Ebola 2014 outbreak
gregladen | September 2, 2014WHO has put out very few updates in the last several days. The most current update is August 28th, and it pertains to information from August 26th and before. Based on that update, the total number of cases (confirmed, suspected, etc.) is ow 3069 with 1552 deaths. The number of new cases per day may be increasing, may be decreasing; hard to say at this point. Here's the new cases per day since the second week of July:
Senegal now has one case, a person who traveled there from Guinea. He had contact with a lot of people including health workers and family before it was figured he may have…
gregladen | August 25, 2014The number of people known or suspected to be infected with Ebola in the West African outbreak is increasing, and the rate at which it is increasing is increasing. About 40 new cases are being reported per day on average, but the number of new cases has been going up by a few a day.
However, it is still unclear that these numbers represent what is actually happening on the ground. There is little confidence that the WHO has a good idea of who is currently stricken with the disease, and efforts to contain those who are have had mixed results.
A second outbreak is now occurring in the DR…
gregladen | August 4, 2014LATEST UPDATE HERE ... new numbers just in from WHO, and they are bad.
I had suspected this might be the case. Disease like Ebola are potentially easily cured using serum. Here's the idea. Someone gets the disease and survives, and their body now produces products that give them an immunity. So, you take a bunch of their blood, clean it up as best you can, and inject the serum (the cleaned up blood, to oversimplify) with these immune products, in to a person with the disease. That stops the disease, at least some of the time. The early history of the discovery of many nasty viruses…
gregladen | August 2, 2014LATEST 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, infect a couple thousand people, and last with no sign of letting up for a few months (that is the current situation, more or less), most would say no, probably not, though it is within the range of possibilities. Does the fact (assuming it is true) that this particular Ebola outbreak is unprecedented…
gregladen | July 27, 2014LATEST UPDATE HERE
UPDATE: The latest numbers do not indicate a weakening of the outbreak. (See list of new cases below. Several graphs have been updated as well)
UPDATE: More detailed discussion of transmission of Ebola
UPDATE: I note with sadness the death of my neighbor (though I did not know him) of Patrick Sawyer, of the Liberian Ministry of Finance, who died in Nigeria of Ebola contracted in Liberia. He was on his way home to Minnesota at the time.
There is an Ebola Outbreak currently underway in several West African countries, mainly Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea. This is the…