4 ms·

It is perhaps not relevant to this community. Yet. Give it a couple months. Though I can't excuse the general public. It is astounding to me just how very l

• danieltillett 12y ago
  There is usually a pretty good response to important science stories here so I am not sure why the lack of interest. There are four really worrying aspects to this outbreak: 1. It is showing no sign of burning itself out unlike the other 18 outbreaks we know of. Every single person that it passes through increases the probability of it becoming fully adapted to humans. We really have no idea of the case rate, but it is at least a 1000 per week - that is a lot of rolls of the dice. 2. It is occurring in west Africa where implementing any containment is near impossible. An aspect of this that has not received much attention is the genetic diversity of the human immune system in west Africa population is very high. If the virus does breakout then we can’t rely on it having adapted to limited HLA subset - basically if the virus is able to spread in west Africa then it can spread in any human population (a kind of reverse new world problem). 3. A very high percentage of the medical staff dealing with this are getting infected despite taking extraordinary effort to avoid person-to-person contact. How are they getting infected if not by airborne transmission? This suggest that ebola is already airborne, just not highly efficient yet. Every person infected increases the chance that airborne transmission will become efficient. 4. We are doing almost nothing to prepare.