What if someone in a major US city got infected? How bad could it get? Could they even contain it at that point?
There is also a much more extensive public health system that is alert to the risk of an infected person entering the country.
If someone makes it through the airport screens and carries the virus into a city, the epidemiology could become overwhelming before we know an outbreak has begun. So yes, we have the advantage that we have real hospitals and good infection control, but we have the disadvantage that we have huge cities, high population density and lots of personal mobility.
If you had a fever and went to work, and it turned out you had ebola, it's still unlikely you would infect your coworkers, because it is rare for American workers to directly contact each others' bodily fluids.
Think of ebola like AIDS that kills faster. That's the right mental model for how it is transmitted. And, it's a good reminder that we have decades of practice managing diseases transmitted that way.
It's easy to get fixated on aerosol transmission because it's fancy, but "bodily fluids" are a damned effective vector for the everyday transmission of a virus.
(Also, HIV is a pretty poor model for this. As viruses go, HIV is pretty hard to transfer -- even heterosexual sex has a low rate of seroconversion.)
> Basically every health agency in the world agrees on this point. In order to catch Ebola, you have to come in contact with bodily fluids — such as sweat, saliva, vomit, or diarrhea — of someone who already has Ebola and is exhibiting symptoms. (A person who is infected but not yet showing symptoms generally isn't infectious.)
> And yet, remarkably, many readers have been unconvinced by this point.
http://www.vox.com/2014/8/10/5980553/ebola-outbreak-virus-ae...
This was the first of many available sources in a quick Google search.
I don't understand why there seems to be so much interest in hyping the threat of ebola to the U.S. Maybe it has to do with the many doomsday virus stories in our culture?
An analogy: a friend of mine worked at a "Wild West" type museum. He got a call from someone who wanted to know if there were any black cowboys. My friend told the caller that yes, there had been many black cowboys. The caller said "that can't be true. How come I never saw any in western movies??"
Ebola has many symptoms, but coughing isn't one of them. By the time you start coughing up blood, most people in the developed world will know better than to touch that blood.
Doctors who knew they were working with Ebola still managed to get infected. So it can't be that hard to get it.
We don't need to panic, but it would be unwise to be too complacent.
Yes, but these doctors often don't even have the equipment to provide proper antiseptic medical care let alone containment-type biosuits.
In addition, quarantines can be rolled out quickly and effectively in modern countries with well-developed communication infrastructure.
This is not to say that we should be complacent. However, a bad flu epidemic poses more direct hazard to the modern world.
Could, but very unlikely to, as Ebola doesn't spread as easily as cold or flu viruses.
Most of the outbreaks in Africa, where numerous dangerous practices such as hospitals reusing needles helped spread the virus, have had only a few hundred cases. The latest outbreak is pushing towards 2000 cases but local practices that don't exist in the West are contributing significantly.
Bio-terrorism looks so easy.
Obviously he's a moron, but the response from the other side of the debate has been almost as one-dimensional.
The idea that poor children are just left to fend for themselves on basic healthcare like treating a cough in the US is blatantly false.
Poor people who know about the emergency rooms also know that normal healthcare is available for poor children for free from the government, which they get and then take their kids to the doctor like everyone else when they have a cough.
Seriously, the hysteria around people not having healthcare in the US is just incredible relative to the actual facts on the ground. Even if you believe Obama's "40 million without healthcare" claim (I don't), that's just 12% of the country, and the two most vulnerable populations—children and the elderly–were fully covered by the state already without the Obamacare regs.
There are real problems with the US healthcare system; we don't need to start spouting nonsense like poor children can only get a cough treated at the emergency room for free.
My point wasn't what isn't available. My point was that, regardless of ability to pay or any other factor, everybody in America has access to the American health care system for acute treatment (something Ebola would certainly be classified as).
Whether you can make it to a doctor's office or are stuck at the ER for your kid's cold depends on a lot of other factors, but, even then, your kid will get seen for that cold.
I don't know where you got "hysteria" from...
Not very, barring unexpected mutation: http://www.vox.com/2014/7/30/5948995/why-ebola-would-never-g...