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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

This unfortunately won’t be news again until, and I think this is now an until versus if, we find evidence the disease is spreading uncontrollably outside the DRC.

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Ebola isn't like most people think. It isn't airborne, isn't respiratory and requires direct contact with blood/semen/feces/etc to spread. It's also only known to be contagious once symptoms are present. The risk of a global outbreak is very low.

Africa has a large array of unique circumstances that make it much more 'viral' there, including various cultural funerary rituals that involve contact with corpses that can have extremely high viral loads, bushmeat consumption/processing (ebola can spread from animals to humans), as well as all the more stereotypical (and accurate nonetheless) reasons as well that make it particularly dangerous for healthcare workers there.

It's not entirely clear how it could spread uncontrollably outside of Africa.

Viruses are viruses though. Becoming airborne and less deadly (like this current strain) would be a death knell for the world. The longer you let it hang around the longer it has time to adapt. This is why HIV medication is prescribed so overwhelmingly. One of the main goals is to stop all replication immediately or it rather quickly “figures out” how to get past the drug.

There has been a lot of HIV going around, I have yet to hear reports that it's gone airborne.

But, yes, I would rather not have an outbreak of ebola.

HIV is a very weak virus. Ebola is significantly more robust.

Ebola thrives in African animal populations, so it has basically forever to do whatever you think it might do - though I'd add that in basically all scenarios viruses become more mild over time. It's not just good luck but because it maximizes transmissibility - killing your host usually means you die too. And that may well be why ebola remains so nasty to humans - we're not its primary reservoir, it's fruit bats which maintain persistent asymptomatic ebola infections, and are often the source of the first human infection in outbreaks.

Yeah, I didn’t know that about Ebola. That being said animal populations are not going to do anything to counter the virus. It’s only going to face resistance when it makes it into humans and that’s what is going to end up pushing mutations and evolution.

> Ebola isn't like most people think

Bunga bunga or whatever isn’t classic ebola. And it’s being given an expanding substrate on which to evolve.

Bundibugyo (as you are probably actually aware, but others might not be).

It does sound like such a caricature I can see the temptation to be flippant about it though.

But surely once somebody explains that kissing (yes, literally) the deceased corpse of an ebola patient is a bad idea they'll stop doing that

We can’t get our rich, educated populations to wear masks or vaccinate, on what planet are we getting this?

I think that’s going to be true if any disease whose previous outbreaks were only in a “third world” place. The rest of the world easily ignores it. If it was contained but in let’s say - some European country - I bet it would be in the news 24/7 still.

You think an outbreak, in for example Belgium, would be 24/7 news in Demorcatic Republic of Congo?

The DRC is a former Belgian colony, so yes.

Have you ever been to the DRC? Its former colonial master plays almost no role in Congolese society. Belgium made little effort to spread its culture to its colony, rather like the Dutch in Indonesia. Then, after independence, most of the population became isolated from the outside world as central government and education broke down, and the main impact on the country’s politics from outside came from larger, stronger powers than Belgium was.

This is such a weirdly tilted and aggressive response, complete with Facebook style demand to prove some strawman nobody ever claimed.

Yes, outbreaks of extremely contagious and deadly disease often are major news stories in other countries, and yes western nations often ignore outbreaks in global south nations.

You might not like the tone, but I don’t think it is a strawman argument.

The discussion is about whether the western media is paying insufficient attention to the Ebola outbreak simply because it’s in DRC, and DRC/Africa doesn’t matter.

The post you responded to is suggesting a different hypothesis: that the media is paying limited attention because it’s in a country quite a long way away, on a different continent. In line with this hypothesis, it’s not unreasonable to question how much attention the press in countries a long way away would focus on a viral outbreak in a European country.

If that outbreak was in a midsize European town like Marburg they would even name the virus after it.

But not if there was a virus that broke out in, say, Wuhan.

Exemplified by the ridiculous Hanta-Virus news/social media coverage for weeks - even though the risks were much lower and contained - but it happened on a CRUISE ship which the news people thought might resonate with the western vacation crowd.

I view that situation differently. The Andes strain of hantavirus does spread human to human and isn’t well understood. I think caution and coverage makes sense. After all, someone caught it just sitting near an infected person on a plane.

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