Have a new article up at Slate. Nine months into the worst-ever Ebola outbreak, here's where we stand.
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The 2013-2016 West African Ebola virus outbreak altered our perception of just what an Ebola outbreak could look like.
While none of the three primary affected countries--Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea-have had a case since April 2016, the outbreak resulted in a total of over 28,000 cases of…
In the earlier days of the West African Ebola outbreak, it was not uncommon to hear people note that we should not panic about Ebola because, after all, far more people are killed from Malaria than Ebola. This is of course an irrelevant argument. That is like telling a person who has lost their…
New for August 16th
I will try to keep new information and updates in the same post for a while until I have a chance to do a comprehensive re-overview of everything.
The 16 August update from WHO indicates a large uptick in the daily number of cases. Over the two days of the most recent…
LATEST UPDATE HERE
It is true that this particular outbreak of Ebola has taken health officials somewhat by surprise. It is impossible to know, but I suspect that if you had asked a few ebola experts, a year ago, if there could be an epidemic that would spread across three or four countries,…
Please post a link. I find several Ebola articles but none with your byline. Or are you pointing out an article authored by another? Thanks!
Good article, if "good" is a word that can be used in this context.
BTW, news from someone at Daily Kos in comments: Glaxo is testing a vaccine in England. IMHO if the vax works, we're on our way to beating the virus. Not a moment too soon.
Reader, there's a hyperlink in the post, but here it is again: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2014/…
I had seen this and thought it was a good article, without noticing that you had written it. The CDC's predictions, which assume that cases are being grossly underestimated, imply R0 values quite a bit higher than WHO's already worrisome figures. Of course, like calculations of genetic vs. environmental variation, such numbers are entirely dependent on the nature of the environment. An American patient would do much less spreading of virus since he doesn't have to get to the hospital in a taxi with ten people in it, and the hospital workers have gloves. But one group of authors is still out there this week saying that the R0 for Ebola is less than 1 based primarily on previous outbreaks, even as it becomes very obvious that it's much higher now. At what point is it reasonable to start wondering if the virus is mutating towards more efficient transmissibility?
OK, I hacve a feeling this is a really silly question, but...
If Ebola is in blood, can mosquitoes spread it? I've never heard of regular blood-borne diseases (as opposed to specifically insect spread stuff like malaria) spreading that way... but why isn't it equivalent to "sharing needles"? Is the mosquito mouth too small for a blood drop to stick to?