Nightmares of the Ebola virus

jjstraka34

I distinctly remember being terrified of this when I first heard of outbreaks as a child, and it is even more chilling to STILL hear them, most even worse, even 20 years later. Humanity would lose quickly to this lethal killer if it ever got out of control. Just for conversations sake, how terrifying do YOU find the Ebola outbreaks in Africa. Is it (or something or it's like) how humanity is destined to one day fall apart. As George Carlin once said in a great bit...."the planet will be fine, it'll shake us off like a case of bad fleas."

kiwidoc

I think the latest outbreak of Ebola is appalling - but not for the reasons most people are disturbed by it. Ebola is passed on via bodily fluids, not by droplets in the air you breath out. This makes it much easier to contain than any of the recent flu scares. In a country with a reasonably funded modern health service an outbreak of Ebola can be contained so that only dozens of people fall victim to the disease, not hundreds or thousands. In any place with decent health care for people who are reasonably well nourished and healthy to start with the death rate is about 50% - which is still bloody awful. However in a place with wide spread poor nutrition, lousy services such as sewage and water supply, over run hospitals with low supplies of all the things needed just to support an ill body the death rate rises to 80 or 90%,

So I am appalled that an outbreak of an illness that could have ended up killing a couple of hundred people at most is going to kill thousands, maybe tens of thousands. I am appalled but not surprised - TB and HIV kill hundreds of thousands every year in "developing countries" - almost all of these people could have been saved. But the countries where they live don't have enough money (or the money is in all the wrong hands), and the pharmaceutical companies are far too interested in profit to sell the needed medicines at a reasonable price ... and the vast majority of those of us lucky to live in rich countries don't give a shit.

But when a few irresponsible rags try and whip up a health scare here in the UK and its US that are supposedly at risk - oh how we all scream our bloody heads off!

Sorry about the rant guys - but as you can tell this is a subject I feel very very strongly about.

terzaerian

I find people who assure us that things will be fine because ebola is a "fragile" virus are ignoring the possibility that it could mutate into a more durable form, or one that could travel on those droplets in breath. What is so supposedly immutable about ebola that such a mutation is out of the question?

SapphireIce101

I don't think they want to push the notion of mutation because that may spread mass panic. Kind of like when avian flu finally makes the jump to person to person. Now, what should scare people the most about avian flu is that it has the same toxin strain as the Spanish flu of 1918.

As for Ebola, we have no cure for that, if it does mutate like @terzaerian‌ says. Well, lets just say it won't end very well for humanity.

elminster

SapphireIce101 said:

I don't think they want to push the notion of mutation because that may spread mass panic.

Or maybe because it would be horribly jumping the gun and announcing something that hasn't happened yet. Rather than talking about addressing the viruses impact that is happening right now.

SapphireIce101 said:

Now, what should scare people the most about avian flu is that it has the same toxin strain as the Spanish flu of 1918.

Lets recap the world in 1918 shall we?

-No penicillin (much less anything else we've developed since then for fighting viruses/bacteria).
- Quaint means of containing patients who were sick with a virus.
- Computers used punch cards. Just slightly better than the loom machines of the 19th century, but not that much. Our ability to map out the makeup of a virus was (as far as I'm aware) non-existent (which also ties into how far science has come since then).
- Was going through/went through a devastating war that left a lot of people wounded (along with a host of other problems). This included restrictions on what could get published about the disease spreading.
- Airplanes were still in their infancy, meaning that even if one place invented a cure our ability to distribute it worldwide was pretty limited (particularly if it involved specialized equipment).

Honestly I'm really not that scared. The number of lab confirmed deaths of H1N1 worldwide was about 19,000 in 2009. You compare that to something like Rotavirus those numbers are tiny. They certainly aren't that severe compared to the number of people who died from the spanish flu.

SapphireIce101 said:

As for Ebola, we have no cure for that, if it does mutate like @terzaerian‌ says. Well, lets just say it won't end very well for humanity.

It would certainly be a challenge but we are in a much better position to address that now than in the past. Also all the mortality numbers we are seeing for Ebola are coming from developing countries, so as kiwidoc pointed out these are numbers coming out of countries that lack a lot of basic infrastructure and have a garbage healthcare system.

terzaerian

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that ebola will mutate into a stronger form, I'm wondering what is holding it back from doing so, because honestly I would like to know the specifics; either my fears are well-founded (a cold comfort) or an ebola mutation is unlikely (the best-case scenario).

Awong124

I remember ebola was all the rage back when the movie Outbreak came out. There was also another movie that came out around that time that was about the ebola virus, but I can't remember what it was.

jjstraka34

Awong124 said:

I remember ebola was all the rage back when the movie Outbreak came out. There was also another movie that came out around that time that was about the ebola virus, but I can't remember what it was.

Outbreak was half of an excellent movie. It was really engaging and tense right up until the point that Dustin Hoffman and Cuba Gooding Jr. basically became super-heroes in a helicopter. Donald Sutherland is always great, and I've always gotten a kick out of his "Sandman, this is Viper Command" lines near the end of that movie. The coincidental rhyming just seemed silly in that context.

Drugar

terzaerian said:

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that ebola will mutate into a stronger form, I'm wondering what is holding it back from doing so, because honestly I would like to know the specifics; either my fears are well-founded (a cold comfort) or an ebola mutation is unlikely (the best-case scenario).

Same reason that's holding frogs back from developing wings; things don't evolve that quickly (though virusses do evolve quicker than frogs) and it hasn't had a need to. If every illness suddenly became airborne just before it faced some opposition, we'dve been wiped out long ago.

Awong124

terzaerian said:

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that ebola will mutate into a stronger form, I'm wondering what is holding it back from doing so, because honestly I would like to know the specifics; either my fears are well-founded (a cold comfort) or an ebola mutation is unlikely (the best-case scenario).

The problem is that the virus doesn't know what mutations will make it more effective. It can't plan for that outcome and strive towards it. For it to evolve and become more effective, it would have to have a freak random mutation that causes it to somehow become stronger. The chance of even having a mutation is already low, since RNA is supposed to replicate perfect duplicates, so having a mutation is already an anomaly. Then you'd have to have a mutation that causes it to become stronger, out of the myriad of other effects that a mutation could cause. A mutation has to happen first, and then it gets decided through natural selection whether or not it's effective. Even if a strain of the virus is mutated to be stronger than the previous generation, it still has to survive long enough to reproduce, which isn't guaranteed.