I am not downplaying Ebola. In the regions affected it is a deadly virus

[La Lioness Priyanka]

and is causing havoc.

however, the United States and several other first world countries are far more equipped to handle a break out of Ebola. Yes, there will be some screw ups should but we do have a functioning infrastructure and health care system. Additionally our population is relatively sparse, and we have a lot more money for a lot more epidemic related security than West African countries do.

I am also really unsure what an ebola related panic actually accomplishes. If I jumped up and down about the fears of Ebola, would that really help anyone?

There are many scary things in the world, that are killing thousands (ISIS, for instance), but are highly unlikely to kill me. Ebola is one of those things.

[snooper2]

1. somebody just died falling off a ladder this morning

[La Lioness Priyanka]

2. in bangladesh and india buildings collapse all the time killing hundreds

but again, I personally am unlikely to die in this manner.

it is a great privilege to live in the first world. every once in a while we should appreciate it.

[adigal]

3. I wasn't concerned until I read this story in the LA Times

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-ebola-questions-20141007-story.html#page=2&panel=comments

And while I am not jumping up and down in fear, I am thinking about buying some canned goods (because they last a long time) and talking to my two kids who live and go to school in NYC about how to get home if there is an outbreak.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

4. there is a lot of speculation in that article. even if this thing is airborne

we still have the infrastructure for it, given our response to SARS etc.

panic tends to cause a lot more destruction than is necessary.

[Electric Monk]

22. All the conservative pundits so worried about Ebola going airborne just admitted that

they believe in evolution

[Peacetrain]

5. Fear stops us in our tracks..

It really does.. and I am old enough to remember a number of fearful mindsets that had people doing loopy things.. From Aids to Y2K...

If doing a little pre prep like stocking up on a few cans of vegetables, and having a heart to heart with the kids.. to assuage some of the fear of the unknown.. I say that is a good idea..sometimes doing some little things can put the larger picture in a better perspective.

But if fear (and I know that is not what your are saying) just thinking out loud.. starts to make us do irrational things.. then that can be a major headache.

My older sister thought the world was going to come to an end in 2000 and she bought all of these crazy things that she could use when the power grid went down.. she was absolutely convinced the power grid was going down.. I did not know you could run a refrigerator with
gas.. I do now ... but fear of the unknown just froze her in her tracks.. And she is a bright woman..

So I am hoping people do more things to inform themselves about the reality of Ebola.. a virus.. and be proactive.. and not reactive. Do the small things that will relieve some of the stress and worry..

[adigal]

13. I'm not crazy over this, just thinking about it

I remember my crazy neighbors over the Y2K fear. We had many a chuckle at their crazy fear. But I think talking about this is smart.

[jeff47]

15. And that story is crap.

The thrust of the argument in that story is we can not absolutely 100% prove that ebola could never, ever be transmitted by air. Like we can 100% prove that E=mc^2.

There is nothing in all of biology that is 100% provable. Because absolutely nothing in biology occurs 100% of the time.

So demanding that we 100% prove ebola can't ever be transmitted by air is the wrong threshold. Heck, we can't 100% prove that the influenza virus causes influenza - some people get the virus and don't get sick.

Since we can't 100% prove anything, we have to go collect a large volume of data and see what the probabilities look like.

We have hundreds of thousands of cases of Ebola since the 1970s. We have zero cases where the virus was transmitted through the air to a human. If it were possible, how come it never happens?

We've seen it transmitted through the air to other creatures, such as pigs and some species of monkey. But not humans. In fact, we've watched, in vitro, as ebola infects pig lung tissue, and fails to infect human lung tissue

Does that mean it's utterly impossible for ebola to evolve the ability to infect through human lungs? Of course not. Again, nothing in biology is 100%. Even if we pretend it is 100% impossible today, evolution means it might be possible tomorrow.

So, how likely is it to evolve airborne transmission? We've never seen it in that entire family of viruses. Billions of infections of people, rats, monkeys, pigs, and even petri dishes. So we can say evolving airborne transmission is extremely unlikely.

So even though it's more likely that two asteroids land on top of each other in my backyard tonight, (CNN announcer voice) but what if it has?

Well, we know what an outbreak by an airborne virus looks like. Remember the H1N1 flu in 2009? It created a pandemic. In places with high population density, poor sanitation, poor medical care and no public health system, the virus spread extremely rapidly and infected very large numbers of people.

The ebola outbreak in Liberia is in a place with high population density, poor sanitation, poor medical care and no public health system. There's been around 5000 cases in Liberia. Only 8000 worldwide. If ebola could spread through the air, there would be 8000 cases in Liberia in a month, and it would only go that slow because of the long incubation period before becoming contagious.

You want to worry about airborne viruses? Well, it looks like H1N1 flu will be the virus that spreads around this flu season. There were more than 100,000 cases in the United States during the 2009 pandemic. Get your flu shot.

[PADemD]

17. Hundreds of thousands of cases of Ebola?

The World Health Organization has documented only 10,482 cases of Ebola from 1970-ytd 2014, including the one in the United States.

Ebola virus disease
Disease outbreak news
http://www.who.int/csr/don/archive/disease/ebola/en/

Ebola virus disease
Fact sheet N°103
Updated September 2014
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs103/en/

[jeff47]

18. I lumped several similar diseases together under one, technically inaccurate, name.

The fact that i was going back to 1970 while using a name for a disease that didn't appear until 1976 was a hint at that.

Btw, 10,482 does not appear on any of the pages you linked, the search for 10,482 on the site gets 0 relevant results and a google search also doesn't get 10,482. Where'd you get it?

[PADemD]

19. With a calculator

I totaled the cases at the link.

[jeff47]

20. K, now you need to add in the other, similar viruses

that technically aren't Ebolavirus but spread nearly the same way, function the same way and cause nearly the same disease.

[PADemD]

21. You can find the all the virus figures on the World Health Organization web site under Fact Sheets.

You did specifically say Ebola virus.

[Whiskeytide]

6. Jumping up and down is good cardio exercise....

..., and better health will help you ward off the coming Ebola pandemic!!!

I think Americans fall into three basic groups. Those with burning hair, those who are blowing it off in a cavalier manner, and those who are watching the story with concern far short of panic. And there are two primary concerns: 1. Ebola; and 2. how ill equipped our health care system was to handle this eventuality. Most people are not at the extremes.

But I will say that I AM genuinely surprised at the profound ineptness of the system, at least initially and in many respects. I'm afraid something really nasty might come along someday, and my confidence in our "1st World" ability to tamp it down is a little shaken.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

9. i think there are variations even in the first world. Texas, for instance,

has been cutting a lot of corners around healthcare. NY is not. These differences are meaningful when it comes to tackle something unexpected. However, if its a big enough problem, we will have the resources for it. Money makes a lot of things easier.

[Yo_Mama]

7. We do not have the infrastructure for it.

A few thousand cases would utterly destroy our health infrastructure. The reason is the isolation required. The clinic in TX that the deputy walked into is now shut down and won't be reopened until it is specially cleaned by a speciality cleaning firm - the same one that cleaned the apartment Duncan was staying in. Imagine that a few thousand times. We can't do it. The deputy, who is highly unlikely to have Ebola, will be held in the hospital until he has two clear blood tests (in early infection the blood tests can come back negative, and CDC recommends two).

Eventually, because Ebola has gone widespread in Africa, we will have a vaccine for it. That probably won't be until 2016. Until then, it is an acute threat.

Because it is an acute threat, we are reacting with extreme caution and trying to find every possible case before any case could start an infection chain. Therefore you are unlikely to catch it here. But that improbability is because of the extreme measures being taken to prevent a breakout.

There is no "hysteria" going on. The problem in the US is that the Texas Hospital took CDC's case definition too seriously in the first place. We probably have to isolate and clear 200-400 unlikely cases to prevent one overt infection. It's a huge and taxing effort which must be made.

When Duncan walked into that hospital the first time, he did not meet the CDC case definition, because his fever was too low. He did not tell the hospital staff that he had been closely exposed to a person in Liberia who then died. He probably did not know then that she had Ebola, but if he had told them of that death, they probably would have reacted differently.

Now everyone is ignoring the CDC case definition and going into hyperdrive because we can't afford another such case.
http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/symptoms/index.html

We've got nothing but early detection, isolation and contact tracing. It works, but you have a high number of false positives to rule out to make that work.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

8. extreme caution and panic are different things

panic leads to gossip/wild speculations/irrational behavior. caution is also required, whether its ebola/mers or something else.

[Yo_Mama]

10. I don't see any panic

What I see is that there was a degree of complacency in the west in medical circles that is now being displaced by a more realistic caution and determination.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

11. i see a lot of people panicking about ebola and speculating wildly about it. nt

[HereSince1628]

12. Think epidemiological triad...Host, Agent, Environment

All three contribute to disease in a population. There are many possibilities for variations in host wellness/habits and environment in the US.

In the US as elsewhere, there is some possibility for genetic variations to occur that shift the character of the virus. Some of that depends on ebolas interaction with genetic material from other viruses...data support a common evolutionary origin for some aspects of Ebola genome and avian retroviruses... What ebola will look like in a few years can't be completely certain.

Our health care system has asymmetries that follow from a society that has great wealth asymmetries, we vary in education and family practices regarding care of sick relatives, pets and the routine hygiene we practice around people and animals we share space with.

While the US is thought of as a first world nation with infrastructure, education, and healthcare at the pinnacle of what's possible, third world conditions do exist in the US. Sometimes within a 20 minute bus-ride of the first-world parts of our country.

There is no reason to panic, but I think there is reason to avoid over-confidence.

[liberal_at_heart]

14. yeah, I'm not really even opening very many of the ebola threads. My husband just recently traveled

to Texas and I wasn't worried a bit.

[PADemD]

16. Here's a story of panic from 1956

Polio: The deadly summer of 1956

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/polio-the-deadly-summer-of-1956-2117253.html

Although the story is about County Cork in Ireland, the United States also had a polio epidemic in 1956. I remember it well because one of my classmate's whole family was quarantined. No work, school, or visitors.

Scary times in 1956 because there was no polio vaccine at that time; and the only cure was either braces, an iron lung, or death.

[Warpy]

27. I had polio when I was a toddler

and had the Salk vaccine in 1952 as one of the first groups of children used as guinea pigs.

My mother knew I'd had the disease and was likely immune to it, she just didn't want to take any chances on going through it again.

I do remember panic years, 1954 and 1956 among them, when they closed the city swimming pools and that really chapped my ass. I remember my clunky shoes and kids in braces. People did panic but mostly for their children. That's odd because the worst cases were among adults.

[alcibiades_mystery]

23. If not a single additional case results from the Dallas vector (i.e., Mr. Duncan)

the people who have been running around here hitting the chicken switch need to at least tone it down for a hot minute.

If the family - the FAMILY! - doesn't contract it, after all we've heard from these folks?

They need to keep epidemiology out they mouths for a minute. Seriously.

[cwydro]

24. I agree, and the Texas thing was a debacle.

Hopefully, we'll learn from it.

My local paper today though, showed the latest "suspected" case in Texas being helped down from an ambulance. The helpers were in hazmat suits, though parts of their faces were visible. The "patient" was wearing what looked like a shower cap, a mask, a gown of some sort, AND SHORTS! No protective gear on his lower body. It would be hilarious except for the fact that it isn't.

That photo alone told me they don't know what they're doing there.

But, I doubt he has Ebola...the whole thing has been blown completely out of proportion. In this country, I mean. West Africa has a huge problem on its hands, and I hope we continue to help there.

Thank you for your reasoned post. They seem to be in short supply around here lately.

[FLPanhandle]

25. I'm downplaying Ebola.

It's not even in the top 10 of viruses causing deaths even in Africa. It's not easily contagious. It has a relatively short incubation period.

It's killed but in comparison to other diseases, it's a minor player.

However, it's new! Human psychology being what it is and the media fascination with new and scary is driving a panic all out of proportion with the risk.

Totally overblown panic for people with little understanding and whipped up by the media.

[Warpy]

26. There is such a vast difference in infrastructure between here and there

and I'm not talking solely about health care infrastructure, not to mention cultural differences.

People don't have refrigeration, so they need to shop daily. They often don't have indoor water supplies, so they need to haul water daily. Their sewage system is often an unlined cess pit which can leach into the water supply.

Hospitals and treatment centers do their best but are geared more toward non contagious things like malaria and parasitic infections, difficult childbirth, and children with the local illnesses. They're not set up to manage an epidemic illness, not even one as difficult to contract as ebola.

The cultural differences include a great deal of contact with a dead body while preparing it for burial and a massive mistrust of European style medicine.

Flipping out over ebola here in the US where these things are not in play is just plain goofy. There are worse things to flip out over, like the Republicans having all 3 branches of government again.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

28. yeah, people who dont understand the infrastructural differences have no idea

what they are talking about

[cali]

29. Sure, that's likely true, but the ramifications of the outbreak are

serious for the world- not just Africa.