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Comment by AznHisoka | Hacker News Reader

That includes the USA, right?

If Ebola sticks with its current mode of transmission, stopping it is straightforward. Isolate patients, find their recent contacts, isolate them. Rinse[1] and repeat. It's easy to track down contacts in the western world: credit cards, post-paid mobile phones, formal employment, etc. It's hard to do so in developing world slums.

The entire developing world might be incapacitated by the Ebola epidemic. The western world, not so much.

[1] with bleach

How do you track all the contacts from a million infected people?

There are no infected people in the USA. If there is a case here you ferociously follow the contacts of the first case(s).

The NSA has already shown this to be relatively trivial. Don't think for a second the government wouldn't harness that knowledge in an emergency situation such as an Ebola outbreak within the US.

The NSA is excellent at tracking communication contacts that establish the existence of relationships (notwithstanding the potential of false positives). And this would also work for tracking someone driving around in a car running errands in specific places.

But if someone arrives in a US city unwittingly carrying Ebola and gets on a crowded bus or subway car, that's not so easy to track. Likewise if the person goes to a nightclub or other crowded place. Suppose it's a returning American who attends a baseball or football game - the NSA may well be able to ID almost everyone who attended the event, but trying to screen/isolate tens of thousands of people who might have come in contact with an infected individual wandering around a stadium is easier said than done.

Crowded places aren't currently a significant source of Ebola infections.

That could change in short order - don't you remember the Liberian guy who turned up in Lagos? If he had traveled a few days earlier he would still have been infectious but might not have been identified as such on arrival.

http://news.yahoo.com/liberian-ebola-symptoms-dies-nigeria-o...

They can track your location via a cell phone that nearly everyone carry's with them at all times.

If an infection does come over, then expect people the laud the NSA's spying because it'll be the thing that makes it possible to identify, target, and quarantine.

I like the way you think--what a wonderful opportunity this presents for these agencies to justify their existence and methods!

This is what Ive been saying all along. First world countries are fine...ATM.

However, the more people that are infected, the more chance of Ebola mutating some novel route of infection.

I.e. in the worst case....airborne.

Then it becomes a serious issue in the first world. An apocalyptic issue...

The USA is probably the best place to be. According to the news, Ebola spreads through direct, close contact. My opinion is that people in the US live somewhat isolated lives, which would make it hard for a disease like Ebola to flourish.

I honestly have no idea. I really hope we don't have to find out.

No, it doesn't. I know a lot of people that work day-in-day-out on ebola at the CDC. The US (and many countries) are totally equipped to handle ebola and you really don't need special facilities to do it.

So how come we can't stop the seasonal stomach flu ;) it's not as easy as they make it out to be and I for one don't want to test this hypothesis...

We can't stop the seasonal stomach flu because the stakes are low enough that we aren't handing out hand-sanitizer on every street corner and obsessively quarantining every gastroenteritis sufferer and every person with whom they ever interacted.

flu is airborne. ebola isn't, and no one that i know of at the cdc is seriously considering the possibility that it will become airborne.

Stomach flu isn't flu. Stomach flu is a misnomer, referring to gastroenteritis, a symptom of a stomach bug - generally a virus, but not influenza (the flu). It's relevant because the infectious mechanism of stomach bugs is similar to Ebola - the disease spreads by people interacting with sufferers' copious vomit and diarrhea.

The US is on the short list of countries that in fact do not need to fear ebola much at all.

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