This is our CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/ebola/situation-summary/index.html
And yes, this is a big deal. Public health emergencies of international concern are a short list consisting of, in their entirety: swine flu ('09 to '10), polio ('14 on), ebola ('13 to '16), Zika ('16), ebola ('19 to '20), Covid ('20 to '23), monkeypox ('22 to '25) and now this [1]. It's one step down from a pandemic emergency (which, to be clear, has not been declared).
(Helpful explainer: https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2....)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_health_emergency_of_int...
Also, the article says surveillance picked up the spread late. I wonder if the US's pulling back from the WHO and other international functions had anything to do with this, it used to make up a big chunk of its resources and staff.
"Case fatality rates in the past two [Bundibugyo virus disease] outbreaks, reported in Uganda and in DRC in 2007 and 2012, have ranged from approximately 30% to 50%" [1]. Given "as of 15 May, a total of 246 suspected cases and 80 deaths" were reported, the current disease's 33% fatality rate is in the historic range.
[1] https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2...
Is that like a general rule, or pure bunk? (I'd probably assume the answer 'depends').
I understand the jury is still out on whether a virus can be considered "alive" but, like us, it is capable of replicating itself and mutating. In that sense, it benefits from the same evolution strategies as more complex beings: a strain that gets its host very sick very quickly gets a lower chance to spread to a new host and multiply.
This creates an evolutionary advantage for strains of that virus that are less aggressive or at least develop the worst symptoms more slowly and more covertly.
That allowed for a deadly disease that's somewhat hard to spread (mostly just through sex) to ultimately go on a rampage.
So without concern for the humans with HIV* there an argument to be made that treating symptoms without curing made it spread more?
*obviously, this is just hypothetical. It’s important to care about the life of those with HIV. No banish them all to something like a leper-colony. Although it explains the logic for those archer time they existed better than a religious one did.
I remember way back in med school in the mid-70s our infectious disease professor asking this same question, in a philosophical as much as a mechanistic sense.
The most successful strategy is to make a virus that spreads fast, with few visible symptoms until the late stages of the disease. A deadly virus, early will just cause borders to be locked and the international research community to swarm on a cure.
That said I'm quite hopeful, since there is a vaccine for other strains.
The us is not involved in this mess.
If by not involved you mean still massively subject to the public health and econonomic consequences of a containment failure, then sure.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary...
The disease control interventions really are a mix of teaching and doing. In acute situations, experts are brought in to do (some of) the things. But mostly it's training and outreach and supplying equipment to do routine disease control and surveillance of issues that need help.
This is less about feeding a neighbor than digging them a latrine so they stop crapping in your water supply.
With what money? There's a reason they're dependent on USAID.
> I'm sure there's a parable about teaching someone to fish rather than feeding them
Unfortunately the priorities of USAID (and European foreign aid as well) aren't exactly aligned with that paradigm. It's the worst expressed in agriculture because we just dumped our excess production on Africa to keep our prices stable, but foreign aid being sustainable is a relatively new and not really widespread requirement.
To hell with your historical collective guilt machine.
I honestly dont care what people did before I was born. I had absolutely no decision in anything of theirs. Had no choice in any of that. Nor did I enslave or torture or murder people. My parents didnt either. Their parents didnt either.
And somehow, Im responsible for shit that happened hundreds of years ago? Whatever.
I dont mind helping and working collectively for a human cause. But im also not going to be an emotional collective guilt tampon because people before I was born did bad things.
Id say "Take it up with them", but theyre dead. Thats why you flail at anybody and try to make them feel responsible.
I will not answer to idiocy like "your bloodline X generations back".
I am not feeling guilty simply because I am not guilty.
And I do not feel guilty about historical happenings I did not have a hand in. They are things to read about to understand how we got here. But caring? No. More like dispassionate historical context.
I fight against shit like "Collective Historical Guilt". Liberals here in the USA use this crap, like in worthless land akcnowldgements but do absolutely nothing.
Ive also seen a lot of republican and MAGA types also have their 'white' ethnicity weaponized. Its obvious when 1 side blames you on a demographic you cant change (skin color). You vote against them.
I will never support collective guilt/punishment. And I will not 'care' about some historical wrongs.
>However WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stressed in a statement it "does not meet the criteria of pandemic emergency" and advised countries against closing their borders.
Directly contradicted by the WHO: "...spreads from person to person through direct contact with the blood, secretions, organs, or other bodily fluids of infected individuals or contaminated surfaces" [1].
[1] https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2...
The average commentator on this website, if he or she dies this year, will be more likely to die in a motor vehicle accident or due to the complications of cardiovascular disease, or due to cancer.
If you’re going to spend time worrying, worry about all those things instead. When it comes to infectious diseases, the flu is more likely to kill the people here than hantavirus or Ebola. Make sure to get your flu vaccines.
Adding both those risks together still is a higher risk than before...
The WHO language is "a public health emergency of international concern," but not "a pandemic emergency."
But I have no clue how far along vaccines are, and even if they exist how feasible it would be to use in e.g Congo. Similar to how we can treat tuberculosis, yet many people keep dying of it.
Unfortunately, the hotbed being Africa makes the situation much worse given historical events - the entire continent has a dark history regarding colonial and modern abuses of power for medical "experiments" [1], and the entire topic resurfaced during the early Covid era [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_experimentation_in_Afr...
[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/4/8/medical-colonial...
1. It could spread airborne;
2. It spread relatively easily. Not quite measles-level of contagiousness but still, pretty good;
3. Unlike something like the flu, there really wasn't any kind of natural resistance. What we now call the modern flu is a descendant of the Spanish flu that killed tends of millions in 1919-1920 in its first outbreak and it becamse less lethal for a variety of reasons; and
4. (This is the big one) It would spread when the carrier was asymptomatic. The flu can also spread asymptomatically but AFAIK it's less common. People with the flu tend to self-isolate showing symptoms.
Still, what's probably most concerning about Covid is the number of people who truly believe it was and is fake. The public health implications of that as well as the societal and psychological impacts is something we're going to be studying for decades to come.
The exact contagion mechanism for hantavirus isn't confirmed. Previously it's been from, say, rat to human. It's believed there was human-to-human transmission with the plague cruise ship of doom but whatever the case, it's simply not as contagious.
Ebola generally requires contact to spread. How it's spread in a lot of these African regions has historically been from funeral rites. Family of the deceased would touch the body and this contact would spread the disease. So while it was quite contagious, it didn't spread airborne (as far as we know). It's also quite lethal, which naturally tends to limit spread. The king of long-dormant viruses is of course HIV.
But at least we aren't dealing with cordyceps [1] so we've got that going for us at least.
[1]: https://thelastofus.fandom.com/wiki/Cordyceps_brain_infectio...
Public-health experts never seemed concerned about hantavirus. They are with this. It's appropriate to take their declarations seriously.
> Ebola generally requires contact to spread
"Human infection occurs through close contact with the blood or secretions of infected wildlife, such as bats or non-human primates, and subsequently spreads from person to person through direct contact with the blood, secretions, organs, or other bodily fluids of infected individuals or contaminated surfaces. Transmission is particularly amplified in health-care settings when infection prevention and control (IPC) measures are inadequate, and during unsafe burial practices involving direct contact with the deceased" [1].
So yes on traditional burial. But much easier to spread than HIV.
[1] https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2...
We may never know the true origins of Covid-19.
So with asymptomatic spread and a novel virus, it's unlikely that whatever China did actually mattered at all. Once cases reached the US in particular, it was game over. People just can't miss work. There were very few places that maintain zero Covid for any significant period of time (eg Australia) through a combination of luck, geography and extreme quarantine. By geography I mean Australia doesn't have any land borders. And even then it only lasted so long.
Tough to say that's "exactly the right amount of deadly" for a pandemic when the Black Death and Spanish flu killed larger fractions of their total affected populations (in the latter case, of humans) [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics_and_pandemic...
Do you have any other fantasy tales you’d like to tell?
I've had flu twice, and both times I simply wouldn't have been able to leave the house no matter how much I wanted to - even just turning over in bed was a major effort!
Would people not have spotted their shivering and sweating and sent them straight home again?
Shit pay, no benefits, and managers who threaten to fire you if you dont show up. Sick? Puke in the bathroom.
Whys this the case? Cause we Americans have garbage for labor laws. You can be fired for pretty much any reason. And you are NOT protected if youre sick.
When I had to work food seevice, at starbucks, subway, random pizza chain, etc, I begrudgingly came in sick, infected LOADS of customers. My choice was to work, or get fired (or not fired but 0 hours for next 2 weeks on schedule as punishment).
Who knows how many I got sick and potentially killed due to compromised immune systems. Im sure I did.
This is the real, hidden external cost, of our unmitigated capitalism. People get sick and die for the reason of making the boss more money, and too fucking bad.
And healthcare being tied to "having a good enough job".
But yea, it's a huge mess.
> Approximately one-quarter (26%, n = 303/1169) of adults (aged 16–64 years) with self-reported ILI took time off work for their illness for a mean of 3.3 days, compared with 31% (n = 31/99) and 20% (n = 3/15) of those with confirmed influenza A or B, respectively, who reported missing a mean of 3.8 and 3.0 days.
Anyway: taking time off work when too sick to work != isolating when the symptoms first appear.
It always goes like this with me, the first few days:
- Hm, am I coming down with something? Not too sure. Feel a bit under the weather
- I'm feeling great! Let's go shopping/for coffee/to the supermarket/see friends
- OHH I definitely have flu
> "It would spread when the carrier was <LARGELY> asymptomatic" , the largely is very important here otherwise containment would have been a lot different.
The main concerns for covid were also limited to a novel strain of a known virus type (again a KNOWN TYPE) being released into a global general populous with no inherent immunity. Aka expect ~5% of cases to probably have complications and some smaller %-age of that to be serious. If we didn't know what covid was we wouldn't be calling it "covid-19" to expressly describe which genus we're talking about. (Followed by general stupidity from people of pretending we don't know how other covid strains progress (regardless of any 'novel' effects)). Sill no sensible scenario put death rates >1% for anyone not in an at risk group. I mean everyone forgets the south-park sars skit that there's a 97% chance of catching that practically without symptoms. Why this became polarised about steam rolling through untested technology onto the populous is identical to the "green coal" and "tech will solve the carbon footprint" thinking...
2014 was Ebolavirus proper (Zaire, I believe). This outbreak is this fucker of a chimera [1].
Snark aside, there may be an Ebola outbreak and no doubt it's affecting certain African countries but calling it a global health emergency is laughable and I'd trust TMZ's analysis on reporting orders of magnitude more than I'd ever trust anything the WHO has to say.
The CDC did fine, but not WHO. I wouldn't even call WHO public health experts at this point - it's just a political racket that's pretty analogous to the UN generally in terms of how objective and useful they are.
I've had 12+ COVID vaccines and one of my degrees is a BSc so it isn't like I'm some antivaxxing conspiratorial anti-science hillbilly. WHO isn't really about science though, they're about funding and pushing particular agendas which is... antithetical to actual science.
Your complaint is with the NYT's re-phrasing, not the WHO.
WHO declaration is: "determined a public health emergency of international concern" https://www.who.int/news/item/17-05-2026-epidemic-of-ebola-d...
Obviously it's a local public health emergency, and some international concern seems warranted anytime an ebola strain pops up...
But, we'll just throw that in to the story anyway, even though we have no facts either way.
We don't have a tight chain of causation. But we have plenty of facts pointing entirely one way.
We know there was "a critical four-week detection gap between the onset of symptoms of the presumed index case...and the laboratory confirmation of the outbreak" [1]. This has contributed to "significant uncertainties to the true number of infected persons and geographic spread associated with this event at the present time" [2]. And tying all of this back to DOGE, we know USAID's "more than 50 staffers dedicated to outbreak response" were cut to "just six people to handle Ebola, Marburg virus, mpox and bird flu preparedness" [3].
Musk and Trump didn't cause this outbreak. But we would have had a better chance of catching this sooner, and with more precision, if we had those resources there.
[1] https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2...
[2] https://www.who.int/news/item/17-05-2026-epidemic-of-ebola-d...
[3] https://www.spyuganda.com/another-one-us-cuts-aid-to-fight-e...
Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern
https://www.who.int/news/item/17-07-2019-ebola-outbreak-in-t...
> 17 July 2019
(people never seem to look for/check dates any more)
> Pursuant to paragraph 2 of Article 12 - Determination of a public health emergency of international concern, including a pandemic emergency of the International Health Regulations (2005) (IHR), the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), after having consulted the States Parties where the event is known to be currently occurring, is hereby determining that the Ebola disease caused by Bundibugyo virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda constitutes a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), but does not meet the criteria of pandemic emergency, as defined in the IHR.
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