Nigeria 'on red alert' over Ebola death in Lagos
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Ebola is a incurable and statistically fatal disease, but it is being made worse by people wanting to see their families and friends before their will likely expire. This behavior places infected persons in communities and situations where proper care and quarantine may not be available therefore the disease has spread. People acting in their own self interest when confronting their mortality is nothing new. We'd likely all do the same.
Maybe we need to start treating this outbreak we fight wildfires. Start digging a proverbial fire line. Setting broad travel restrictions and geographical quarantines and hope that the virus fades away over time. Of course this is cruel and inhumane to people with the disease not to mention impractical to implement physically over such a wide area because people inside any area would rush out possibly taking the virus with them.
There is an "African" border near me. Its got a fence - which is impressive. The fence does double duty as a washing line and is about waist high.
Or the one between the USA and Mexico, which has more to do with a dislike of the racial makeup of those wanting to cross into the USA?
Isn't a border nothing more than a line drawn in the sand patrolled by armed men in places where it is feasible?
If animals can cross borders at will, then why can't humans also? After all humans are a peculiar breed of apes without fur?
Every year ten of thousands of africans try to cross the border jumping over the 7m high fence.
Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melilla_border_fence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceuta_border_fence
Images:
https://www.google.com/search?q=la+valla+de+melilla&es_sm=91...
It seems its main purpose is to stop the refugee processing system from being overwhelmed, as that doesn't place them on Spanish soil proper.
>Spain has two exclave located on the north coast of Africa,
It was more of an example though...borders pretty much don't exist in Africa. The only people that get formally checked are those using the roads & border posts. Once you're on foot its a free for all. Hell there are people repeatedly using deportation mechanisms as a free ride home after doing migrant work.
As for the issue at hand...I have little faith in Ebola being contained to be honest. The overall social setup is uniquely incompatible with containment. That being said Rwanda etc have demonstrated a reasonably approach to AIDS (awareness driven) which did impress me.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndro...
The problems we are seeing don't have any clean solution because the actual solution is quite simple, but it failing to be employed properly.
And ebola isn't the only disease for which this is true. An even more terrifying prospect is of TDR-TB: totally drug resistant tuberculosis.
Ebola infects, incapacitates, and kills within a matter of days. For TB the period can be years, and a large number of carriers are asymptomatic.
"Treatment" requires total population isolation for the remainder of the patient's natural life.
The disease has spread from Guinea to Liberia [2] so this would be a jump Eastward [3]
[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/06/25/324941229/could-t...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_West_Africa_Ebola_outbreak...
[3] https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/West+Africa/@14.6336215,...
I'm only aware of these cases (are there others?) Hence, I used theory until you've had a few more occurrences.
The first link in the previous comment documents:
1) 1996 a man in Gabon travelling to Johannesburg and he didn't infect anyone.
2) 2004, a man with Lassa fever, similar to Ebola, travelling to the US and not infecting anyone.
Not sure how to filter the non-2014 outbreaks, though.
For similar reasons, you'd expect the world's foremost expert on avoiding shark attacks to be attacked by a shark more often than the general population. He's out there practicing his theories and doing his research every day. The rest of us aren't going in the water as often.
The best way to avoid being attacked by a shark in the ocean is not to go in the ocean. The best way to avoid contracting Ebola is to stay as far away from Ebola as possible. An expert might be better able to handle himself around Ebola, or around sharks, than the rest of us. But he's also more likely to be around Ebola (or sharks) in the first place.
All it takes is a single mistake, or one vector of transmission that was not yet known, or one patient sneezing at exactly the wrong moment or simply not having the tools and supplies to do the work safely.
Being a doctor in this field is a very high risk occupation, doing it in Africa is simply very brave.
If we try out drug X and only 50% of those people die, then we know that drug X is good for Ebola. Once there is drug Y to try, then we can use drug X for a control group.
You must be sure that you are using the same criteria to count the patients. Are you going to count the almost dead patients as a drug failure, or drop it from the list? Are you going to give the drug to suspected cases or only to confirmed cases? Do you count small children (they usually have a smaller survival rate)?
Are you counting the people that die before going to the hospital? Are you counting the (few) people that survive without going to the hospital?
If you get a 30% cure rate, (and suppose that the standard cure rate is 20%), it's very difficult to be sure that the improvement is in the mew drug and not in a change in all the other factors or some unwanted statistical trick.
Most of the rules for double blind studies are there because in the past there have been many "successful" test of new drugs, that were later retracted. It's very easy to measure incorrectly, especially when you really want the experiment to be a success.
(Another rules are there to prevent the consequences of previous "unsuccessful" test, were the "cure" was much worse than the illness.)
I feel like a control group is immoral at this point.
Freetown, the Sierre Leone Capital, has had it's first case and seems to be having problems controlling the movement of infected people, one (now unfortunately dead) was 'rescued' from quarantine by relatives. "The woman had been one of dozens of people who tested positive but were unaccounted for, the BBC's Umaru Fofana reports from the capital, Freetown."
When did this become an 'us versus them' issue, as though any people or governments are glad to have an Ebola outbreak on their hands.
Ebola is spread through physical contact with infect matter or fluids. It isn't airborne.
This looks like racism coming into play. Obama is black, Nigeria is also an African country. And what does it have to do with Obama?
Is he an expect on medical issues or is something for him to leave to the experts health issues are delegated to decide? And to think that you only signed on make this comment.
Don't let your fears let your behaviour degenerate into panic and racism.
I know that its high mortality rate is a massive curb on its ability to spread, but is that enough to put a dampener on spread if it became more easily transmittable?
http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/121115/srep00811/full/srep00...
If the outbreak is localized then we may have a change of putting a quarantine on the area, but I doubt it.
The bad news is that there's a hell of a lot of human movement, and you'd have to shut down much of that, as well as isolate carriers and exposed individuals as quickly as possible. Often in places (such as the present African outbreak) in which infrastructure, governance, and resources are exceptionally limited. The task of effectively controling all vectors would be a very high challenge.
I'd say it would be an ugly time, all told.
For example the closest thing to a medical stockpile in the United States would be the current inventory on hand and what the public or private sector has stockpiled for its own limited audience.
Perhaps there are exceptions for certain medications, but requiring 6-12 month stockpiles of certain medications tastes of corporatism.
Also such a huge mutation may lower the deadliness of the illness.