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Ebola - all or nothing?

Re: Ebola - all or nothing?

Today in you know what.

A Maine elementary school teacher has been barred from school after visiting Dallas, Texas, where Ebola patients have been treated - despite having no contact with any suspected sufferers.

It comes after hundreds of parents removed their children from a middle school in Mississippi because the principal visited Zambia - 3,000 miles from any countries struck by the deadly disease.
 
Re: Ebola - all or nothing?

Well, I feel much safer now that Ron Klain has gone from disenfranchising GIs in Florida and wiping the drool off Joe Biden's chin (and making sure he's zipped up) to "Ebola Czar." Only a terminally cynical person could conclude this appointment was anything but a pathetic, political, shortly-before-an-election move.
 
Re: Ebola - all or nothing?

Well, I feel much safer now that Ron Klain has gone from disenfranchising GIs in Florida and wiping the drool off Joe Biden's chin (and making sure he's zipped up) to "Ebola Czar." Only a terminally cynical person could conclude this appointment was anything but a pathetic, political, shortly-before-an-election move.

Perhaps somewhere in his extensive background he took an elective in epidemiology?;) Way back in the dark ages of the 1960's, when i was in medical school, the required reading list including a bunch of stuff by Berton Roueche. He stories and investigations of epidemics and their origins and spread were often times published in the New Yorker Magazine but collections of his works in book form still float around on the web these days. Studies of the spread of old time diseases such as Typhoid, TB, Bubonic Plague, Sweating Sickness, Hanta Virus, Cholera, etc are often quite instructive when it comes to evaluating some new virulent process.
 
Re: Ebola - all or nothing?

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

The New Yorker has an extensive article about Ebola virus this week.

Since there is no vaccine against or cure for the disease caused by Ebola virus, the only way to stop it is to break the chains of infection. Health workers must identify people who are infected and isolate them, then monitor everybody with whom those people have come in contact, to make sure the virus doesn’t jump to somebody else and start a new chain....Health authorities in Europe and the United States seem equipped to prevent Ebola from starting uncontrolled chains of infection in those regions, but they worry about what could happen if Ebola got into a city ....

The virus is extremely infectious. Experiments suggest that if one particle of Ebola enters a person’s bloodstream it can cause a fatal infection....The virus is believed to be transmitted, in particular, through contact with sweat and blood,...

Viruses like Ebola, which use RNA for their genetic code, are prone to making errors in the code as they multiply; these are called mutations. Right now, the virus’s code is changing. As Ebola enters a deepening relationship with the human species, the question of how it is mutating has significance for every person on earth.

there isn’t just one “strain” of the virus. Ebola is not a thing but a swarm. It is a vast population of particles, different from one another, each particle competing with the others for a chance to get inside a cell and copy itself. The swarm’s genetic code shifts in response to the changing environment.


It sounds like an ounce of prevention is worth more like 100 pounds of cure, perhaps.
 
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