First off, full disclosure: I'm not a virologist. I'm a molecular biologist with specialism in developing diagnostics tests for infectious disease and have worked on lots of bacteria (MRSA, C.difficile etc) and the viruses causing flu and HIV. Nico - your mutation article references PCR-based diagnostic tests. That's my bag, using DNA and RNA sequences to rapidly identify the causative agent of disease. I recently quit R&D and currently work for a body notified by the UK government to regulate such tests in the EU i.e. to ensure new diagnostic tests are safe to be sold in the European Economic Area. You can decide for yourself if I'm qualified to make expert comment (I think I am )
Nicodimas, on 28 August 2014 - 04:53 PM, said:
http://www.bloomberg...dated-plan.html
Breaking Article Suggests 20,000 Infected with a current Lethality of 50% in this Variant..!!
I wouldn't mind hearing someone with upper level knowledge as it sounds like it can honestly be Spread by a Sneeze, I don't think that makes it "Airborne" ..Correct?
Viral haemorrhagic fevers are spread by contact with bodily fluids. So it is more similar to HIV than flu but unlike HIV is a little more easily transmitted. Most transmissions so far are healthcare transmissions or due to African burial practices where people touch the dead body. For you or I to catch it we would need to touch the bodily fluid of a severely infected person (blood, body fluids, organs) and then transfer that fluid to one of our mucous membranes - mouth, eyes, nose. The first line of defence is washing your hands with soup and water. Flu is way more contagious and a lot less people have had it than they think. On average we each get real influenza once every 10 or 12 years. I travelled on public transport in a major metropolitan area in the UK all through the swine flu outbreak and I haven't had influenza since 2002.
Spread of this infection in a healthcare setting in the west would be zero to rare because we have single-use disposable basic medical equipment such as gowns, masks, gloves, curtains and things like needles and drinking cups. In Africa such items are crudely disinfected and reused. I read an interesting manual produced by the CDC advising African healthcare facilities on infection control CDC manual pdf - it is basic stuff when you have access to lots of disposable equipment and incinerators. You also have to look at how infected US and UK nationals have been brought home without any of the people they had contact with being infected. It's just not that contagious.
Applying some context to the WHO press release about the potential for 20,000 infections before it comes under control - it sounds rather alarmist and unlike the WHO usual tone but they are trying to alarm the international community into mobilising man power and resources to go to Africa and help.
Nicodimas, on 28 August 2014 - 06:15 PM, said:
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Ebola always freaks me out, cause it melts your insides ..The hot zone suggests more than once this the Virus turning you into the perfect carrier to infect everyone...
What worries me is the -reports- that this one can spread with no symptoms showing. Though could be cause of the substandard care in that part of the world. That also in my mind makes it the perfect place to create a colossal disaster of a virus.
Ebola doesn't melt your insides. Most people die from dehydration due to vomiting and diarrhoea. It has an incubation period of 2 - 22 days (I think). Yes that makes it more dangerous because someone could wander around for 22 days without showing signs but in this time they would have a low viral load which again makes transmission less likely. So at that time you have a small amount of virus that is hard to transmit. Not really a big deal.
Nicodimas, on 28 August 2014 - 06:35 PM, said:
If you find some information on Vaccine Manufacturing that would be great!
Europe and the US have mass vaccination production facilities (run by corporations like Roche, GSK and Astra Zeneca). Once a vaccine is known to work, production volumes would be high after a couple of months.
Nicodimas, on 28 August 2014 - 07:54 PM, said:
Here is some information from the field^ on mutations.. I would really like some more insightful information on what a "mutation" means in everyday terms.
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Is this cause for concern..? Or completely normal for a virus.
Cause has the crux of it - this mutation level is entirely normal. The reason people are looking into it is to understand the origin and spread and to look for novel features that could be exploited by diagnostics/drugs/vaccines and not because MUTATIONS BAD ARGHHHHH. Mutations are one of many reasons PCR-based diagnostic tests might give false negatives but that is a routine part of the technology and the institutions/companies that manufacture these tests usually keep abreast of it. People who make diagnostic tests are obliged to report false positive and false negative rates (typically around 1% and 5% respectively) and it is the reason why there are different levels of diagnostic test and why they are used in combination with clinical skill of evaluating exposure risk and symptoms. Usually a primary test will have a higher false positive and negative rate because accuracy has to be sacrificed in order for screening the wider population to be economically viable in terms of cost per test, time taken and laboratory resources required. Then you have secondary and confirmatory tests that follow up and confirm diagnosis. In a public health context, the number of people who receive an incorrect diagnosis is negligible.
We also need to remember that what the public learned about influenza during the swine flu pandemic scare does not apply to ebola. There isn't a virus sink of ebola in the population as there is with flu - there is no melting pot of it in domestic animals and humans living on top of each other so there aren't lots of strains floating around waiting to combine and create super-ebola as is the over-hyped risk with flu.
Ebola is a crisis but it is a local crisis. The west should help from a humanitarian perspective not because it is a risk to us.