Ebola: The tolling bell

The viral factor of ebola is 1.7, but it is also is the place in the world where there is the least amount of medical staff.

In addition it would be a lot easier to ban plane travel out of Africa than it would be to end the ebola outbreak. Both options would prevent ebola getting into India.

In addition I am not that terrified of India - the kind of people who live about the airline are the kind of people who have access to medical resources. I don't want to live in India, but it is not entirely a third-world country, certainly not for the middle-class and above.

Now if it got into the slums of Calcutta we might a bigger problem.

Demonstrably untrue. The people affected are persistently, spectacularly unsuccessful. It's unclear why more investment into helping with Ebola would work where previous intervention in other crises has failed.

Well what about all the wildlife and rainforests that have been devastated by human population growth in Africa? The continent would be better off without so many people. After all, they're not doing anything to advance humanity technologically. They are just wrecking ecosystems and wasting resources.

What are the odds that I see this quote twice on one day for the first time ever?

http://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/2i418w/every...

I don't really care about what they are as long as they are a treat to my family, which they can are if they move out of Africa.

I want a good counter argument to this feeling because it is morally wrong but seems logically sound: between terrorist threatening us at home (they just murdered another british aid worker), ugandas death penalty for homosexuality, out of control ebola in Africa (made a lot worse because these people are too uneducated to trust medical staff, but trust their local community witch) I don't see how we can let these people govern themselves any more.

Like I said I don't want to feel this way, so good logical counter arguments are much appreciated.

But the other problems have been with us for a while. Stacking Ebola on top of them is really bad news.

We've already underestimated Ebola in a number of ways. The assumption was that it's not easily transmissible, but it's spreading, so perhaps that assumption is not as true as we thought. The fact that doctors are getting infected is certainly a bad sign. Perhaps this strain is more easily transmissible, or will be soon due to a larger infected population within which it can evolve.

Also, none of those other problems require drastic measures like a 3-week quarantine, which is costly, disruptive, and doesn't scale well.

We've discussed this before. The key differences are that the first two things take quite a long time to kill you; the second two things are very easy to treat/prevent and we know they tend to improve as infrastructure is added. All four of these problems can be managed with current knowledge, at varying degrees of expense. Our failure to eliminate them or other obvious causes of mortality is largely due to a failure of political will, inadequate capital, or some combination of the two. HIV/AIDS is the best example because we don't have a definite cure, and we let it get much worse than it needed to because originally it was treated as a moral disease.

In contrast, we lack the capability to treat Ebola reliably, and it acts fast enough and powerfully enough that patients can't get meaningfully involved in their own treatment the way many HIV patients did in the early days of that epidemic. Our best strategy against Ebola right now is to just isolate people and hope that it burns itself out. Given the size of the area where it is rampant, this is a highly unreliable strategy.

At what age did people who died from smoking, first get infected? How many years did they live with the infection? Did they have the difficult but still viable option to quit smoking and survive a few more years or even have a full life?

How many people contracted HIV by hugging someone? Or being in the same environment for a prolonged period of time? How many contracted it because of unprotected sex, or perhaps sharing needles? Again, how long did they live with the disease?

How many people did not die from Diarrhoea and Malaria? Do we have medicines for these diseases?

It takes two weeks to die from Ebola from the moment you are infected. You don't have any choice in the matter. It has extremely low survival rates. We have no cure. It infects anyone and everyone. Being infected with Ebola is closer to being the victim of a random shooting than any of the diseases you mentioned.

And finally, in numbers alone, from the original article: "WHO and Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) both estimate that the number of people infected is doubling roughly every 20 days. This means that in 20 days 6,000 infections would become 12,000 and in 100 days, 6,000 infections would become about 200,000. In 200 days – early April 2015—there would be 6 million infections and in 400 days—roughly Halloween 2015—we would see over 6 billion people infected, nearly as many as the world’s total population."

He does go on to say: "Unsustainable trends will stop; that rate of new infections will slow down.[3] We will not see the world’s whole population infected with, and more than half of us dead of, Ebola before the end of 2015. It is possible that outbreak may end up largely confined to the three current epidemic countries in West Africa. Other parts of the developing world provide some hopeful signs."

So, there is hope. And it may not be as bad as the whole world being infected, but the possibility is much larger than 60, 25, 6 or 15 million. That too in one year, and not in 14.

And this is the problem I have with a lot of the bullshit back and forth idiotic arguments you can read every day on HN.

Hey, moron, let me spell it out for you. If my little five year old girl gets ebola she will be in horrible pain crying out for Mommy and Daddy and her siblings, anyone, really, to comfort her. And if Mommy and Daddy do comfort her mommy and Daddy FUCKING DIE. And Mommy and Daddy will probably kill themselves if they watch their little girl die without comforting her. Parent, sibling, families, neighborhoods would be ripped to shreads. I don't know about you, but I would gladly die hugging my little girl until she goes if she has to.

I am almost crying as I write this because I can imagine it and it hurts. A parent's worst nightmare. How dare you compare it to smoking and AIDS. How FUCKING CLUELESS can you possibly be? This IS different. Very different.

Sorry for the emotion and the language. I suggest readers place themselves in the above scenario before posting stupid fucking comments.

And please, donate some money to organizations that can help the people in Africa going through this horrible problem. You know, the Mom and Dad choosing to hug and kiss their little girl and die with her rather than watch her die while she cries out for their love.

Enough said.

And a hundred years ago 50-100 million people died in the Spanish flu in the space of a few years. A pandemic, which Ebola definitely has a quite high possibility to become, has the ability to do home runs that really blow the ball out of the court when it comes to death tolls.

Seems there are quite serious plans to even tap their blood: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8410437

Terrorists could have done that years ago with AIDS or Hepatitis C but they never have - it's not obviously an effective propaganda tool and religious terrorists are likely to have hangups about dying in an unclean fashion.

I have been thinking the same. It seems that America desperately needs an enemy sometimes. If there isn't one available, it kind of makes them up to keep busy. This is a golden opportunity for the USA to bring the world together and fight a real enemy worth defeating and perhaps regain some of it's lost luster. Well I'm hoping anyway.

I often think that people just can not conceive of the scales of disasters that are possible and can befall anybody, including the US. You look at the frankly incredible measures that may be necessary to prevent an outbreak, and it's easy to imagine the costs, the screaming from the affecting (and, given the topic, possibly the literal screaming on the evening news of perfectly innocent people against their will being confined in their own houses unto literal death), the economic costs of shutting things down and quarantining people, etc., politically and economically all very expensive, and in the face of an imagination unable to truly, fundamentally believe these things are possible, the will to take the necessary actions can not be found, because the benefits are literally inconceivable.

And there are oh-so-many things that are so much more fun to spend time on for those in authority, and the odds that their fundamental preparations will be found wanting so low during their tenure, that the appeal of shifting all resources and money away from basic prep is tempting to the point of irresistibility.

Unfortunately, the disasters that can occur are not bounded by our imagination.

(And I do mean fun for those in authority. Contemplating emergencies is not fun. Exerting primate dominance over others in the so very many varied ways that humans are capable of is so much more fun.)

"We suddenly realized that there is zero global coordination. There is just no global immediate response mechanism in place to deal with this type of stuff.

In the Hollywood movies you see the American tanks roll in as a show of force to contain an area...but where are the American tanks in Nigeria?"

This is why I have to apologize on behalf of Americans when I meet foreigners from any of the dozens of countries the US has recently invaded.

They know not what they do.