CDC scientists pursue deadly monkeypox virus in Africa | Hacker News Reader

CDC scientists pursue deadly monkeypox virus in Africa

washingtonpost.com

100 pointswhyenot21 comments

Africa is very large, and Africans is a very broad description of people who live in the continent. The article talks about Congo, which puts the disease in sub-Saharan Africa, already being a lot more specific.

Why does the title say mysterious if we know it's monkey pox? Is it because we don't understand the virus mechanism or what?

It's because you would not click the bait otherwise.

Washington post title is "CDC scientists pursue deadly monkeypox virus in Africa", different from what has been submitted.

The clickbaity title seems to actually be the one used on the front page of WP. For me, the actual article title is “Chasing a Killer” which isn’t much better really.

Re: "Worldwide, animal-borne infectious diseases that jump to humans are on the rise."

Is that true? Or is this due to detection methods? (I presume it's the latter.)

I'm also curious, would similar things happen in developed countries if the factor farm food supply (e.g., chicken, pigs, etc.) if there wasn't such high use of chemicals, meds (abx), etc. Why isn't the rain forest of Brazil a hot bed for such things?

The rainforest is a paradise for bugs and snakes, it’s sparsely populated with our close relatives. Most of all, there is very little human settlement, and where there is, the rainforest is usually destroyed first. Meanwhile in the Congo...

> Why isn't the rain forest of Brazil a hot bed for such things?

Why would it be?

It looks like one of the least imaginable places for those things to appear. Very few people, modern agriculture, access to developed medicine, almost no history of human colonization.

Or. Why isn't it? Or might it be but we don't know, yet?

To me it seems like a combination of wild life and minimal - but enough - human contact with that. I mean, what's to stop deer ticks from something more than Lymes Disease? I would imagine it's nothing.

Yet, these things seem to happen in Africa nearly exclusively. What evolutionary context does this? This is, why?

> Yet, these things seem to happen in Africa nearly exclusively.

If you look at animal flu transmission to humans, it's almost always central America or Asia, for really well understood causes. Europe has a history of importing those diseases from Asia, and, of course, America has a history of importing them from Europe.

All said, there's a reason to expect most of transmissions to happen on Africa. It's were we are from, and all the animals most similar to us live there.

Agreed. The flu seems to work that way. But why do these "exotic" viruses seem to be exclusive to Africa?

I really dislike the site layout. It makes it quite difficult to read on a desktop computer.

Just scrolling to continue reading steals the article text and replaces it with an animated image or map. I admit it's really pretty, but I care more about the content than the presentation, and the latter makes reading the former difficult.

Wow, that is bad. From your description I assumed it was just a slide up image, but no, it totally hijacks the entire experience, including the scroll wheel. What's more, I tried searching in page for a word ("update") and it took me to some step of the interactive map display. I'm not sure if there's some match that is underneath it all, or search is totally broken.

I agree it's pretty, and also agree it's difficult to navigate. :/

And it pushes my CPU usage constantly above 20% (otherwise 1%) on a i5 desktop machine with a 27" monitor. I just wonder how painful would be navigating it on a netbook or small laptop, not to mention tablets.

I just read through it on an older ASUS Chromebook Flip (ARM, 4GB) without issue. I found it to be a clever and engaging presentation format for a tablet. If I were on my desktop I'd probably go for the print view though.

It did the same thing on my handheld device. Yeah, crap really.

If you read the full article a tldr; would be much appreciated.

There's a smallpox variant called monkeypox that seems to come from contact with animals from Africa which is communicable, incurable, and deadly about 10% of the time. The smallpox vaccine is only 85% effective against it. They suspect various African rodents of spreading the disease, so scientists are trapping them, freezing them, and shipping them off to laboratories for analysis. There have been several outbreaks in African and the disease once spread to America because some animals brought over from Africa were kept in the same facility, and then infected, other animals sold as pets. One of these pets was a prairie dog that bit and infected a 3 year old American girl.

The rest of the article appears to be background about them hanging out in remote villages near the site of recent outbreaks.

Also note this is a long know virus and not considered an immediate threat, though it is high on the watchlist via concern it could mutate.

Thank you very much.

It's all background, and narration of the expedition to collect samples. There's nothing about new results.

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