Patients’ Symptoms Raise Concern About Ebola in New York
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"A New York City hospital is examining a sick patient who recently returned from a West African country where the deadly Ebola virus has been spreading, but authorities said it's unlikely that the man has Ebola."
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/New-York-City-Hospital-...
"Patients’ Symptoms Raise Concern About Ebola in New York"
Which is true, and still interesting. At this point, I wouldn't bet against the disease showing up in an international city, and it's nice to know the state of things.
We've followed suit.
You are far more likely to be infected by malaria than ebola. Ebola is scary and makes for great news that draws lots of attention -- but it is largely sensational and not truthfully something you need to rationally fear, unless you work with infected individuals.
Edit: Though you are correct it is not necessarily something to be freaking-out over at the current moment. That said its a serious problem that we should not assume is benign. We should be working to contain it outside of the US.
There does seem to be something about the strain in this latest outbreak that is different to past outbreaks.
Don't waste your time worrying about such hypotheticals. If you want to worry for sport, there are better things to worry about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubo
I guess a hemorrhagic fever can't be ruled out though.
Ebola, in the form that requires fluid transfer, won't spread all that quickly in the U.S., where people aren't all that skeptical of doctors and tend to react to disease threats by avoiding touching things (as I understand it, burial practices involving touching the bodies are a significant source of infection in the current outbreak).
If I am infected by either, I am overwhelmingly more likely to survive a bout of malaria.
And during an unusual outbreak (which is the case for ebola at present), looking simply at past incidence will underestimate my risk.
It's still probably not a high risk, and there are higher risks (which I try to pay more attention), but I don't think it's wrong to say it poses a greater threat to me (or to the overwhelming majority on this site) than does malaria.
Imagine that it is 1918 again and someone was trying to make a prediction of the likelihood of influenza becoming a deadly pandemic that would kill 100 million people over the next 18 months. They would look at the past history of influenza and say there is a negligible risk of this happening. Of course now since we know that influenza can become very serious we keep our eyes on it, but for something like ebola we really know very little.
Given how infrequent pandemics occur, a better way to judge the risks involved would be to take a much long term view and try to measure the risk of a major pandemic occurring in your lifetime. When you look at the history of plagues over the last 2500 years they are infrequent, but common enough that we can get some handle on the risk. My very rough calculations based on past pandemic frequencies and death rates put the risk at around 1 in 1000 of being killed by a pandemic sometime during your lifetime. This is not huge, but at the same time it is not trivial.
Edit. I added the word apparent to the “…danger of…” as I realise that my wording is confusing without it.
I might have worded it better, but pandemics are actually one of those areas that people get the risks wrong for the opposite reason than usual. While pandemics are considered low frequency, high risk events and so over-worried about, they are actually relatively frequent events on a historical time scale and are not worried about as much as they should be. They are really more in the car crash category not the stuck by lightning category, but we get complacent because a big one has not happened in living memory (unless you count HIV).
On the other hand we have a lot of changes in our favor: understanding how diseases are spread (starting with germ theory, all the way up through population models), understanding how many more diseases are treated, an astoundingly better ability to communicate, probably a better ability to coordinate...
I don't know how it nets out. The streak we've had should be taken as some evidence that it breaks in our favor. Certainly we should not succumb to the gambler's fallacy, there. However, I think we're well served to keep an eye on things.
My biggest fear is a pandemic Rhadinovirus since it is airborne, has a long incubation phase and leukaemia is the outcome [1]. Something like a human pathogenic Ateline or Saimiriine herpesvirus could spread through the human population without us knowing until it is too late.
Interestingly, Saimiriine herpesvirus has recently been linked to idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis [2]. All it would take is a more pathogenic strain of this virus and we would be in a lot of problems.
What is newsworthy is that there is potentially an Ebola patient zero in the most densely populated part of the United States. Worse, the patient was in contact with travelers who have likely fanned out throughout North America, South America, Europe, and Asia.