Ebola is 'entrenched and accelerating' in West Africa

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-29563530

by Libertatea • 12 years ago

35 34 12 years ago

I hate to be negative, but really I expect a little better from the BBC on a story as serious as this. Do we really need an interactive photo of someone in an “ebola suit” with such informative labels you can click on that say things like “boots” or “goggles”?

ZoFreX• 12 years ago

To us such things might be self-explanatory, but not for everyone. A lot of the people most at risk from the disease know nothing of our modern notions of how disease spreads and how to effectively prevent it. Even in the US, a lot of people don't know the specifics of how ebola spreads, there is a lot of FUD.

kale• 12 years ago

This seems apropos: the woman in the cube across from mine just announced she had cancelled her airline flights because of fear of ebola virus, and has decided to drive to Disneyland instead (much longer trip). She wants to cancel (fear of ebola, again), but doesn't want to disappoint her kids.

calgoo• 12 years ago

Yes we do need these things, as here in spain they have cut all spending on hospitals, to the level of having simple "supermarket fruit section gloves" when working with patients. Its really fu up and the government, are trying to hide it by saying they are ready etc etc etc. There is not a single public hospital in spain that is technically able to handle the virus, as they dont have the level of isolation units necessary.

hga6• 12 years ago

It's telling that that hospital's infectious disease ward was closed a few months before, e.g. see https://www.thespainreport.com/11651/spains-health-minister-... which echoing other reports says, quoting someone, it was reopened "in a rush, urgently and at top speed".

simonh• 12 years ago

Those are just titles. When you click on each of them, you get a more detailed description of what the item is and what risks it helps protect the wearer from. For example:

Boots

Ebola health workers typically wear rubber boots, with the scrubs tucked into the footwear. If boots are unavailable, workers must wear closed, puncture and fluid-resistant shoes.

DanielBMarkham• 12 years ago

Some very interesting things are going to happen in international politics over the next six months, driven by Ebola. And I use the word "interesting" in the same way as it's used in the curse "May you live in interesting times"

I think by early next year it'll become obvious that we're going to lose millions of folks to the disease. What remains unknown is what the containment ability of western societies are. R is overall around 2, but in Europe maybe it's just .2 -- or maybe 1.2. The difference between those two numbers has staggering implications for the future of many societies.

I also do not believe that some sort of massive intervention would work to contain Ebola in Africa right now. Mathematically, yes, you can make the numbers work to show that a huge intervention could contain it. But practically? Not happening. The world is heading down this road whether we're prepared for it or not.

coldcode• 12 years ago

I read some senator wants to hold up the US investment for helping out in Africa for political reasons. I suppose there are no voters in Africa so why spend money there. Not in my back yard often goes both ways. People are dying in Africa, why should we care. Of course this is a world problem but politicians seem unable to grasp that.

maxerickson2• 12 years ago

It's a nice idea to only repeat things like that if you can find some decent source for it. Here's one:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/09/us-health-ebola-us...

(Well, I think it's useful to provide a source for something like that, it cuts at least 1 step out of the game of telephone that may ensue.)

hga6• 12 years ago

So Senator Inhofe's concerns about the health of our servicemen sent over there, and how this will play out over the long term (this money is not going to last more than 6 months), are unwarranted, a ruse for parochialism?

Note the DoD is currently using already budgeted money, this is for the future.

Shivetya• 12 years ago

What strikes me odd about the Ebola problem is this seemingly fear to do anything about it. With SARS we had many countries preventing people from traveling, we had border checks, and the restrictions affected air travel.

Yet Ebola while not airborne is far deadlier, so where are the travel restrictions? Is there some PC element to this, or is there some fear of perceived over reaction? Considering two recently publicized cases involved people who should have known better (if not the organizations they are part of) screwing up how are we to deal with people who don't know better understanding the signs and risks?

hga6• 12 years ago

SARS came from China, Ebola comes from Africa....

ADDED: the downvotes I'm getting for pointing out this simple, uncontestable bit of inconvenient truth guessed by Shivetya rather prove my point, yes? (At one point a net minus 3.)

omonra• 12 years ago

Yep - they absolutely prove your point.

drivingmenuts2• 12 years ago

Africa is a continent that the Western, mostly-white-run world has an incredibly troublesome history with. I suspect this is giving us (in the US) internal fits when we try to decide what to do. Almost anything short of sending direct aid makes it look like we are abandoning them and sending direct aid looks suspiciously like a military invasion (because we'll be sending armed troops).

We haven't even figured out how to "deal with" black people here in the US and those guys over there, well, they're foreign black people.

awakened• 12 years ago

You wrote: "We haven't even figured out how to 'deal with' black people here in the US..."

That's an absurd statement. The US has an African American president. He was elected twice by a large majority.

kaonashi• 12 years ago

A somewhat insightful take on that: http://www.ianwelsh.net/why-africa-cant-handle-ebola-the-des...

maxerickson2• 12 years ago

Between levels of service and visa requirements, west Africa is under de facto travel restrictions all the time.

Levels of service have dropped since the outbreak began, and you can bet that, for example, the U.S. State department is not issuing so many visas for individuals in that region.

tim333• 12 years ago

so where are the travel restrictions?

I think people are assuming we can contain any cases that arrive in the west which is probably largely true.

icantthinkofone• 12 years ago

I read a book about Ebola in West Africa 20 years ago or more ago so "entrenched" is very old news and "accelerating" is last month's news.

hga6• 12 years ago

It's zoonotic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoonosis), and in fact rather poorly adapted to humans (kills us way too often and quickly, one big danger from this outbreak is that less lethal strains will develop).

So it was "entrenched", or, rather, endemic in we guess fruit bats, the index case was a child in a household where some "bushmeat" was butchered, but not, until now, in human populations.

Note this is believed to have started with one child who died on December 6th, 2013. Exponential growth since then, and nothing specifically foreseeable is going to change that any time soon.

ADDED: if you assume, as many do, there are about 20,000 cumulative infections as of now, that equals a doubling rate of 3 per week (http://www.doubling-time.com/compute.php?lang=en), which also matches some other estimates I've seen.

taivare• 12 years ago

I was down-voted last time for this,but Please share this Ebola awareness poster. http://bit.ly/1vF1COO

dzdt• 12 years ago

There seems to be a big problem with innumeracy in responding to this epidemic. The number of ebola cases is doubling every 15 to 20 days. I guess people don't "get" exponential growth. Otherwise how are there so many statements about resource needs without a time tradeoff mentioned? Liberia needs about 3000 beds today to isolate patients, but only has about 600 currently. The US is helping to build more treatment centers totalling about 2000 more beds... but on a 5-12 week timeframe (to accomodate using Liberian engineers and local resources). In 5 weeks, the need will be for around 12000 beds! Do the leaders just not get the math? Or how else isn't the answer "do it the fastest way possible and nevermind who gets slighted or misses their cut of the business"!

freehunter4• 12 years ago

It's not about helping, it's about making a political statement. I can buy pink gear from Susan G Komen and everyone will think I'm wonderful for it, even though Komen is one of the worst cancer charities you can give money to. A politician can vote to build a number of beds that sounds great to voters, but also gives kickbacks to their friends and doesn't actually do anything because doing something costs real money.

Ebola is 'entrenched and accelerating' in West Africa

Related Stories