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CDC director warns that Congo's Ebola outbreak may not be containable
- toomuchtodo 8y agoUganda is preemptively vaccinating front line/first responder workers with an experimental, unlicensed vaccine (with WHO backing) that has shown efficacy in attempts to contain the virus. > Country becomes first to administer experimental vaccine without active outbreak of the deadly disease, in bid to protect 2,000 medics close to DRC border > “In previous [Ebola] outbreaks, Uganda lost health workers, including the renowned Dr Matthew Lukwiya, as they cared for patients,” said Yonas Tegegn Woldemariam, WHO’s Uganda representative. “Scientists believe such invaluable lives would have been saved had a vaccine been in existence then.” https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/nov/06/uganda-vaccinates-at-risk-health-workers-ebola-congo-drc https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/nov/06/u...
- tango24 8y ago> including the renowned Dr Matthew Lukwiya Short video about Dr. Lukwiya's story. He was on a sabbatical, but rushed back to provide aid, while others were running in panic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7LpjpuOvc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7LpjpuOvc8
- toomuchtodo 8y ago"Look for the helpers" -- Mr. (Fred) Roger's mother.
- CydeWeys 8y agoThat's the thing about a disease that kills >50% of the people it infects -- there's no ethical risk in using untested, unproven vaccines to fight it. It's still better than the alternative, even if there's bad side effects.
- starbeast 8y agohttps://www.msf.org/drc-2018-ebola-outbreak-crisis-update-october-2018 https://www.msf.org/drc-2018-ebola-outbreak-crisis-update-oc... https://www.msf.org/donate https://www.msf.org/donate
- eMSF 8y agoDonate to MSF so they can increase their human trafficking operations across the Mediterranean Sea? Thanks, but no thanks.
- bluetwo 8y agoSeems like a bigger problem than a bunch of migrants slowly walking towards the southern border.
- Lolibturd 8y agoSpin it!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- yanoz 8y agoThis doesn't seem like a problem to the welfare of Americans at all, while the caravan is. I presume that's the reason it's not in the news. Also the Ebola scare was already sold back in the day and in the end nothing important happened, so it's going to be hard to sell this. (If you're going to downvote please provide an argument, thanks.)
- craftyguy 8y ago> This doesn't seem like a problem to the welfare of Americans at all, while the caravan is. [citation needed] Immigration is pretty much required for a healthy economy[0] 0. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2017-07-10/economic-statistics-suggest-immigration-is-a-boost-to-the-us-economy https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2017-07-...
- yanoz 8y ago"better for the economy" doesn't always translate to better lives for the laymen. Also you have to understand some people don't want immigrants at all. But I was just giving a reason as to why this isn't on the media. No point on making this political.
- craftyguy 8y ago> "better for the economy" doesn't always translate to better lives for the laymen. It arguably does far more times than it doesn't. > Also you have to understand some people don't want immigrants at all. Putting aside the fact that 99% of the time they are decedents of immigrants, I've yet to hear one compelling reason why they should be taken seriously.
- jonawesomegreen 8y agoSome interesting data about the efficacy of the experimental vaccine that is being used to try to control the outbreak. > Merck's Jakub Simon, MD, MS, addressing a session at the American Society of Tropical Medicine's (ASTMH) annual meeting here, showed two charts tracking Ebola during this past spring's outbreak in the DRC's Equateur province and the subsequent one now raging in the North Kivu and Ituri provinces. In both, health workers on the ground have been using the Merck vaccine in a so-called ring vaccination strategy to contain the epidemic. Although not yet formally approved for marketing, the vaccine has been cleared for emergency use. > In Equateur, immediately after vaccination began with the Merck product, the outbreak petered out. > But the experience in North Kivu and Ituri has been quite different. Although new cases dropped significantly after vaccination began in early August, they never approached zero, and 2 months later they rocketed back to the level seen before vaccinations began. https://www.medpagetoday.com/meetingcoverage/astmh/76018 https://www.medpagetoday.com/meetingcoverage/astmh/76018
- amputect 8y agoThat's not great! I wonder if Ebola is especially quick to mutate. This article: https://jvi.asm.org/content/early/2015/12/08/JVI.02701-15 https://jvi.asm.org/content/early/2015/12/08/JVI.02701-15 suggests that it is. A mitigating factor is that it doesn't seem to tolerate mutations very well (i.e. lots of mutations lead to non-viable strains), but I guess with a large enough patient pool it could have out-run the vaccine.
- findyoucef 8y agoI didn't even realize there was recent outbreak. This hasn't been in the news at all.
- cududa 8y agoIt’s been reported on for months in major outlets, just not with the fervency of last time. Find new news sources or pay closer attention to your existing ones behind the outrage cycle.
- makomk 8y agoAlmost everything is reported in major outlets somewhere, to the point that it's pretty remarkable when something isn't. There's just so much news out there that the priority they give to it matters.
- BookmarkSaver 8y agoMost people (I assume) don't look beyond aggregation feeds, or at best, the front/landing page of whatever news source they prefer.
- bow_ 8y agoFYI, the WHO [1] and CDC [2] post regularly on the status of various outbreaks all over the world. For Ebola particularly, WHO posts weekly updates. And a cursory look of the most recent posts paints an increasingly worrying situation. [1] http://www.who.int/csr/don/archive/year/2018/en/ http://www.who.int/csr/don/archive/year/2018/en/ [2] https://www.cdc.gov/outbreaks/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/outbreaks/index.html
- anigbrowl 8y agoIf you're in the US PBS Newshour does a good job of covering that sort of thing.
- giobox 8y agoI’ve always believed the “World News” section of major written news outlets must be among the most unread things in the world, I almost feel bad for the thankless work it must be for the journalists involved.
- coldcode 8y agoThe real fear is that one person makes it out of the area and into another part of the world, similar to what happened in Dallas. The more people are infected in that area the more the odds of escape go up. Any place in the world can wind up with an outbreak within a short time. Given the response of the hospital in Dallas, it's very likely most medical facilities would not recognize Ebola before transmission had already occurred.
- ams6110 8y agoI'd think (hope?) that any hospital ER is trained to recognize hemorragic fever when it presents.
- irq11 8y agoIt looks like a case of the flu when it first presents. Unless you have a specific reason to suspect Ebola, you wouldn’t suspect it.
- ashildr 8y agoWhether the patient will see a doctor in the early or late stages of Their Ebola infection will depend on whether they have health insurance. So here’s another reason for socialized healthcare.
- the-red-herring 8y agoSocialized healthcare doesn't really apply here. Regardless of whether or not the healthcare is free, people still go see a doctor anyway.
- amazingman 8y agoEven if this point were granted, the timeline is the issue at hand. When cost is an immediate and pressing concern, people delay the decision to seek out medical attention.
- watersb 8y ago
- lifeisstillgood 8y agoI would love to see regularly updated and triaged "backlogs" for countries, and subsequently the world. And then maybe just report on the top 100 in each news cycle. Just lists of most important tickets in a global todo list - because this would just rise to the top pretty quickly and make us rethink mid terms, Brexit and train delays.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoSomething like https://ourworldindata.org/ https://ourworldindata.org/ but with more frequent updates? I ask because I too am interested in the very same type of dashboard, and instead have a "Dashboard" bookmarks folder with a variety of links for data.
- lifeisstillgood 8y agoMore akin to the Copenhagen Institute thingamijig that Biorn Lomborg hosts, that tries to get bigwig economists to prioritise interventions based on cost benefit (various low cost high impact projects like innocuoation and medical / public health top the bill) Something that takes this concept and runs with it, taking both identifiable problems (Ebola outbreak) and solutions (do nothing, invade, stop subsidising petrol in that country) I suspect that the equivalent of National Security Advisor in each major country does this. I guess what I want is to steal each of their daily briefing documents and make a combined one, and have it read out each day onthe daily news. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Consensus_Center https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Consensus_Center
- starpilot 8y agoWhy contain it? Let it spill over into the schools and churches, let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end, they'll beg us to save them.
- runciblespoon 8y ago"CDC director warns that Congo's Ebola outbreak may not be containable" especially as the locals insist on following traditional burial methods such as washing the deceased and sitting in for days on end with cadaver.
- guilhas 8y agoUS, UK, France, UAE,... insist on traditional bombing of countries for peace.
- carboy 8y agoIt’s scary to consider it making it to some of the large slums in Nairobi, India, or Pakistan.
- the-red-herring 8y agoThat's a bit racist to call a place a slum
- estsauver 8y agoComment currently says "Slums in" a place.