Mass outbreaks are a legitimate fear to be sure, but you're asking a pretty leading question there. If you want to know more, just ask straight up what the facts are rather than invoking pandemic fears before anybody can answer
On your question:
I did hear an interesting comparison to the seasonal flu. WHO website claims that 250,000 - 500,000 deaths
annually occur worldwide because of that virus...that's not even a hiccup in the world's population growth. Granted flu deaths are largely among high-risk groups (young, elderly and chronically ill), whereas Ebola infects and kills across the board. The maximum predicted size of the ebola outbreak (total infected, not total dead because of it) is
at least an order of magnitude smaller than flu deaths,
-- and it's predicted to be over in less than a year.
It's important to keep that kind of figure in perspective when you're considering the size of the potential outbreak. That and Ebola is nowhere
near as contagious as the flu, is spread by contact with the infected (e.g. fluids, skin, mucus), and is
not airborne. The "sick guy with ebola on the plane" scenario doesn't even necessarily mean that the guy's seat-neighbour gets ebola, much less the rest of the passengers.
IIRC from the CBC radio interview I listened to with a lead ebola vaccine researcher, there are 4 experimental vaccines that are ready to go but have not been tested extensively on humans. These could be produced en masse and distributed today, but international rules are such that there would have to be a direct invitation from the government of the country suffering the outbreak to test the drugs on their population.
It was the researcher's opinion that the optics of that kind of invitation were very poor and that was a major reason nobody has asked for a large scale experimental vaccination program as yet. Think of the headlines: "The West uses Africa as its vaccine testing laboratory"..."America tests drugs on African guinea pigs". The researcher also speculated that a major outbreak in, say, Canada or USA would be much more likely to trigger a vaccination campaign because the optics would be faaaaaar better.I
agree with that assessment somewhat, even though there are surely other factors at play.
All that doesn't mention the massive differences in outbreak prevention and control between 3rd world African countries and places like N.America and Europe...and the fact that we *know* where the outbreak is...and the affected countries are locked down pretty heavily in terms of outbound air travel.
So big outbreak? Hell yes. Terrible tragedy? Double hell yes. Likelihood of worldwide pandemic coming out of nowhere la hot zone? Not so much.
EDIT - the media plays on the fear of deadly diseases to a fault. Think of the flap over SARS when it reached Canada and US...like 25 people died or something? Not trying to dismiss those deaths as irrelevant (they are as tragic as any death anywhere) - just pointing out that the media artificially, knowingly inflates the danger of the "Maladie du Jour" and rarely if ever provides context for the reported size of the outbreak.
This post has been edited by cerveza_fiesta: 28 August 2014 - 06:11 PM