Think it’s just a problem for Africa? Let Rick Wilson tell you a little story. It really should be converted from a tweetstorm to a blog post.
6 thoughts on “Ebola”
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Think it’s just a problem for Africa? Let Rick Wilson tell you a little story. It really should be converted from a tweetstorm to a blog post.
Comments are closed.
Yep. Miracle it hasn’t happened yet.
Ebola itself is not that easily transmitted, that is, not by sweat or saliva. There is, however, no intrinsic reason why something else couldn’t come along that’s as easy to catch as chicken pox and that kills most of the people who get it.
What should happen is a crash program to develop medical nanotech as plague insurance.
What will happen is travel restrictions for everybody except the nomenklatura.
Yup. Most likely a flu variant. After all, Spanish flu killed more people than WWI and that’s without the fast jet travel of today. I’m not qualified in any way, but given the fact that there are four times as many people on Earth today and most of them in very crowded areas I wouldn’t be surprised at 200 megadeaths for Spanish flu if it happened today.
Ebola reston was airborne. As detailed in the book “The Hot Zone,
monkeys in one room broke with the reston strain, and then monkeys in neighboring rooms got it as well; the virus apparently was traveling in the ventilation system in aerosolized form. The reston strain was, however, harmless in humans, though it was quite lethal to monkeys.
If I remember correctly, they never ‘officially’ tested the Reston variant to see if it was airborne. USAMRIID was worried they might be accused of testing a possible biological weapon if they did.
I double-checked, you are right. According to CDC, four people tested positive for antibodies; one likely got it from a cut during a necropsy on an infected monkey, and the mode of transmission to the other three was not determined. CDC lists aerosolized ebola as an unconfirmed possibility.