Fighting Ebola: A Grand Challenge for Development
ebolagrandchallenge.net
ebolagrandchallenge.net
While that might be true, I really doubt this is the sort of situation where smart amateurs are likely to do much good. Remember all the crazy ideas for halting the Deepwater Horizon spill? None of them went anywhere. It was smart engineers who devised the eventual procedure to cap the well.
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I mean, sure that might make people feel better, but I'm struggling to see how it helps. Nobody has ever faced an Ebola outbreak remotely like this before. The small group of people who have ever dealt with Ebola are experts already, and presumably don't need a bespoke Grand Challenge to give their input.
> highlight the micro-challenges embedded in the larger Ebola epidemic
They are "micro" insofar as they are "marginally smaller than the whole problem" but "Strengthen Health Care Capacity" is such an enormous problem by itself it's sort of laughable to call it a "micro-challenge"!
Most of the ideas currently are "make PPEs less terrifying" and, while I agree that that's a great idea, right now they just need craptons more of them distributed to the healthcare workers who need them.
Other brilliant ideas include "what if fasting makes Ebola go away," "Can we just use 3D printers to print hospitals?" "What about an Ebola symptom-tracking app?"
[1] The situation is that the Western World at government level doesn't really care about what happens in Africa. It's still too far and away (still). The scary thing is that there's not known and currently approved EbolaVirus treatment that we know off, except rehydration and symptomatic treatment.
This outbreak really is one of the greatest public health disasters of modern times. I encourage you to think about how you might help, beyond donating money.
[0] https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/computing-for-ebola-...
[1] Data available for download: https://github.com/cmrivers/ebola
[2] Examples of ebola analyses: http://www.caitlinrivers.com/blog/category/ebola
[3] https://civic.mit.edu/blog/hidenise/hurricanehackers-project...
While thinking about this is a laudable idea, I encourage everyone to donate money first, right now, since odds are it's by far the most effective thing you will be able to do.
I have donated money, but I now think this is distracting us from what is really needed. No amount of money poured into any NGO will allow us to get on top of this outbreak. Even with tens of billions of dollars a NGO like MSF is not going to be able to put in place the required treatment facilities needed, nor have the authority or ability to enforce an effective quarantine. We should be putting all our efforts into lobbying the US government into getting the required UN security council authority to act and activating the full scale mobilisation of the USA military. This is as about as serious as anything gets.
Two solutions: 1. some way to mass vaccinate/introduce fruit bats with genetic ability to stop passing on bad things to humans. 2. Kill all the fruit bats (but then don't eat them - that is provably what got us into this mess in the first place!)
While the idea of killing them all is attractive, this is not really practical in a place like west Africa.
Of course I expect none of this will occur until 2015 by which time it will be too late.
Just yesterday I had a conversation with someone lamenting how inhumane it was to enforce anything remotely resembling quarantine (say, refusing flights from a "hot" country) as being mean on an individual level, despite the statistical odds of an individual infection exploding into the demise of millions.
Hopefully this outbreak will, like most Ebola instances, burn itself out well before it goes outright pandemic. Prepare to self-quarantine if it doesn't; given what we saw in Dallas of late indicates governmental unwillingness to address such an outbreak in a realistic fashion.
I agree it won’t happen until too late. I think around January we will see total panic set in.
>Hopefully this outbreak will, like most Ebola instances, burn itself out well before it goes outright pandemic.
Past outbreaks have not burned themselves out - they were controlled by standard quarantine and hospitalization. Even this outbreak was being controlled until August when it overwhelmed the limited infection control measures in place. We need to stop pissing around and get serious - when you have an uncontrolled pandemic that is doubling in size every 20 days then you need to act big and act right now with everything you have at your disposal.
Do they really, though?
It seems like what health care workers in West Africa need more than anything is money. Money to build the kind of hospitals and health care infrastructure that makes it possible for a country like the U.S. to clamp down on early cases before they become epidemics. A long-term investment over many decades.
I mean, I'm all for new ideas, but if the big problem is "not enough money" it seems like the easiest way to solve it would be with money, no?
We don’t even need to do this. All we need to do is get to R0 below 1. What this requires is 70% of patients are treated in properly functioning hospitals. Right now the hospitals in the affected area are totally overwhelmed so in practice no new cases are being treated at all.
Putting in place a functioning hospital system on the required scale is now beyond the resources of the countries affected, the WHO, and NGO’s like MSF. The only organisation with the resources and the ability is the US military (with some help from other countries). Every 3 week delay makes the problem twice as large so lets get going right now since full scale mobilisation is going to take months.