• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Merged So Ebola's back......

The DRC situation is interesting,but depressingly typical.
The index case was a pregnant woman from Ikanamongo Village who butchered a bush animal that had been killed and given to her by her husband. She became ill with symptoms of EVD and reported to a private clinic in Isaka Village. On 11 August 2014, she died of a then-unidentified haemorrhagic fever. Local customs and rituals associated with death meant that several health-care workers were exposed and presented with similar symptoms in the following week.

Between 28 July and 18 August 2014, a total of 24 suspected cases of haemorrhagic fever, including 13 deaths, have been identified. Human-to-human transmission has been established and includes the health-care personnel who were exposed to the deceased pregnant woman during surgery (one doctor and two nurses) in addition to the hygienist and a ward boy, all of whom developed symptoms and died. Other deaths have been recorded among the relatives who attended the index case, individuals who were in contact with the clinic staff, and those who handled the bodies of the deceased during funerals. The other 11 cases are currently being treated in isolation centres.
 
And the official death toll is 1,552, from over 3,000 cases. To what extent this is an underestimate is not known.

ETA: there are now 15 confirmed cases in Nigeria including one fatality at Port Harcourt, one of the centres of Nigerian oil exploitation.
 
Last edited:
Frozenwolf150 said:
The homeopaths would need to have an actual working ebola cure first, before they dilute it a billion-fold. Of course, no such thing exists.
Click to expand...

Homeopath's don't start by diluting a cure, they start by diluting what they claim to be a cause of the disease. So the virus itself ought to be something a homeopath could use to create a cure if there were any merit to their ideas.

Aside: To compound the stupidity of homeopathy they don't even start with real causes of diseases. Most of the substances they start with are things that were only superstitiously associated with disease hundreds of years ago.
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
Aside: To compound the stupidity of homeopathy they don't even start with real causes of diseases. Most of the substances they start with are things that were only superstitiously associated with disease hundreds of years ago.
Click to expand...

To continue this slight derail - they also follow an idea of like cures like. So, you don't need ebola to cure ebola, you need something - anything - that causes similar symptoms. If could be a cocktail of things that each address a given symptom.
 
madurobob said:
To continue this slight derail - they also follow an idea of like cures like. So, you don't need ebola to cure ebola, you need something - anything - that causes similar symptoms. If could be a cocktail of things that each address a given symptom.
Click to expand...
I think the obvious answer is to give people a small dose of Marburg when they have Ebola, and a small dose of Ebola when they have Marburg.
 
Rat said:
I think the obvious answer is to give people a small dose of Marburg when they have Ebola, and a small dose of Ebola when they have Marburg.
Click to expand...
Given that both are virii and capable of replicating there may be a small problem with that....
Of course if it's trialled first on homeopaths that'd be fine.
 
The WHO is estimating about 20,000 cases before this epidemic ends, perhaps ~10,000 deaths.
There's also an interesting study in Science about the mutations of the virus during the epidemic. These may make testing less reliable and vaccine development harder.
 
Soapy Sam said:
Very nasty. The poor terrorist's suicide neutron bomb. Leaves the buildings standing.
Click to expand...

Neutron bombs don't work that way. Targets that are knocked flat at a few PSI overpressure, say a block of flats, will not remain standing if you detonate a neutron bomb close enough to kill the people with acute radiation sickness.

They were designed to kill soviet tank crews without having to deploy ~ 1 MT devices that would create significant amounts of early fallout (being a near ground detonation) and destroy civilian targets for miles around. Tanks are very resistant against the blast and heat, but not neutrons.

Ebola also does not work that way. It's a quite difficult virus to spread.
 
Correa Neto said:
Considering most people live nowadays in cities, only if in rats and pigeons. Again, all it takes to make a mess is to say it was done. Even if very few people actually end up believing, governments will have to spend money, time, resources to check it all.

And I wrote "siedes" instead of "sieges". I refuse to acept I need glasses.
Click to expand...


The more complex the system, the greater the impact of a spanner in the works.
Completely off topic, but check out the "Should've gone to Specsavers" ads.
 
Totally off topic too, but I must say thank you, sir.
I really needed that laugh today!
Thank you again!
 
catsmate1 said:
The WHO is estimating about 20,000 cases before this epidemic ends, perhaps ~10,000 deaths.
There's also an interesting study in Science about the mutations of the virus during the epidemic. These may make testing less reliable and vaccine development harder.
Click to expand...

I don't know anything about the science behind it, so how exactly does one go about developing a vaccine for a disease like ebola?
 
Frozenwolf150 said:
I don't know anything about the science behind it, so how exactly does one go about developing a vaccine for a disease like ebola?
Click to expand...

Not my field, but in theory it's just like any other vaccine; find a harmless, or mostly harmless, form of the virus that can be produced and administered to humans, and stimulates a protective response from the human immune system. In practice it's far trickier; I believe the vaccine starting tests next week (by GSK so expect the conspiracy nuts to emerge and scream) uses a synthetic vector with grown strands of DNA from the Ebola virus, non-pathogenic but sufficient to stimulate useful antibody production. Hopefully. It works pretty well in chimps.
 
The suspected Ebola case in Quebec has been eliminated, however there's now one is Stockholm. Also the first case was confirmed in Senegal at the weekend.
Initial experimental vaccination is expected to begin in about three weeks.
 
And the travel restrictions are continuing:
Saudi Arabia has halted issuance of visas for workers from Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone as "preventative measure"
Nine athletes will be unable to compete at the upcoming world championships in Tashkent because of travel restrictions imposed by Uzbekistan.
 
catsmate1 said:
Not my field, but in theory it's just like any other vaccine; find a harmless, or mostly harmless, form of the virus that can be produced and administered to humans, and stimulates a protective response from the human immune system. In practice it's far trickier; I believe the vaccine starting tests next week (by GSK so expect the conspiracy nuts to emerge and scream) uses a synthetic vector with grown strands of DNA from the Ebola virus, non-pathogenic but sufficient to stimulate useful antibody production. Hopefully. It works pretty well in chimps.
Click to expand...

I cannot imagine they are using an attenuated virus or even any of the RNA (it's an RNA virus, not a DNA virus). It's enveloped so it's more likely GSK is using a single protein from the surface of the virus. Your immune system then recognizes the surface protein and sends antibodies to attach to it. The antibodies in turn send out chemical signals for the phagocytes to come and swallow the antigen-antibody complex.
 
Last edited:
Skeptic Ginger said:
I cannot imagine they are using an attenuated virus or even any of the RNA (it's an RNA virus, not a DNA virus). It's enveloped so it's more likely GSK is using a single protein from the surface of the virus. Your immune system then recognizes the surface protein and sends antibodies to attach to it. The antibodies in turn send out chemical signals for the phagocytes to come and swallow the antigen-antibody complex.
Click to expand...
This seems probably, though I'm not sure of the details of the approaches being used in the three vaccine projects.

Japanese researchers claim to have developed a faster and cheaper test for the Ebola virus (link).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom