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Merged So Ebola's back......

Surprised no one has mentioned the Dr in NYC yet.

I was on board with the "oh stop freaking out about this" group, but the more these "oops just a little isolated case, nothing to see here" things pop up, the less confident I am that all is under control, or will be, as the incompetence of either the people themselves and/or those who should have had them under closer scrutiny is simply unreal.
 
catsmate1 said:
Latest confirmed death toll is 4,877.
Click to expand...

If 80 people died 6 months ago and now the death doll is 4,877, that means it is doubling every month. That means in another 6 months the death toll will be over half million people. The number is so much bigger because it is an example of exponential growth.
 
There's a graph here from last month predicting the infection rates into October:

ht tp://ww w.npr.org/blogs/goatsandsoda/2014/09/18/349341606/why-the-math-of-the-ebola-epidemic-is-so-scary

It looks like the actual number of cases may be very close to that of their "improved scenario" model prediction rather than their worst case scenario.

The number of total cases as of the 24th was 9937 and as posted above the total deaths were 4877 as shown here at the moment:

ht tp://ww w.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/2014-west-africa/index.html
 
rjh01 said:
If 80 people died 6 months ago and now the death doll is 4,877, that means it is doubling every month. That means in another 6 months the death toll will be over half million people. The number is so much bigger because it is an example of exponential growth.
Click to expand...
That presupposed an exponential growth rate for infections.
 
Are we finding more because we are testing more?

Good morning.

I was just wondering if this is a case of finding something because we are looking for it more. Have there been other cases in the US that was written off as flu or something else in the past? Fatality rate isn't 100% so if someone was treated as if it was the flu and responded to the treatment and recovered would they have tested for Ebola willie-nillie? Isn't the symptoms and treatment similar to the flu?(I mean without the new super drugs they are using now to treat it with some good results.) Lots more people have died from the flu than Ebola. Surely they didn't test everyone of them for Ebola or the flu for that matter.
I just find it somewhat remarkable that only within the past few months the very first case of Ebola arrived here in the US. People have been traveling for a long time and the disease isn't new either. It isn't particularly easy to catch using just common sense prevention.

ETA: Since the actual testing is highly risky buisness, I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't done all that often in the past or if a proper evaluation of the risk of Ebola wasn't determined to begin with. My doctor never asked me if I recently traveled to Africa or a Ebola infected village.
 
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[nfURL]http://homeopathycenter.org/news/ebola-crisis-homeopathic-community[/nfURL]
 
JPK said:
Good morning.

I was just wondering if this is a case of finding something because we are looking for it more. Have there been other cases in the US that was written off as flu or something else in the past? Fatality rate isn't 100% so if someone was treated as if it was the flu and responded to the treatment and recovered would they have tested for Ebola willie-nillie? Isn't the symptoms and treatment similar to the flu?(I mean without the new super drugs they are using now to treat it with some good results.) Lots more people have died from the flu than Ebola. Surely they didn't test everyone of them for Ebola or the flu for that matter.
I just find it somewhat remarkable that only within the past few months the very first case of Ebola arrived here in the US. People have been traveling for a long time and the disease isn't new either. It isn't particularly easy to catch using just common sense prevention.

ETA: Since the actual testing is highly risky buisness, I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't done all that often in the past or if a proper evaluation of the risk of Ebola wasn't determined to begin with. My doctor never asked me if I recently traveled to Africa or a Ebola infected village.
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If the patient was asymptiomatic for EVD it's possible, however if they manifested symptoms then it'd be noticed. Viral hemorrhagic fevers are uncommon and noticeable. Further, treatments for influenza aren't going to help someone suffering from a VHF.
 
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catsmate1 said:
That presupposed an exponential growth rate for infections.
Click to expand...

It is exponential growth - but there is also such a thing as exponential decay. It was modeled recently as one person infecting 1.7 others (in the Washington Post?), but once that number drops below 1, the epidemic goes into decay mode.

I think epidemics generally can be modeled exponentially - that's what makes them epidemics.

ETA: I could be wrong, viral epidemiology is a very amateur interest of mine.
 
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Good morning catsmate1
catsmate1 said:
If the patient was asymptiomatic for EVD it's possible, however if they manifested symptoms then it'd be noticed. Viral hemorrhagic fevers are uncommon and noticeable. Further, treatments for influenza aren't going to help someone suffering from a VHF.
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Thanks for the info. I'm not in health care so forgive me for being ignorant of what they do. I don't doubt their professionalism just having a hard time wrapping my head around there has never been an infected person in the US before. I do realize someone has got to be the first.
Once again thanks for sharing your knowledge .
 
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JPK said:
Good morning catsmate1

Thanks for the info. I'm not in health care so forgive me for being ignorant of what they do. I don't doubt their professionalism just having a hard time wrapping my head around there has never been an infected person in the US before. I do realize someone has got to be the first.
Once again thanks for sharing your knowledge .
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No worries. There was an article in The Lancet, which I linked to earlier in the thread on some studies indicating that far more people than thought have developed antibodies to EVD, suggesting asymptomatic infection is actually quite common. However such infections aren't likely to be infectious.

Once someone shows symptoms of any hemorrhagic disease they're probably too sick to travel much or else attract medical attention quickly. There's more info on VHFs here.
 
cosmicaug said:
[nfURL]http://homeopathycenter.org/news/ebola-crisis-homeopathic-community[/nfURL]
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That's comedy gold there.

The good news is that a small international team of experienced and heroic homeopaths have arrived in West Africa, and are currently on the ground working hard to examine patients, work out the “genus epidemicus,” and initiate clinical trials.
Click to expand...
 
marplots said:
That's comedy gold there.
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As if things were not bad enough in West Africa...

On level it's drop dead funny, but on another it really is not,considering the lives that might be lost because people might listen to the homeopathic nonsense.
 
dudalb said:
As if things were not bad enough in West Africa...

On level it's drop dead funny, but on another it really is not,considering the lives that might be lost because people might listen to the homeopathic nonsense.
Click to expand...

Well, it did trigger a few jokes. The first that came to mind:

What do you call a homeopath helping with Ebola patients?

A vector.
 
Some relevant articles from The Lancet:
Assessment of the potential for international dissemination of Ebola virus via commercial air travel during the 2014 west African outbreak
Little benefit from travel restrictions.

Ebola: worldwide dissemination risk and response priorities
...exit and entry screening might not have a substantial effect on export rates, because of the long incubation period of the disease (average 8—10 days, range 2—21 days),1 combined with rapid disease progression after onset, so that most exportations would be incubating infections missed at border screening points. Finally, a choice is posed between entry and exit screening in Bogoch and colleagues' study, with exit screening shown to be more efficient than entry screening and the combination of entry and exit screening shown to have little incremental usefulness.
Click to expand...
 
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