outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

There is still this other side of me that wishes I'd embarked on one of my many fig tree dream careers of epidemiologist. I really get a kick form this kind of thing. Someday we will all be dead.

So how worried should we be now, anyway.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/25/us-heath-ebola-nigeria-idUSKBN0FU1LE20140725

Fanning flames, paranoia: http://www.sfgate.com/news/medical/article/New-fears-about-Ebola-spread-after-plane-scare-5651721.php

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — No one knows for sure just how many people Patrick Sawyer came into contact with the day he boarded a flight in Liberia, had a stopover in Ghana, changed planes in Togo, and then arrived in Nigeria, where authorities say he died days later from Ebola, one of the deadliest diseases known to man.

Now health workers are scrambling to trace those who may have been exposed to Sawyer across West Africa, including flight attendants and fellow passengers.

Health experts say it is unlikely he could have infected others with the virus that can cause victims to bleed from the eyes, mouth and ears. Still, unsettling questions remain: How could a man whose sister recently died from Ebola manage to board a plane leaving the country? And worse: Could Ebola become the latest disease to be spread by international air travel?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/ebola-virus-top-sierra-leone-doctor-shek-umar-dies-of-disease-9636406.html

Sierra Leone's top virologist has died in the current outbreak.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/health/patient-at-mount-sinai-has-ebola-like-symptoms-hospital-says.html

This is terrible, reports of hospitals shutting their doors, infected rotting corpses in the streets and ebola nurses downing tools after not getting paid measly $30 a week risk money pledged by the Sierra Leone gvt. Conditions described as "medieval" in parts where the health system has totally collapsed.

i heard a woman talking on the radio about it the other day and she was not holding back about how grim it was -- she was a reporter but i don't remember her name
she used the same analogy, like it was medieval in terms of what people believe about medicine as well as the degree to which people receive/shun medical care when they need it

Little did we know all the right wing survivalists had the right idea for the wrong reason. It's not Obama they should fear, but ebola.

I read an article about the stress of being an ebola nurse. Encased in completely enveloping PPE in a hot climate for 12 + hour shifts. Dealing with infectious, dying patients that constantly fall out of beds, spray blood and diarrhea all over the place. The people that deal with these patients ... I just have no idea where they get their courage from.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-armed-men-attack-liberia-ebola-clinic-freeing-patients/

holy shit

Yeah,

Plague Inc is my favorite game

http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsandsoda/2014/08/19/341412011/shadow-and-d-12-sing-an-infectious-song-about-ebola?

dr. brantly speaking now, was just discharged from emory

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/tests-under-way-for-ebola-following-donegal-death-1.1904073

Shit got real. school with this guys sister

Pharmeceutical industry person tries to defend the industry re charges they have not done enough re ebola because it is in poor countries

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2014/08/18/washington-post-off-base-in-critiquing-pharma-efforts-in-ebola/

the incentives for the pharmaceutical industry are what they are, unfortunately

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/25/ebolanomics

Irish guy didn't have Ebola. Was a false alarm.

South Africa and Senegal trying to bar some folks from countries at issue from entry

First US case in Dallas. Take that NYC & LA! We're number one!

Yikes!

I wonder how many crisis of this kind will happen before countries take the WHO seriously and decide to invest in a proper international health structure to prevent this kind of outbreak. Freaking hate to see institutions like the FMI giving up to 130 millions $ but then pressure politicians in the region to go for austerity, it's a waste of money for everyone.

ebola USED to be at the top of my list of irrational fears. presbyterian hospital is about 5 miles north of where i'm sitting right now.

welp

#patientzero

The Frontline piece on this a week or so ago was eye-opening. Hospitals that are barely more than cordoned off fields, mass graves, disinfecting the back of trucks (where patients ride, near death) by tossing in buckets of bleach, doctors and other aid workers more or less forced to visit villages free of any special suits for fear of scaring the shit out of everyone, children orphaned and alone overnight. Just heartbreaking. It's both a matter of doctors struggling to keep up with a rapidly and easily spreading illness and a population almost impossible to isolate. Bodies being dumped and left by the side of the road, families taking members out of quarantine, superstitious treatments co-mingling with modern medicine ...

Here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ebola-outbreak/

The saddest bit may be at the end, where grave diggers, one by one, list all their families members who have succumbed.

I'm just a few miles further away, art. Drive by it almost every day as I head up to Richardson.

Your risk of dying from ebola (total confirmed 2014 ebola deaths: a few thousand worldwide) is still lower than your risk of dying due to complications related to seasonal influenza (on average, 5800-7500 a year in the US). Get a flu shot. Don't get too preoccupied by ebola.

wanna c&p that on every damn facebook post I see for the next week

be my guest

i have total confidence in the medical system to properly handle any other arising cases. that said, i am still illogically terrified

Sick Burn I saw on FB:

Don't worry about Ebola spreading in Dallas. The Cowboys have shown us that people in Dallas can't catch anything.

Ebola spreads by physical contact with bodily secretions and fluids. That makes it easier to contain in a place like the USA or Europe, where there are lots of medical facilities and a patient's recent contacts can be quickly discovered and tracked down.

Even so, if ebola strongly establishes itself in Africa, with a reservoir of infected people who keep the virus continuously viable and circulating, then not only will massive numbers of africans die, but ebola will keep leaping to other parts of the world, including the USA and Europe. It can be compared to sparks thrown out from a wildfire, which land on tinder and start other fires away from the main fire. You can put out many of these small satellite fires, but it is hard to extinguish all of them, and the more new places that start burning the harder the firestorm is to keep contained.

That's a good analogy. I really wish international focus between the Ebola outbreak and ISIL was better divided.

run for the hills imo

*not the hills of West Africa, tho*

http://i.imgur.com/LHm72Rq.png

ugh goddamned parody accounts :(

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/world/africa/ebola-spreading-in-west-africa.html

this is a very difficult article to read

apparently the problem is not money but organization and time

Oh jeez:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/02/texas-ebola_n_5919522.html

at what point is it ok for me to start panicking?

supposed to go to the state fair this weekend and have resolved not to touch any surfaces and to bathe myself in hand sanitizer after it is all over.

the panic is hilarious. Especially from folks who drive on the streets of Dallas. You should be much more afraid of north Texas drivers than ebola.

until there is an effective vaccine I consider ebola as a threat, but in the USA it is a long term threat, which gives the researchers plenty of time to develop that vaccine.

truly despicable imo for rand paul, a physician, to be saying things like this to score political points

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/sen-rand-paul-sounds-ebola-alarm/

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/world/africa/ebola-spreading-in-west-africa.html

this is a very difficult article to read

apparently the problem is not money but organization and time

― I dunno. (amateurist), Wednesday, October 1, 2014 7:27 PM (Yesterday

disorganization and lack of preparedness (not to mention distrust of medical authorities, belief in traditional healing, etc) are consequences of poverty, though. this was from a few weeks ago but i think it's a good primer

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1409494

First, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia are resource-poor countries already coping with major health challenges, such as malaria and other endemic diseases, some of which may be confused with EVD. Next, their borders are porous, and movement between countries is constant. Health care infrastructure is inadequate, and health workers and essential supplies including personal protective equipment are scarce. Traditional practices, such as bathing of corpses before burial, have facilitated transmission. The epidemic has spread to cities, which complicates tracing of contacts. Finally, decades of conflict have left the populations distrustful of governing officials and authority figures such as health professionals. Add to these problems a rapidly spreading virus with a high mortality rate, and the scope of the challenge becomes clear

rand paul, a physician

He's an ophthalmologist without board certification so this is something of a stretch, but yeah obv his statements are fear mongering nonsense.

does anyone know what's the hard libertarian faithful take on institutions like the cdc?

viruses are information that wants to be free?

It seems to be under control in Nigeria! Good news!

Slate: Spread of Ebola Appears to Have Been Stopped in Nigeria

Meanwhile, local health workers paid 18,500 face-to-face visits to repeatedly take the temperatures of nearly 900 people who had contact with them. The last confirmed case was detected on Aug. 31, and virtually all contacts have passed the 21-day incubation period without falling ill.

wow, don't think i knew about paul's board certification controversy before this, that's pretty messed up. at any rate tho he's still a physician and should know better

context:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/10/02/352983774/no-seriously-how-contagious-is-ebola?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=202402

how about this madness

http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2014/09/04/illegal-immigrant-related-pandemic-diseases-are-appearing-in-the-us/

Message from my sister:

"I know a guy who’s on the hantavirus ship. He’s in the cabin next to that influencer crybaby guy who’s been on the newsfeeds. Says 'he wants his own Netflix series.'"

is hantavirus what killed Gene Hackman's wife? where did she catch it?

I remember reading something about mice in their home, though that might have just been conjecture

looked it up and found some news articles confirming it: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3evzk5gx0vo

Yeah, primarily mouse-borne: "The most common carrier in North America is the deer mouse. Infection is usually caused by inhaling hantaviruses that have become airborne from rodent urine, droppings or saliva."

I wonder if it is cat-to-human transmissible. Cats are all over mice, and people are all over their cats.

Apparently not. "Several types of rodents are known to carry hantavirus. Cats can be infected by hantavirus but will show no symptoms, therefore the virus is not dangerous to them. In addition, cats cannot transmit hantavirus to people."

Apparently not. "Several types of rodents are known to carry hantavirus. Cats can be infected by hantavirus but will show no symptoms, therefore the virus is not dangerous to them. In addition, cats cannot transmit hantavirus to people."

you can't really publicly scream about epidemiology if you're an expert and haven't examined the ship but pretty much every expert has been doing the equivalent of screaming "THE SHIP HAS MOUSE URINE AND POOP ALL OVER. IT'S THE SHIP"

I love cruising, hate cruises.

"THE SHIP HAS MOUSE URINE AND POOP ALL OVER. IT'S THE SHIP"

fuckin a. thread reminding me why i get so stressed when i find mouse poop in the house!! wtf

Another ebola outbreak in the DRC & Uganda, with dozens dead... so sad in that there's actually a vaccine for this: Merck’s Ervebo... but I guess it's not widely available, and probably even less so with Trump's USAID cuts

any ILXors got the watery shits? Cyclospora is roaming coast-to-coast!

I just tossed out some dodgy leftover cilantro from July 4th

My brother in law in MI came down sick the day I was there. At first it seemed like heat stroke after working outside all day but by late evening he was more sure it was a stomach thing. Refused to go to doc so who knows.

interesting... MI seems especially hard-hit

Michigan appears to be especially hard-hit, with health officials reporting 2,640 cases. Over the border in Ohio, state officials are reporting 177 cases.

The CA Health Dept clarified that we actually had more cases last year, so not really a part of this outbreak

Michigan is ground central as far as reported cases, but the reporting is only rolled up after a couple weeks, I think?

Illinois has some cases so my friend who just finished chemotherapy for a digestive cancer wasn't going to chance eating unheated food when I was there briefly over the weekend. He's got enough going on

now it's looking like Taco Bell lettuce is the smoking gun

no. from a farmer friend:

"It’s wild that I keep seeing people place blame on Taco Bell for the Cyclospora outbreak. Taco Bell was one of the rare “heroes” in all of this, voluntarily pulling product and whistleblowing themselves in lieu of still having anything resembling a functioning CDC. Taylor farms is to blame. Solely. When it’s not them it’s one of the other mega farms in Selinas California that use slave labor with no facilities, deplorable working conditions, and no desire to make it better in any way. They don’t have to, they have an army of lawyers to bail them out when they get busted making whole populations sick. Remember with everything you buy what kind of system you’re supporting"

yeah, I should've said it's the lettuce, not Taco Bell.. and that lettuce came from Taylor Farms

Taco Bell was just the first major company to lock down publicly and blaming them for the outbreak is wacky when they were just a company that stepped up. Some real Spanish flu syndrome

East of Eden 2 - Electric Poopooloo

so now they're saying that maybe the parasite was not from Taylor Farms? And they don't really know where it started

this is what happens when you guy federal agencies

*gut*

It's funny, early last week a few friends on Facebook (ones who are sharing posts with intros like "a friend wrote this" only for it to turn out, after I'd googled a phrase, to be written by Rebecca Solnit and unattributed) shared heads-up about Taylors Farm being the source, so I was almost surprised when it turned out to be true (but now maybe not?).

they still think it's lettuce, just not sure whose lettuce: While the Food and Drug Administration has confirmed that a positive test result linked to samples of Taylor Farms-branded shredded lettuce sourced from central Mexico was instead a false positive, the investigation remains focused on the produce.

An ex of mine had some bad lettuce on a chicken sandwich from a chain called The Habit - this was in 2017. She ended up in the Stanford Univ hospital with organ shutdown and all that... the CDC did an investigation. She was eventually cured with a drug that cost $900,000 but it was considered experimental so she didn't have to pay for it. It was gnarly, food poisoning is no joke

worst food poisoning i ever had was from a side salad at an Ethiopian restaurant five blocks from my house.

went hospital then too, was in not great shape, but they just fed me electrolytes and said to rest for a few days after a night in obs

probably started multiple places since this isn't an uncommon pathogen. small outbreaks popping up making it hard to pinpoint the main one, if it exists

I'm terrified of buying my boxed arugula. Should I be?

arugula is often grown in greenhouses, so you are better off with that than mainstream lettuce. also, it's a pretty hearty green so you can also give it a good rinsing.

worst food poisoning i ever had was from a side salad at an Ethiopian restaurant five blocks from my house.

unless there was an outbreak and this was deemed the culprit, in my experience, the last thing someone ate, or thereabouts, is what gets blamed. the incubation for cyclospora can be up to 14 days!

outdoor miner, everyone else with me got sick too

Non-human edition: bluetongue outbreak in uk getting a bit spicy

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/bluetongue-latest-situation

There is a suspected outbreak in Irkutsk but the Russian authorities have helpfully clarified that the young woman who worked at the Plague Institute handling vials of pneumonic plague, and died earlier this week, randomly did so of a pneumonia unconnected to her work, and not pneumonic plague, so that’s reassuring.

Might reach here by Election Day…

was just coming here to see if this exciting development in global catastrophe vectors had made an appearance - should have known SV would already got there.

"Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov urged reporters on Monday “not to listen to rumours about a plague outbreak” and to “rely on Rospotrebnadzor’s statement” is v my t-shirt has people asking a lot of questions coded.

The WHO has asked for info on reports of a second person affected but I’m currently leaning towards thinking that if things were much worse than stated, the Russian government is unlikely to be competent enough to keep a lid on it.

also important to note that god forbid there is a larger outbreak, simple and cheap antibiotics kill plague, so it’s not similar to the Covid situation in a lot of ways

Yep, untreated it’s almost always fatal, treated you’ll probably be fine. The second layer of speculation has been along the lines of ‘Russia’s response, to lock down various hospitals, etc, suggests this was a bioweapons lab and the plague was engineered to be resistant to antibiotics’ but I think a lot of people with books to sell and Substacks to promote are getting carried away.

All the same, I’d rather not be in a position to find out in real time if my ancestors survived the plague because their genes were lucky, or if it was because they simply didn’t get exposed to it

"I think a lot of people with books to sell and Substacks to promote are getting carried away."

This raises the question of whether there are any AI gurus who are also bioweapon gurus, or alternatively how difficult it is to pivot from one to the other. Or indeed whether Russia has been using AI to make bioweapons. I bet there's a modern day Gerald Bull out there who goes around promising dictatorships he can turn them into bioweapons superpowers, who presumably also has to check underneath his car every time he starts it up.

Googling "ai guru plague guru" is almost completely useless because Google now just throws up copy-and-pasted news reports from the last few days. Googling "father of plague" reveals that there is a chap called Nurgle, the Lord of Stagnation, Chaos God of Disease, Decay, Despair, and Destruction. His followers are called Maggotkin. Technically Nurgle isn't real, but it would be nice to hear his perspective on the outbreak.

"I like it", probably.

I just learned about Gerald Bull yesterday!

This guy is very much at the intersection of wildly speculating about plagues and wildly speculating about AI:

https://x.com/kesvelt