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kestrel91316
(51,666 posts)I'm fine. To hell with everybody else.
I am concerned about it, because I understand many of the potential pitfalls of the public health investigation process.
Turborama
(22,109 posts)Sparhawk60
(359 posts)Am I worried about a wide spread break-out in America? No, I have nothing to fear.
However; with an expected 1.4 Million cases in Africa by January, I am concerned for my fellow humans in Africa.
napi21
(45,806 posts)I feel very bad for the people who are in areas inflicted by this terrible virus. I understand that most are very poor and don't trust anyone or what they are being told, so the virus continues to spread. I really hope someone or something can get through to them to stop this awful thing.
AverageJoe90
(10,745 posts)
BrotherIvan
(9,126 posts)Empathy and sympathy go a lot further than smugness.
deutsey
(20,166 posts)I've just been dumbfounded (along with angered) at how the world community has just looked the other way while this spread.
MohRokTah
(15,429 posts)we're cool.
Also, the likelihood of such a mutation is about as likely as a mutation where the virus has almost no chance of transmission.
Given the variables, worst case scenario suggests at most another 20 cases with a likely spread of another two or three cases and a best case scenario of this being confined to the individual already known.
Only a nightmare scenario could result in a major outbreak.
JustAnotherGen
(31,817 posts)But I'm worried the ER initially sent that man on his way with a prescription in hand.
This isn't a remote African village - we move around within the US at a rapid pace.
uppityperson
(115,677 posts)I have my mask, scuba gear and condoms ready though, just on case, like the doctor told me to.
Prophet 451
(9,796 posts)I'm British.
Initech
(100,068 posts)Who will try to block development of a vaccine. If there's a vaccine out there for Ebola, give me the damn vaccine!! 
C Moon
(12,212 posts)Is there any idea of how long Ebola can survive once exposed to air?
Folks could easily use the restroom, not wash (or not wash sufficiently) and touch all kinds of things.
magical thyme
(14,881 posts)Since it is wrapped in a membrane, I'll venture that it doesn't persist long once it has dried. Within droplets, though, is anybody's guess.
And studies have shown that Americans, and particularly American men, are not particularly attentive to washing their hands after using the toilet -- even in restaurants. Seriously, a lot of them just don't do it.
For all our reputation as being overly clean, many are anything but.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)I use public restrooms like everyone else. I buy groceries from a store in which other people shop and blow their noses and touch their mouths and then food.
I know that a lot of people do not wash their hands after using the restroom. It's not that I expect to get ebola, but depending on what "contact with bodily fluids" means, I don't think that the risk is as low as some would have us think.
I understand that panic does not help matters, but neither does a careless lack of concern for real risks.
Turborama
(22,109 posts)It is thought that fruit bats of the Pteropodidae family are natural Ebola virus hosts. Ebola is introduced into the human population through close contact with the blood, secretions, organs or other bodily fluids of infected animals such as chimpanzees, gorillas, fruit bats, monkeys, forest antelope and porcupines found ill or dead or in the rainforest.
Ebola then spreads through human-to-human transmission via direct contact (through broken skin or mucous membranes) with the blood, secretions, organs or other bodily fluids of infected people, and with surfaces and materials (e.g. bedding, clothing) contaminated with these fluids.
Health-care workers have frequently been infected while treating patients with suspected or confirmed EVD. This has occurred through close contact with patients when infection control precautions are not strictly practiced.
Burial ceremonies in which mourners have direct contact with the body of the deceased person can also play a role in the transmission of Ebola.
People remain infectious as long as their blood and body fluids, including semen and breast milk, contain the virus. Men who have recovered from the disease can still transmit the virus through their semen for up to 7 weeks after recovery from illness.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)How much contact with how much bodily fluid is required?
Bed sheets? How about seats in a movie theater or on a plane? Just what are the parameters.
Turborama
(22,109 posts)...one could "make direct contact (through broken skin or mucous membranes) with the blood, secretions, organs or other bodily fluids of infected people" when sitting on a cinema or plane seat, unless you have cuts or abrasions on the back of your legs, are wearing short shorts and the person who sat in that seat previously bled, spat, shat, peed, sneezed, puked or spermed on it prior to you sitting on it.
What are the chances of that happening, though?
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)Turborama
(22,109 posts)And keep a safe distance from people who are puking, bleeding, peeing, sneezing, coughing etc.
When it comes (so to speak) to sperm ejaculations, well that's down to practising safe sex, as usual.
progressoid
(49,988 posts)magical thyme
(14,881 posts)I haven't had direct contact with body fluids of an infected person. However, that could change any time I'm at work, so yes I'm personally concerned and have been monitoring this outbreak since very early on.
Back when the WHO was insisting that the strange hemorrhagic outbreak in western Africa wasn't ebola, I was already sure that it was. So far, every sense of foreboding I've had about this has come to pass.
LuvNewcastle
(16,844 posts)A lot of scientists are predicting exponential growth of the disease in Africa. If tens or hundreds of thousands of people get it, chances are that it will spread to other continents. I've been seeing a lot of smugness from Americans about ebola's spread as well. I can't help but be at least a little concerned.
magical thyme
(14,881 posts)and with over 6,000 cases reported, WHO stating that the reported cases are underestimated by 2 to 4-fold and the CDC using 2.5 times as their baseline, there may already have been 20,000+ cases.
There is no reason to panic, but there is a lot of reason to not be blasé.
I've been waiting for the 1st pre-symptomatic case to enter the US. I'm not thrilled that after 12 people were isolated at the 1st symptoms, the 13th was released to wander around for an extra 2 days.
Maynar
(769 posts)and the emphatic assurances of complete containment regarding the single current case in Texas, are perhaps ringing a bit hollow.
Perhaps not, I'm not trying to scaremonger here, but:
Okay, I'm not quite sure what to think at this point.
Should I be worried?
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)recommended. We should carefully monitor all those who come out of the countries in which cases have been found.
Apparently, I have read elsewhere, Nigeria has pretty much managed to control a potential outbreak. It did not take the threat lightly. We should watch those who travel to and from Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. I hope that the fact that they identified this first case is a sign that the CDC is carefully watching all travelers who could possibly have come in contact with the virus.
pnwmom
(108,977 posts)But not because of fears of an outbreak in the US -- certainly not in the near future.
http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/why-we-should-care-about-the-ebola-outbreak-in-africa-b99333047z1-271757361.html
While many Americans and other countries worldwide remain comfortably peripheral to this faraway disease in a faraway land, it portends much more serious consequences if left to only our curiosity. Mandatory travel advisories, passenger screening, immigration control and border restrictions are not implausible and are on the horizon. These measures will invariably have repercussion for economic trade and business. They also raise the specter of social and political upheaval in the countries at the current EVD epicenter already battered by civil strife and poverty. Under such scenarios and in the context of our global village, eventually no one is left untouched or unaltered whether viewed through economic, social or health metrics.
If EVD continues to spread as predicted by public health experts, it will become even more difficult to control. Outbreak suppression is best accomplished early and quickly at ground zero around a tight ring around an index case and close contacts. As the circumference of the circle expands, so does the growth of transmission, exponentially shifting the public health strategy from active quenching to passive managing. Epidemics then run their course based on availability of susceptible hosts and favorable environmental conditions conducive to sustaining spread such as public complacency, lack of awareness and indifference. This I fear is the current state of affairs for many developed countries awkwardly poised on the sidelines.
Now is the time for unprecedented international cooperation, resource allocation and unified strategy between WHO, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and global policy-makers. Actions must be decisive and proactive rather than the current reactive posture in which leadership vision often becomes clouded and the aftermath more costly and indelible. Capacity and capability on the ground must be improved immediately to suppress the EVD epidemic. This will require international political will and consensus that has been in short supply given geopolitical tensions these days.
SNIP
The Ebola epidemic is not so much a public health wake-up call as it is a call to action on part of the entire global community to protect and take care of each other. The question remains whether we have the courage and determination to heed the call.
ErikJ
(6,335 posts)More people will now go to doctor earlier with symtoms. The #1 purpose of national health care plans worldwide.
seveneyes
(4,631 posts)As if this shit can't be spread quietly and quickly.
grahamhgreen
(15,741 posts)SheilaT
(23,156 posts)A lot of people here seem to have a poor understanding of what "contact with bodily fluids" means. It does not mean someone sneezing or coughing nearby. THAT is of concern if the disease in question is airborne.
Sherman A1
(38,958 posts)among many other things. I believe one would be foolish not to be concerned or at least aware. That said I am also concerned about women's rights, the middle east, the disparity in wealth, Ferguson, the environment, my own health and a host of other issues.
The Traveler
(5,632 posts)and there are apparently several virologists who would disagree with you on this matter.
The behavior of this strain is somewhat different from Ebola Zaire ... and, as several have observed, every time this thing does its human-to-human transmission gig, the evolutionary dice are being thrown about a trillion times. The worst adaptation (for us) would be true airborne transmission. But transmission buy airborne bodily fluids ... like droplets emitted by a cough or sneeze ... is already suspected. (But not proven!) Still, evolution will run its course. Give this thing enough time and enough victims, it will get better at human-to-human transmission.
Panic? No. Concern? Yes. Alert? You bet. Our safest course is the morally correct one ... do all that is necessary and possible to help the afflicted nations control this disease. I just read a report that Nigeria seems to have gotten on top of its outbreak ... let us hope this is a continuing trend.
Trav
Turborama
(22,109 posts)Which ones?
Thanks for your answer, btw. Your last 2 sentences were spot on. 
magical thyme
(14,881 posts)The short answer is the team of virologists headed by Harvard. I believe it's the same time that Dr. Sheik Humarr Khanik was part of.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsandsoda/2014/08/28/343734184/ebola-is-rapidly-mutating-as-it-spreads-across-west-africa
...For starters, the data show that the virus is rapidly accumulating new mutations as it spreads through people. "We've found over 250 mutations that are changing in real time as we're watching," Sabeti says.
While moving through the human population in West Africa, she says, the virus has been collecting mutations about twice as quickly as it did while circulating among animals in the past decade or so.
"The more time you give a virus to mutate and the more human-to-human transmission you see," she says, "the more opportunities you give it to fall upon some [mutation] that could make it more easily transmissible or more pathogenic."
Sabeti says she doesn't know if that's happening yet. But the rapid change in the virus' genome could weaken the tools researchers have to detect Ebola or, potentially, to treat patients....
-----
Ebola virus mutating rapidly as it spreads
http://www.nature.com/news/ebola-virus-mutating-rapidly-as-it-spreads-1.15777
The sequence data, which were made publicly available by 31 July, constitute the largest collection of genetic information on Ebola ever to be released. To get them, the group collected leftover blood from samples taken for diagnostic tests in Kenema. They then used a chemical solution to deactivate the Ebola viruses, and sent the samples to be sequenced at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The researchers sequenced the viral genomes from each sample an average of more than 2,000 times, allowing them track how the virus mutated as it spread from patient to patient. In April, researchers reported2 that they had sequenced data from Guinean patients' viruses. That team, however, produced one composite viral genome sequence for each patient, rather than individually sequencing different copies of the virus found in each patient, as in the work reported today.
Back to the beginning
By comparing their data to the Guinean sequence data, Goba's team confirmed that Ebola was probably imported to Sierra Leone by 12 people who attended the funeral in Guinea, and that the West African outbreak originated in a single event in which the virus passed from an animal into a person. Further comparisons suggest that the virus that caused the outbreak separated from those that caused past Ebola outbreaks about 10 years ago. It had accumulated more than 395 mutations between that time and June, when the researchers collected the last samples included in today's analysis.
The virus amassed 50 mutations during its first month, the researchers found. They say there is no sign that any of these mutations have contributed to the unprecedented size of the outbreak by changing the characteristics of the Ebola virus — for instance, its ability to spread from person to person or to kill infected patients. But others are eager to examine these questions.
ecstatic
(32,695 posts)into the general population for 2 days (while contagious). Am I concerned? Not really because I have A LOT on my mind, but others, especially those in the medical field, probably should be.
Dorian Gray
(13,493 posts)panicking? No.
Though I do have concern for the people in Africa who are suffering a real and uncontrolled outbreak. I think the US will contain it.
HereSince1628
(36,063 posts)which makes it somewhat useless.
I do agree that the risk of infection from a random public contact remains very very low. Something less than getting hit by lightening I would guess.
Javaman
(62,521 posts)
MineralMan
(146,288 posts)I'm very concerned about the outbreak in Africa. It's being very hard to control there. Here? Not concerned on any serious level. Conditions in this country are nothing like those in Africa.
PasadenaTrudy
(3,998 posts)than Ebola.