2014 Global Ebola Outbreak

[Teelie]

The people with actual degrees in this stuff have already covered most of that.

The ability to jump from species to species I don't know much about but it still does not change the contagion's primary method of coming into contact with infected fluids.

This also means taking the basic precautions of not coming into contact with said fluids is your best and simplest way to not contract it. Only people who have to deal with such things are really at risk. Everyone else should be safe.

The mutation probablity is low, especially because it isn't in a movie and reality is it takes a lot more than just a single mutation to make that a viable transmission route.

And the people being quietly quarantined because they might have malaria or any number of other not-Ebola diseases is precisely because of the fear it is Ebola and people will naturally overreact and assume they are contagious. I doubt there are more than the known, confirmed cases we already heard about. Someone, somewhere is going to leak out there's another "secret" Ebola outbreak in the country if this were true.

The CDC did drop the ball, but they're a government entity. They always drop the ball. That's one thing from the movies that happens in reality.

 

[Octavias]

Ebola is known to be able to jump from bats to humans and some strains from monkeys to humans. Dogs can also be affected. Because of the limited area outbreaks have happened in, other animals that may be affected or able to transmit the virus are still mostly unknown.
One of the strains of ebola is air transmissable at least between monkeys and pigs (RestV). this was confirmed in a case in the phillipines and in lab tests. Humans to date have not caught the air transmissable one, but in three seperate cases a grand total of 13 humans developed antibodies for ebola from the RESTV strain.

As the Virus expands into different areas the likelihood of mutation increases. Since we already have a version that can be transmitted by air, its not as far fetched as some may think to fear that may eventually come about.

All in all when you read the literature on the Virus it isnt a world ender as of right now, but there is far too much we dont know about it to treat it like Aids 2.0 (which we bungled in containment as well). Hell Science says it may be transmitted sexually for weeks after recovery... its just not something we want around
I think you take every precaution you can with this right now. limit it to Africa as much as you can and fight it there. We do not need a resovour in the animal population over here.

 

[BestGirl]

I think people are missing the obvious. Ebola is a death sentence in West Africa.

Though the fact that the only non-American to get ebola in America and die from it is... curious.

It's not that curious. Duncan insisted that he hadn't come into contact with ebola when he was in Liberia, so doctors assumed he had some other disease. They gave him antibiotics and sent him home. When he returned to the hospital three days later he was too sick to be saved. In contrast, the American nurses began ebola treatment immediately after feeling ill.

 

[BestGirl]

Ebola is known to be able to jump from bats to humans and some strains from monkeys to humans. Dogs can also be affected. Because of the limited area outbreaks have happened in, other animals that may be affected or able to transmit the virus are still mostly unknown.
One of the strains of ebola is air transmissable at least between monkeys and pigs (RestV). this was confirmed in a case in the phillipines and in lab tests. Humans to date have not caught the air transmissable one, but in three seperate cases a grand total of 13 humans developed antibodies for ebola from the RESTV strain.

As the Virus expands into different areas the likelihood of mutation increases. Since we already have a version that can be transmitted by air, its not as far fetched as some may think to fear that may eventually come about.

All in all when you read the literature on the Virus it isnt a world ender as of right now, but there is far too much we dont know about it to treat it like Aids 2.0 (which we bungled in containment as well). Hell Science says it may be transmitted sexually for weeks after recovery... its just not something we want around
I think you take every precaution you can with this right now. limit it to Africa as much as you can and fight it there. We do not need a resovour in the animal population over here.

I've heard that, too. God, the last thing we need is for this to turn into another AIDS crisis, with seemingly healthy people transmitting it to their sexual partners.

 

[Teelie]

It is not going to be like HIV/AIDS because it either kills you or dies out too quickly to keep going. HIV can be in your body for decades and never show signs. Ebola will be obvious within days and either kill you or you become immune and stop carrying it.

Air transmissible between different species of animals does not mean it will infect humans like the fluid one although ironically if the cases of people developing immunity to the airborne strain without the fatal symptoms are true then we might actually want people to get it that way to develop immunity to the far more fatalistic fluid transmitted one.

 

[BestGirl]

^The point is that people, even after having been cured of ebola, can still spread the disease through sex for up to five weeks (I think) after recovery. Imagine if a prostitute got the disease, was cured, and then went back to work. *shudders*

 

[Teelie]

And that's a different risk than any other STD? The fear mongering is outrageous and the lengths you have to reach to get these cases of transmission are tenuous. The airborne transmission is via respiration droplets done with lab monkeys in a controlled facility, not in the wild.

 

[Anita18]

They found the virus in some traces in semen for weeks after recovery, but I think that was only one study. As far as I know, there has been no record of actual transmission that way.

Just because they detected it at some level, or found it in a laboratory setting, doesn't mean that's how it works in the real world. Like sure, the virus can survive for weeks outside the body, IF it is in a warm and dark environment. Sunlight would kill it pretty readily in just a few hours, and there's something called nighttime that brings temperatures down too.

For all intents and purposes, you have to be handling a dying Ebola patient to have a reasonable chance of getting it yourself.

The airborne Reston Ebola virus has always been asymptomatic in humans (but deadly to other apes). What we're dealing with here is I believe the Zaire Ebola virus, and yes, it would take a VERY unlikely series of very specific mutations to make it airborne. Just like how a bunch of monkeys randomly smashing keys has some minuscule chance to churn out Shakespeare. Possible, but extremely unlikely.

 

[Teelie]

In mice, genetics dictates Ebola infection outcomes

Turns out genetics might play a part in how badly you are infected.

The outcome of Ebola infections often depends on a patient's access to sophisticated medical care. But there's the possibility that it could be influenced by genetics as well. That suggestion comes from the authors of a new paper that looked at what happens when genetically diverse groups of mice were exposed to the virus. As it turns out, the results ranged from losing a bit of weight to complete mortality.

The work doesn't seem to have been inspired by looking for insight into the progression of hemorrhagic fever in humans. Instead, the researchers involved appear to have been frustrated by the fact that the most convenient research mammal, the mouse, doesn't experience the symptoms typical of Ebola infections in humans: no problems with blood coagulation, no hemorrhages, and no shock. So they decided to see if they could find a mouse strain that did show these symptoms (and would thus enable convenient studies).

To do so, they started with something called the Collaborative Cross collection. Most of the mouse strains used in research have been inbred until all members of the strain are genetically identical. There are, however, differences between strains; C57 mice are genetically distinct from 129 mice. So it's possible to see very different things happen if you do the same experiment in different strains.

The Collaborative Cross collection takes this a step further. In addition to having five of the traditional lab strains, it has three strains recently isolated from wild populations, and then it breeds every pairwise combination of the eight strains. The result is a very large collection of mice that are genetic hybrids.

Infecting the hybrids produced all sorts of results. In some strains, the virus had no effect whatsoever. In others, it killed without causing any obvious symptoms. Still others showed a human-like progression through hemorrhagic fever to death. Focusing on two specific strains, the authors found that both lost about 15 percent of their body weight within the first five days of infection. But on day six, one strain started to die, while the other recovered.

There were similar levels of viral RNA in both strains; the susceptible one just made far more viruses using that RNA. The authors were able to see differences in gene activity following infection in the two strains, including some indicating that the resistant strain begins to activate genes needed to repair blood vessels as the infection proceeds.

In addition to indicating that we can now study hemorrhagic fever in mice, the results may tell us something about the trajectory of outbreaks in humans. Follow-up studies have shown that even in the same outbreak, Ebola infection causes different responses in humans. As the authors note, "This suggests that the host response may determine disease severity after EBOV infection."

In situations like this, there is always a range of factors that can contribute—health status prior to infection, quality of care, speed of diagnosis, genetic changes in the virus, and so on. But the new work suggests that genetic contributions of the host may influence disease progression as well.

Ars Technica