again why... And if you REALLY try... It will be
like "Yea we ARE bad"

a reply to: Phage

"Only" 95th percentile. That's not exactly what is normally considered "only". But then by 42 days you're "only" at the 98th percentile. Are you looking for 100%? Over what time span?

You're good with numbers, how does that "only" 95% and only 98% influence the transmission of a disease? Seems to me it means it gets stopped in its tracks with those numbers.

I realize they have to pick reasonable time periods for quarantine, isolation, observation, etc., and that they can't cover 100% of the cases. I even agree that time frames encompassing 95% or 98% of known incubation periods sound reasonable and would quickly reduce transmission.

But now that WHO has stated that the incubation period is longer 3-5% of the time (that's about 300-500 cases already), it's my personal opinion that they should not continue to refer to 21 days as the "maximum" incubation period - which they do still, even on the same page.

If the nurse from Dallas who traveled to Cleveland and back would have been informed when she called the CDC that although her fever didn't match their guideline, 12.9% of Ebola patients do not run a fever above the guideline, perhaps she might have made different decisions. The big picture is important, but the little numbers are at least important to the people affected. And even the biggest epidemics all trace back to a single individual.

I at least prefer knowing the real statistics rather than generalities.