The ebola panic

[AccountingDrone]

You said it yourself. One must make contact with the infected substance to be at risk of catching it.From there, you'll need to get it into your system somehow. Either through your blood, stomach, or mucous membranes. Simply seeing the puke, or even standing/walking by it, will not cause infection.

And if I, a known klutz trips and falls into a now more or less dry puddle of vomit trying to avoid it, or having been my normal klutzy self. I now have abrasions on my hands that have been on the contaminated vomit.

Fecal matter occurs - and all it takes is one stupid accident for that fecal matter to happen to some poor schlub that otherwise would be healthy. Why do you think they quarantine people? To reduce the chance that someone will biohazard on something and expose someone. How about those noncompliant roomies - let me go to the grocery to pick up some fruit .... *sneeze* handle several fruits looking for a nice fresh one, and snarfe on my hand and use the same hand to grab the plastic bag roll to get one to put fruit in. Oh, and let me snarf all over this $20 bill and hand it to someone to stack with other bills to pay for that nice bag of apples. On the way home, I think I will stop for a coffee - so now I have opened the door from both sides, stood in line, rested my snarfy hands on the counter and then gone over and added milk and splenda, touching the counter and the garbage can.

Go watch the mythbusters when they do snot transmission with the UV responsive fake snot.

[TheHuckster]

The problem is not just the vomit in the parking lot, but that chances are traces of biowaste is on the patient's hands and other body parts. Anything he touches, at that point, becomes contaminated, and it doesn't matter if you can't see it, or even smell it, the germs are there.

Again, people don't willingly touch or consume others' vomit and other biowaste, yet biowaste-transmitted illnesses like norovirus spreads quickly when someone is sick, and a lot of the reason is due to scant traces of the fluids being spread onto anything the ill-stricken come into contact with.

Yes, washing hands and taking other precautions will help contain it, but it's not always foolproof, and the difference between ebola and norovirus is if you're a healthy individual, you will survive norovirus. Not necessarily so with ebola.

[BlaqueKatt]

yet biowaste-transmitted illnesses like norovirus spreads quickly when someone is sick, and a lot of the reason is due to scant traces of the fluids being spread onto anything the ill-stricken come into contact with.

highly incorrect, most of the cases of norovirus outbreaks are due to a sick person working in food service. NOT community contact.

comparing the two is really apples/oranges as people contagious with noro are usually still well enough to wander around while ebola the most wandering you do while infectious is to seek medical attention.

Also the R nought for norovirus is around 14 because it's NOT only fecal-oral, it's person to person*(like a cold), and waterbourne. Also 23 million cases in the US, and 267 million worldwide annually. (one case a patron vomited in a restaurant, 52 got sick from just being in the same room-ebola doesn't transmit that way)


*you can get norovirus just walking next to a sick person, you cannot get ebola walking next to a sick person.

[HYHYBT]

That brings up another question: how long does a contaminated substance stay dangerous? For example, could someone pumping out a septic tank years later get ebola that way?

[D_Yeti_Esquire]

Probably not a septic tank.

It boils down to - in water or outside the body, not very long. Obviously anything that preserves the environment for Ebola helps it survive but it's not excessively hardy.

That said - in a dead body you've got the equivalent of a virus bomb. It survies a long time.

[Greenday]

So basically just don't touch someone with Ebola and don't touch any bodily fluids that have been left behind by them. Sounds simple enough.

Just saw a kid is being examined for Ebola-like symptoms in Delaware.

[Gravekeeper]

I can't help but feel there would be less of a panic if all of the US news networks didn't go into a 24/7 "YOU'RE ALL GOING TO FUCKING DIE" cycle as soon as ebola was mentioned. >.>

[blas87]

I know it's a bad comparison, so please don't take it that I'm comparing the symptoms or the disease or even the number of deaths with each other, but the PANIC reminds me of Swine Flu a few years back.

In reality, I don't think hardly anyone I work with got it. A few of the hypocondriac attention whores claimed they got it (including my ex, Satan Himself), but I never really saw anyone put their lives on hold or really stop going about their business for as much panic as they spoke of.

[Gravekeeper]

I know it's a bad comparison, so please don't take it that I'm comparing the symptoms or the disease or even the number of deaths with each other, but the PANIC reminds me of Swine Flu a few years back.

Swine flu is more contagious and had a far far far higher body count ( we're talking like 100 times more ). It was a phase 6 pandemic, which is the highest level the WHO has. The panic was a tad more justified with the swine flu since there were infections in pretty much every country in the world.

Ebola is almost exclusively limited to Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone right now. Its difficult for ebola to spread without the wonderful assistance of the absence of medical care, sanitation and plain old human stupidity and superstition.

Its kind of hard to isolate and treat the outbreak there when people are killing aid workers because they think they are what causes the disease.

[lordlundar]

I know it's a bad comparison, so please don't take it that I'm comparing the symptoms or the disease or even the number of deaths with each other, but the PANIC reminds me of Swine Flu a few years back.

Funny, I was thinking of the Y2K bug at the turn of the century. Media sites being "the first" to say the world is doomed and instill panic over something that has already been dealt with.

More things change, the more they stay the same.

[Gravekeeper]

On the other hand, if you live in Texas, maybe you SHOULD panic. Seeing as everyone there that comes in contact with ebola loses 50 IQ points.

[wolfie]

I wouldn't be surprised if, in the U.S., there have been more deaths due to traffic accidents caused by a driver being distracted by an Ebola story on the radio than due to the disease itself.

[Gravekeeper]

I wouldn't be surprised if, in the U.S., there have been more deaths due to traffic accidents caused by a driver being distracted by an Ebola story on the radio than due to the disease itself.

Considering Ebola only has 1 confirmed death in the US vs roughly 100 or so people that die every day in the US in traffic accidents. Yeah that's probably right. >.>

Ebola's death toll so far is estimated at around 4000. Swine flu was 300,000+. The single most widespread and devastating pandemic of the century is still raging all around on a global scale: HIV. But no ones shitting themselves over that.

Considering Ebola is actually LESS infectious than HIV and you start to understand why the WHO and CDC aren't losing their fucking minds over it like everyone else seems to be.

[D_Yeti_Esquire]

On the other hand, if you live in Texas, maybe you SHOULD panic. Seeing as everyone there that comes in contact with ebola loses 50 IQ points.

I have family in Dallas that have been to that hospital and know people there. Please just don't. Hopefully it's over, but I'm going to get ragey with Dallas jokes.

Re: the term infectious - it takes approximately 10 particles of Ebola to produce infection. I can't compare it to HIV, but it is an incredibly infectious disease. Me calling a dead body a virus bomb wasn't an overstatement, very little contact can produce the infection.

It is not however very contagious. If it's under control and people can be restricted from running around with fevers and contaminating extremely public areas, everything's relatively ok.

But if people panic and hide or somehow a large number of people overwhelm what resources the CDC has, it's mortality rate is stupidly high. Something like Swine Flu kills by percentage and it's contagiousness. Lots of people don't deal with the flu until it's too late. Like Ebola, most of it's deaths were also in Africa and eventually Southeast Asia.

Something like this though is just a throw of the dice if you happen to get exposed. It's just the kind of bug that should not be taken lightly because public safety is preserved by public action.

[Herebecause]

This can't be helping the containment of Ebola - authorities accepting bribes to say that deceased victims died of something else so the family buries their relative according to their traditions, plus they do not have to deal with the social backlash of having a family member die from the disease.

http://news.yahoo.com/ebola-families...153423993.html