10 thoughts on “Ebola”

  2. I was reading the essay with some interest until I realized that the author’s primary defense against an Ebola outbreak is “give the United Nations total control” and “give a lot of orthogonally-related humanitarian aid”, which is, quelle surprise, also the primary solution, in the mind of a certain segment of people, to a vast array of other problems real and imagined.

    I get the feeling “give the UN control” and “give more humanitarian aid” would have been the solutions anyway, and Ebola only provides a useful crisis to which to attach them.

  3. While I’m sure there is a very real crisis, I am unable to avoid thinking about bird flu and swine flu and all of the other “WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!” panic-demics that we’ve seen over the last 13 years.

    There is a constituency for blowing any new danger out of all proportion — whether founded in malice or in a desire to sell web clicks — and what is unreasonable now is to expect people not to assume it’s just more crying wolf.

    And the tragic thing is that the folk tale ends with the wolf actually showing up.

  4. It seems like all the stories breathlessly intone “mutation” as if every mutation would make the virus more destructive. Mutation is, after all, a scary word.

    But, the odds are pretty good that mutations would render it less so – after all, with something as horrific as Ebola, you’ve almost reached a superlative in terms of horror – not much way to go but down.

    Now, if y’all will excuse me, I have a graveyard to go whistling by.

    1. Chances are the mutation will lead to some strains of Ebola being able to teleport while others gain control of weather and amazing regenerative properties keeping them forever young.

  5. There is reason to believe that Favipiravir (A.K.A. T-705, a Fujifilm drug in Phase 3 testing) should be able to drastically reduce the danger of Ebola, especially if administered before the development of frank symptoms. If I were a health care professional in West Africa, which thankfully I am not, I would demand to be given access to T-705 before I would knowingly get within 100 meters of a suspected Ebola case. Japan appears to be the only country with an adequate supply of T-705, although they possess millions of doses, which they have been stockpiling to guard against flu epidemics.

  6. The US Army has developed a simple system of cleaning the blood to fight sepsis, similar to a dialysis machine, which might also be useful. Daily Mail link

    Tiny magnetic beads coated with substance that attracts numerous types of bacteria, virus and other invaders, are used to catch the germs.

    The infection-coated beads are then pulled out of the blood using a magnet and the clean blood put back into the patient.

    In tests, 90 per cent of rats treated using the ‘biospleen’ survived potentially deadly infections – compared to just 14 per cent of untreated animals, the journal Nature Medicine reports.

    Dr Super said: ‘We didn’t have to kill the pathogens. We just captured and removed them.’

    This saves times and means that antibiotic-resistant germs, which are becoming increasing common, should be readily combated.

    Researcher Dr Don Ingber said: ‘Sepsis is a major medical threat, which is increasing because of antibiotic resistance.

    Every hospital should buy one (or more), since sepsis kills approximately 200,000 Americans a year. We have about 5,700 hospitals in the US, so one machine per hospital could potentially save 35 lives per hospital per year.

      1. That is one of the most amazing things I’ve heard of in years. And I thought I had seen everything.

        Of course, I’ve never seen a man eating his own head, so I guess I haven’t seen everything…

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