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Comment by josephschmoe | Hacker News Reader

I've heard consistently that ebola is incapable of becoming a pandemic in first world countries. This is because it lacks the resiliency to survive outside of the human body for long periods of time.

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The problem is a virus have a nasty habit of evolving - just because all the past ebola strains have had a particular property does not mean that any new strain will behave in the same way.

There does seem to be something about the strain in this latest outbreak that is different to past outbreaks.

Do you similarly lose sleep over the idea of AIDS becoming airborne?

Don't waste your time worrying about such hypotheticals. If you want to worry for sport, there are better things to worry about.

No I don’t worry about AIDS becoming airbone, but when you look at the historical record of pandemics they are much more a problem than would appear of first glance. Pandemics that wipe out 1/3 to 1/2 the population and that appear out of nowhere are far too common over the last 2500 years for us to be complacent.

For roughly 2300 or more of those years we didn't understand how diseases spread or how to treat/prevent them.

But that doesn't mean we humans are "safe". Knowledge is power but its not a vaccine.

The odds of any particular mutation are small. The odds of any mutation are high. The odds of a meaningful mutation, somewhere between the two. The fact that we're seeing more spread than usual is already some evidence that this strain has some relevant mutation - though I don't know enough to quantify how much evidence.

That is a total overstatement/generalization.

That would be the case if it were not for the fact that it is really good at surviving in the human body.... until the person is dead or until they have developed antibodies to fight it. Some people do survive Ebola (aka the plague or the black plague). But not many. Ebola spreads, and fast at that, in areas where there are high population densities, areas where people are in close contact (areas like NYC). Because of the symptoms, it is possible that someone may be infected, spreading the disease, but think they have the flu or some other common ailment. That is the reason why the hospital in the original article didn't take chances and put the person in involuntary quarantine (the article didn't say it but I can guarantee that is the case (and the patient may not know it because if you had Ebola you would have to be insane to decline care)). The only effective way to fight Ebola is quarantine. You section off an area, don't let anyone in or out, and wait out the sickness until it runs it course. After that you safely and securely destroy everything.

Plague refers to several types of bacterial infections. The Black Death is believed to involved bubonic plague because of the characteristic symptom described in all sorts of records:

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).

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