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Firestone Stopped Ebola in Its Tracks

183 points by mdturnerphys 12y ago

Someone1234 12y ago
Honestly what it really boils down to is resources and money ("resource" can also be described as "money" therefore really money and money). Up until very recently there were simply not enough hazmat suits, not enough burn-able bedding, not enough people (who wants to work with Ebola?), not enough disinfectant, and heck even clean water in SOME areas. Then you have to consider how damn hot it is there, so a $5 hazmat suit may not cut it (this article covers that). Now you're dealing with suits costing tens of times more than that for basic AC, just to allow the people in them to work longer shifts. You also have a lot of local population pushback. The hazmat suits scare people, and all locals see is Ebola patients go into treatment and die. There is a lot of suspicion that Westerners are getting people sick to kill them, so they hide away family members until they get infectious. What can be done? Money, and resources. It isn't a magic bullet but if you train a metric ton of local people and give them everything they could possibly need it would at least slow the spread if not reverse it entirely... PS - This article is exactly WHY I am not legitimately concerned about a wide-spread infection in the Western world. We are simply too rich, we have or can acquire the resources, and even your average Joe Smith on the street can Google how to protect themselves from Ebola exposure.
- gohrt 12y ago
  We also need to stop intentionally delivering fake medical care http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-cia-fake-vaccination-campaign-endangers-us-all/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-cia-fake-vacci... and then wait decades to earn trust back.
  - chernevik 12y ago
    That episode probably (hopefully?) hasn't much to do with the Ebola thing. Apparently it has been a huge problem for the polio eradication effort in Pakistan. A very, very serious error by the CIA.
    - ghshephard 12y ago
      It may turn that those actions by the CIA result in more deaths than occurred as a result of 9/11. Absolutely no excuse or justification for using the cover of medical treatment for their para-military reconnaissance in that situation, particularly as it turns out it was never needed anyways.
      - tokenadult 12y ago
        There was Islamist opposition to polio eradication campaigns before anyone in the West was sure that Osama Bin Laden was in Pakistan. (That's why it surprised me that vaccination campaigns were used as a ruse for verifying his whereabouts, but apparently Bin Laden's personal crazy ideas didn't include opposition to vaccination.) It's not entirely a coincidence that even before anyone heard about Bin Laden, the last few places on earth with endemic polio were all places with militant Islamist movements. Personally, I would rather have my children live long healthy lives, no matter whose idea it was to invent vaccines or to use a vaccination campaign as a pretext to find an international fugitive, but logic doesn't always appeal to people who are already making excuses for being illogical.
      - sliverstorm 12y ago
        particularly as it turns out it was never needed anyways. Let's avoid armchair quarterbacking.
        ghshephard 12y ago
        I was more commenting on zero dark thirty, in which the attempt to get genetic material by the doctor was prevented, and played no role in the actual decision to storm the compound. You are correct in that the reality may have been somewhat different than the movie.
  - tokenadult 12y ago
    Your comment is quite irrelevant to the topic of this thread, which is efforts to prevent deaths from ebola, a disease for which there is currently no vaccine.
    - pilsetnieks 12y ago
      It's not about vaccines, it's about doctors' access to patients.
- ObviousScience 12y ago
  It's not like the US intentionally infected a bunch of people in a foreign country with a disease because they were curious about it, then waited 65 years to apologize for their crimes.[1] And certainly the US government would never lie about treating people for a disease in a government program, and then just watch them die instead of actually helping them.[2] Snark aside, have you ever considered that maybe there's a reason people don't trust the US government to act ethically or in their interests? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiment [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment
  - adventured 12y ago
    You're referring to things that happened 60 or 70 years ago as a reference basis for trust, for a government who has as its President a man born 53 years ago. There's a long list of warranted criticism to throw at the US Government, but I don't see how your examples are valid criticism of today's government. The US Government of 1950 no longer exists. Yet you're referring to it as though it does. I guess Angela Merkel is not to be trusted because of what happened 70 years ago? Or Shinzo Abe?
    - Rapzid 12y ago
      You always here about this stuff 60-70 years afterwards unless it was leaked. This is because the people involved are long buried and everyone alive can deny involvement...
      - snowwrestler 12y ago
        "It happened before I was born" is a pretty good denial of involvement.
    - lutorm 12y ago
      Whether it's rational to not trust either the US or German government because of what happened in the past, the actual situation is that such actions are not easily forgotten. There are plenty of people who still carry suspicions against Germany for what happened 70 years ago.
- danieltillett 12y ago
  >This article is exactly WHY I am not legitimately concerned about a wide-spread infection in the Western world. Leaving aside the moral argument of preventing huge numbers of innocent people from dying Ebola if we can, there are two reason we in the west should be concerned: 1. There is a serious risk that Ebola will mutate to become more infectious. It is very unlikely to become airborne (this is about as likely as pigs becoming airborne), but it could relatively easily mutate to slow down its kill speed. At the moment Ebola kills so quickly that there is little time for a patient to spread it to other people. Ebola is under huge selection pressure to slow down the disease progression in humans. We could see a strain arise that takes a month to kill you where you are asymptotically infectious for a couple of weeks. Model this sort of virus and things look far less rosy for us in the west. The more people we let Ebola infect the more likely that such a strain will arise. 2. Once the number of cases get very large (25,000 a day by Jan 2015 according to the CDC) this is going to start disrupting international trade as countries close their borders. We already saw the sort of recession that can result from disruptions to trade when this happened in the GFC and the Asian crisis in the 90s. With interest rates at or near zero in most countries there is not much that can be done to buffer us economically.
  - AlexDanger 12y ago
    You can bet Madagascar will be the first to close their borders.
    - asdffdsajkl 12y ago
      For those that didn't get the reference - this is a reference to the web game pandemic in which the objective is to design a virus/bacteria/parasite to infect the entire world - Madagascar is the hardest country to infect in this game because it only has one port in the game.
  - phkahler 12y ago
    >> There is a serious risk that Ebola will mutate to become more infectious. Not likely. Survival of the fittest for a virus usually means allowing the host to live longer - in other words LESS lethal. It is not likely to become airborne, and if it did it would not be ebola any more. The symptoms of most diseases are not an accident, they are tied to the means of transmission: Colds make you cough and sneeze. Flu makes you cough, sneeze, barf and sweat. Rabies makes you crazy and want to bite. STDs some think may make people horny. Ebola makes you barf, shit, bleed, sweat. The one scary thing is I once read that a single gene make Ebola hemoragic, and if that were to transfer to a flu, that would be very deadly. But it would also be less virulent due to that same deadliness and so would be selected against as our response to related flu vidii would wipe it out. None of that is helpful short term, but this notion of the virus getting more horrible than it already is, I don't think so.
- DustinCalim 12y ago
  I do agree that we(humans from other countries) should all just dump resources on the people there - but I think the legitimate concern here is that while we squabble about resources and their cost, the virus spreads and mutates - and if it makes the jump to airborne, I think it will make the average Joe Smith pretty vulnerable.
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    It's a prisoner's dilemma sort of thing. The best outcome for ME is if YOU dump lots of money into it, so I sit around on my hands hoping you take action, while YOU do the same waiting for ME to take action. As a result, we arrive at the worse outcome- nobody does anything.
    - danieltillett 12y ago
      This is the philosophical explanation for government taxation. In this particular case I think we can say that it is now beyond voluntary funded NGOs to solve.
- robomartin 12y ago
  > This article is exactly WHY I am not legitimately concerned about a wide-spread infection in the Western world. I guess you have never been in a disaster in the western world. Well, I have. More than once. And I have seen what people can devolve into. I'll probably get voted down mercilessly for saying this: The truth of the matter is that "civilization" is thin-skinned. It doesn't take that much for people to revert to cave-men behavior. The worst thing we can do, by far, is to adopt a smug "won't happen here" attitude in the "civilized", "educated" and "sophisticated" west. The minute we don't attack this as the existential threat it is, we are simply setting ourselves up for a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.
- cturner 12y ago
  It's not just resources, it's also about trust. The government/foreign operations had basically shut down Ebola earlier in the epidemic. But there was an atmosphere of conspiracy theories associating the operation with the outbreak of the disease. Ebola cases went underground. The foreigners had started to pack up and go home when it reemerged.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
saulrh 12y ago
Yep. Ebola is just not a very scary disease. Its incubation period is short and reliable, it doesn't become infectious until symptoms display, it's not particularly infectious in the first place, and its transmission mechanisms are downright pedestrian. 90% of the first world can make themselves completely safe by googling "Ebola Safety". The other 10% are homeless or hippies and will either get similarly informative pamphlets or are living in communes and won't infect the rest of us. And even if all of that fails, we have the industry to literally give every American a hazmat suit. Ebola may become a crisis, but it will not become a pandemic.
- bane 12y ago
  Well, it's one of those low-probability high-risk diseases. You probably won't get it, but if you do there's a better than middling chance you'll die a horrible death and if you survive you're guaranteed it won't be any fun. Oh, and there's no cure and basically no treatment. You're on your own. The treatment for it is basically "drink lots of fluids", "keep pumping blood into the patient" (since they're literally losing it all out of every hole in their body) and "pray real hard". Even with all these resources the tale is pretty bad Forty-eight were treated in the hospital and 18 survived. Less than 40% survival rate.
  - adventured 12y ago
    A moderately effective treatment for ebola will come out of all of this. There hasn't been a huge sum of money poured into ebola therapies, and we already have promising options. ZMapp or a similar treatment will be scaled up over time, and if ZMapp proves itself to work across a larger base of test patients, we'll simply begin keeping X doses available at all times to shut down ebola outbreaks in the future.
    - mhb 12y ago
      That's exactly what people said when AIDS first showed up.
      - 12y ago
serge2k 12y ago
Amazing what happens when western money has an interest in Africa.
taivare 12y ago
Anyone is free to use this Ebola awareness poster I made http://bit.ly/1vF1COO http://bit.ly/1vF1COO
- dllthomas 12y ago
  Also, the UCSC ebola portal is worth a look: https://genome.ucsc.edu/ebolaPortal https://genome.ucsc.edu/ebolaPortal
danieltillett 12y ago
All this story tells us is that what we have known since the mid 70s that if you can get and keep patients in a proper infection control facility that you can stop Ebola. The problem we have right now is that we don’t have anywhere near enough functioning infection control facilities in the affect countries and we are not doing anywhere near enough to put them in place. The scale required is beyond anything ever attempted outside of a war setting.
swframe 12y ago
I think a "corporate micro-city" might be the solution for poverty in the 3rd world. I think a joint venture with google, facebook, apple, and 1st world governments etc to build a "hong kong/singapore styled city" next to a 3rd world capital could be the catalyst for transforming the country. I don't think providing internet access is enough. You need to break the cycle of poverty from birth to college. And you need a vehicle/brand that the 1st world can invest in/trust. I think you can avoid the obvious pitfalls by creating multiple independent neighboring "corporate mirco-cities" so there is competition for residents.
- phkahler 12y ago
  >> I think a "corporate micro-city" might be the solution for poverty in the 3rd world. Funny, I was thinking it contributes to the problem. It clearly creates inequality which can be seen in this article. The company simply doing the minimum to exploit the resources in the area with no spill-over into the larger region. It would be more helpful to the locals if they were vertically integrated right there - producing tires. That would require building more infrastructure and more manufacturing capability and such. But no, they just want to grow the rubber there and keep the higher value stuff elsewhere. To clarify, I'm not saying "companies=bad" just that companies only have self-interest and are not inherently good for the broader region they inhabit. This is abundantly clear from TFA which I don't think is the message they wanted us to take away.
- briandh 12y ago
  An idea along these lines is that of the Honduran ZEDEs: http://fee.org/the_freeman/detail/startup-city-redux http://fee.org/the_freeman/detail/startup-city-redux (I'd link to a less ideological source but libertarians and their fellow travelers are the ones giving them the most comprehensive coverage and the Wikipedia article is atrocious.)
- BrandonMarc 12y ago
  Interestingly, that's similar to what Firestone did nearly a century ago - built a city in Liberia, and has been the major influence of the city ever since. I'm not sure about Apple, Google, Facebook, et al (and even less hopeful about the success of building an ultra-modern city right next to an existing, poor-er [by comparison] capital) ... but ... there's a good notion here. With a large plantation of rubber trees, it makes sense for Firestone. Rather than re-creating silicon valley in the jungle, finding and exploiting an economic resource there - and doing well by the locals at the same time - seems to be a great model to follow. From the article: Asked what's needed to turn that around, Flannery says, "More Firestones" — places that have the money, resources and unwavering determination to stop Ebola. Maybe I'm oversimplifying, but this sounds like a situation where what we tend to call globalization turns out rather well for all sides.
dammitcoetzee 12y ago
Wow, a company that can handle a thing like this in stride has to make a good product. I will look at them next time I need tires.
- innguest 12y ago
  Wow, someone that understands capitalism. :)
  - mcguire 12y ago
    Or is simply vulnerable to good marketing campaigns. It's been a while since I used Firestone tires, but I'll bet anyone quite a lot that their product development and quality control have very little to do with their human resources practices in the third world. (Even though I think they sound really good, too.)
    - innguest 12y ago
      It's a marketing campaign that ends up helping people and the real world. They have that money to spare because their customers think their products are desirable. It seems to me you're trying to detract from what happened here by trying to argue that their products aren't that good? I'm not sure what you're implying, but I'll repeat, they've only been able to help, even as a marketing ploy, because they have accumulated profits - proof that their customers value what they produce. The quality of their product, in the eyes of their customers, has everything to do with their ability to pull off this stunt.
      - mcguire 12y ago
        I'm not trying to detract from anything they've done, and their products are fine, as far as I know. What I'm saying is that there is no correlation between their success in dealing with an infectious disease in the area around one of their facilities and the quality of their consumer products.
        12y ago
BrandonMarc 12y ago
All I can do is scratch my head, wondering what the reporter isn't saying. Just what is it that Firestone is doing differently? It sure appears to be working, so it would be great to replicate if possible. Marbel is a company town of 80,000 ... a city more or less owned and run by Firestone, benevolently it appears, for nearly a century. Perhaps they're better at guarding and enforcing their border ... effectively keeping themselves mostly isolated from disease vectors coming in. Perhaps that helps them avoid being outnumbered by the sick and, more importantly, the ignorant [1]. After all, it's easy to keep an eye on those exposed when they're comparatively few and you have reliable information ... which comes from having a literate, educated population you've been working with for decades. Perhaps it's also easier to get honest [2], voluntary compliance when you're a close-knit community and the infected are usually coming from the outside (and, again, are few in number). It sure is interesting that while Firestone has hazmat suits intended for dealing with chemical spills, that infected nurse in Spain [3] says the blame goes to her Level 2 biosafety suit since it wasn't the preferred Level 4. Please correct me if I'm wrong ... I get the sense Firestone's suits aren't comparable to Level 4. Contrast this to the success (lack thereof) of the CDC, WHO, RSF, and other aid organizations. Sadly, they're either overwhelmed or incompetant. So what's needed is more Firestones, really? That's interesting. ----- [1] Yes, ignorance is massively lethal. See this story from August, of a mob who decided it would be fun to ransack and rob and already-overwhelmed Ebola clinic, stealing everything and taking it home ... all while taking Ebola home with them. http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/08/16/man-without-a-country/ http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/08/16/man-without-a... [2] As opposed to the diplomat who deceived his way into continuing on to a meeting of regional leaders ... thereby effectively causing the outbreak in Nigeria. And as opposed to the CDC today handing out fliers in airports and expecting voluntary compliance, in a sense informing travelers of how to lie in order to get into the USA where the good hospitals are. [3] http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/10/07/paradigm-shift/ http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/10/07/paradigm-shif...
- danieltillett 12y ago
  >All I can do is scratch my head, wondering what the reporter isn't saying. Just what is it that Firestone is doing differently? It sure appears to be working, so it would be great to replicate if possible. They are doing nothing different than what has worked in all the other Ebola outbreaks which is catch the outbreak early and implement effective infection control. A better question is why did this outbreak get out of control? The sad reason is incompetence. The WHO staff in west Africa appointed to watch out for Ebola outbreaks were, to quote Peter Piot [1], “[not] the most capable people but ... political appointees”. Some genius had also decided that gutting the department for hemorrhagic fever and the one responsible for the management of epidemic emergencies at the WHO was a great idea. This meant that there was no one around to respond. The outbreak was allowed to run wild for six months until it got so big that it overwhelmed the local health authorities (this occurred around August) and the case numbers took off exponentially. [1] http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-peter-piot-discoverer-of-the-ebola-virus-a-993111-2.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-pet...
facepalm 12y ago
"They grabbed a bunch of hazmat suits for dealing with chemical spills at the rubber factory and gave them to the hospital staff. The suits worked just as well for Ebola cases." I suppose having a rubber factory nearby helped a lot. Not to diminish their managerial achievement, but I imagine getting proper equipment might be a major obstacle in other parts of the country.
lotsofmangos 12y ago
Donation pages for Médecins Sans Frontières: http://www.msf.org.uk/make-a-donation http://www.msf.org.uk/make-a-donation https://donate.doctorswithoutborders.org/ https://donate.doctorswithoutborders.org/ Send MSF money and we will see more successes like this. Ebola can be beaten, but only if the resources are there.
peter303 12y ago
Nigeria has ended Ebola too. But its proximity to the main infections could mean reoccurence.
mcguire 12y ago
"Forty-eight were treated in the hospital and 18 survived." That's an interesting point on the actual lethality of the disease under more modern treatment conditions. Still, 60% is only slightly less scary than 90%.

183 points by mdturnerphys 12y ago

Honestly what it really boils down to is resources and money ("resource" can also be described as "money" therefore really money and money). Up until very recently there were simply not enough hazmat suits, not enough burn-able bedding, not enough people (who wants to work with Ebola?), not enough disinfectant, and heck even clean water in SOME areas. Then you have to consider how damn hot it is there, so a $5 hazmat suit may not cut it (this article covers that). Now you're dealing with suits costing tens of times more than that for basic AC, just to allow the people in them to work longer shifts. You also have a lot of local population pushback. The hazmat suits scare people, and all locals see is Ebola patients go into treatment and die. There is a lot of suspicion that Westerners are getting people sick to kill them, so they hide away family members until they get infectious. What can be done? Money, and resources. It isn't a magic bullet but if you train a metric ton of local people and give them everything they could possibly need it would at least slow the spread if not reverse it entirely... PS - This article is exactly WHY I am not legitimately concerned about a wide-spread infection in the Western world. We are simply too rich, we have or can acquire the resources, and even your average Joe Smith on the street can Google how to protect themselves from Ebola exposure.

gohrt 12y ago
We also need to stop intentionally delivering fake medical care http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-cia-fake-vaccination-campaign-endangers-us-all/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-cia-fake-vacci... and then wait decades to earn trust back.
- chernevik 12y ago
  That episode probably (hopefully?) hasn't much to do with the Ebola thing. Apparently it has been a huge problem for the polio eradication effort in Pakistan. A very, very serious error by the CIA.
  - ghshephard 12y ago
    It may turn that those actions by the CIA result in more deaths than occurred as a result of 9/11. Absolutely no excuse or justification for using the cover of medical treatment for their para-military reconnaissance in that situation, particularly as it turns out it was never needed anyways.
    - tokenadult 12y ago
      There was Islamist opposition to polio eradication campaigns before anyone in the West was sure that Osama Bin Laden was in Pakistan. (That's why it surprised me that vaccination campaigns were used as a ruse for verifying his whereabouts, but apparently Bin Laden's personal crazy ideas didn't include opposition to vaccination.) It's not entirely a coincidence that even before anyone heard about Bin Laden, the last few places on earth with endemic polio were all places with militant Islamist movements. Personally, I would rather have my children live long healthy lives, no matter whose idea it was to invent vaccines or to use a vaccination campaign as a pretext to find an international fugitive, but logic doesn't always appeal to people who are already making excuses for being illogical.
    - sliverstorm 12y ago
      particularly as it turns out it was never needed anyways. Let's avoid armchair quarterbacking.
      - ghshephard 12y ago
        I was more commenting on zero dark thirty, in which the attempt to get genetic material by the doctor was prevented, and played no role in the actual decision to storm the compound. You are correct in that the reality may have been somewhat different than the movie.
- tokenadult 12y ago
  Your comment is quite irrelevant to the topic of this thread, which is efforts to prevent deaths from ebola, a disease for which there is currently no vaccine.
  - pilsetnieks 12y ago
    It's not about vaccines, it's about doctors' access to patients.
ObviousScience 12y ago
It's not like the US intentionally infected a bunch of people in a foreign country with a disease because they were curious about it, then waited 65 years to apologize for their crimes.[1] And certainly the US government would never lie about treating people for a disease in a government program, and then just watch them die instead of actually helping them.[2] Snark aside, have you ever considered that maybe there's a reason people don't trust the US government to act ethically or in their interests? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiment [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment
- adventured 12y ago
  You're referring to things that happened 60 or 70 years ago as a reference basis for trust, for a government who has as its President a man born 53 years ago. There's a long list of warranted criticism to throw at the US Government, but I don't see how your examples are valid criticism of today's government. The US Government of 1950 no longer exists. Yet you're referring to it as though it does. I guess Angela Merkel is not to be trusted because of what happened 70 years ago? Or Shinzo Abe?
  - Rapzid 12y ago
    You always here about this stuff 60-70 years afterwards unless it was leaked. This is because the people involved are long buried and everyone alive can deny involvement...
    - snowwrestler 12y ago
      "It happened before I was born" is a pretty good denial of involvement.
  - lutorm 12y ago
    Whether it's rational to not trust either the US or German government because of what happened in the past, the actual situation is that such actions are not easily forgotten. There are plenty of people who still carry suspicions against Germany for what happened 70 years ago.
danieltillett 12y ago
>This article is exactly WHY I am not legitimately concerned about a wide-spread infection in the Western world. Leaving aside the moral argument of preventing huge numbers of innocent people from dying Ebola if we can, there are two reason we in the west should be concerned: 1. There is a serious risk that Ebola will mutate to become more infectious. It is very unlikely to become airborne (this is about as likely as pigs becoming airborne), but it could relatively easily mutate to slow down its kill speed. At the moment Ebola kills so quickly that there is little time for a patient to spread it to other people. Ebola is under huge selection pressure to slow down the disease progression in humans. We could see a strain arise that takes a month to kill you where you are asymptotically infectious for a couple of weeks. Model this sort of virus and things look far less rosy for us in the west. The more people we let Ebola infect the more likely that such a strain will arise. 2. Once the number of cases get very large (25,000 a day by Jan 2015 according to the CDC) this is going to start disrupting international trade as countries close their borders. We already saw the sort of recession that can result from disruptions to trade when this happened in the GFC and the Asian crisis in the 90s. With interest rates at or near zero in most countries there is not much that can be done to buffer us economically.
- AlexDanger 12y ago
  You can bet Madagascar will be the first to close their borders.
  - asdffdsajkl 12y ago
    For those that didn't get the reference - this is a reference to the web game pandemic in which the objective is to design a virus/bacteria/parasite to infect the entire world - Madagascar is the hardest country to infect in this game because it only has one port in the game.
- phkahler 12y ago
  >> There is a serious risk that Ebola will mutate to become more infectious. Not likely. Survival of the fittest for a virus usually means allowing the host to live longer - in other words LESS lethal. It is not likely to become airborne, and if it did it would not be ebola any more. The symptoms of most diseases are not an accident, they are tied to the means of transmission: Colds make you cough and sneeze. Flu makes you cough, sneeze, barf and sweat. Rabies makes you crazy and want to bite. STDs some think may make people horny. Ebola makes you barf, shit, bleed, sweat. The one scary thing is I once read that a single gene make Ebola hemoragic, and if that were to transfer to a flu, that would be very deadly. But it would also be less virulent due to that same deadliness and so would be selected against as our response to related flu vidii would wipe it out. None of that is helpful short term, but this notion of the virus getting more horrible than it already is, I don't think so.
DustinCalim 12y ago
I do agree that we(humans from other countries) should all just dump resources on the people there - but I think the legitimate concern here is that while we squabble about resources and their cost, the virus spreads and mutates - and if it makes the jump to airborne, I think it will make the average Joe Smith pretty vulnerable.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  It's a prisoner's dilemma sort of thing. The best outcome for ME is if YOU dump lots of money into it, so I sit around on my hands hoping you take action, while YOU do the same waiting for ME to take action. As a result, we arrive at the worse outcome- nobody does anything.
  - danieltillett 12y ago
    This is the philosophical explanation for government taxation. In this particular case I think we can say that it is now beyond voluntary funded NGOs to solve.
robomartin 12y ago
> This article is exactly WHY I am not legitimately concerned about a wide-spread infection in the Western world. I guess you have never been in a disaster in the western world. Well, I have. More than once. And I have seen what people can devolve into. I'll probably get voted down mercilessly for saying this: The truth of the matter is that "civilization" is thin-skinned. It doesn't take that much for people to revert to cave-men behavior. The worst thing we can do, by far, is to adopt a smug "won't happen here" attitude in the "civilized", "educated" and "sophisticated" west. The minute we don't attack this as the existential threat it is, we are simply setting ourselves up for a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.
cturner 12y ago
It's not just resources, it's also about trust. The government/foreign operations had basically shut down Ebola earlier in the epidemic. But there was an atmosphere of conspiracy theories associating the operation with the outbreak of the disease. Ebola cases went underground. The foreigners had started to pack up and go home when it reemerged.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

saulrh 12y ago

Yep. Ebola is just not a very scary disease. Its incubation period is short and reliable, it doesn't become infectious until symptoms display, it's not particularly infectious in the first place, and its transmission mechanisms are downright pedestrian. 90% of the first world can make themselves completely safe by googling "Ebola Safety". The other 10% are homeless or hippies and will either get similarly informative pamphlets or are living in communes and won't infect the rest of us. And even if all of that fails, we have the industry to literally give every American a hazmat suit. Ebola may become a crisis, but it will not become a pandemic.

bane 12y ago
Well, it's one of those low-probability high-risk diseases. You probably won't get it, but if you do there's a better than middling chance you'll die a horrible death and if you survive you're guaranteed it won't be any fun. Oh, and there's no cure and basically no treatment. You're on your own. The treatment for it is basically "drink lots of fluids", "keep pumping blood into the patient" (since they're literally losing it all out of every hole in their body) and "pray real hard". Even with all these resources the tale is pretty bad Forty-eight were treated in the hospital and 18 survived. Less than 40% survival rate.
- adventured 12y ago
  A moderately effective treatment for ebola will come out of all of this. There hasn't been a huge sum of money poured into ebola therapies, and we already have promising options. ZMapp or a similar treatment will be scaled up over time, and if ZMapp proves itself to work across a larger base of test patients, we'll simply begin keeping X doses available at all times to shut down ebola outbreaks in the future.
  - mhb 12y ago
    That's exactly what people said when AIDS first showed up.
    - 12y ago

serge2k 12y ago

Amazing what happens when western money has an interest in Africa.

taivare 12y ago

Anyone is free to use this Ebola awareness poster I made http://bit.ly/1vF1COO http://bit.ly/1vF1COO

dllthomas 12y ago
Also, the UCSC ebola portal is worth a look: https://genome.ucsc.edu/ebolaPortal https://genome.ucsc.edu/ebolaPortal

danieltillett 12y ago

All this story tells us is that what we have known since the mid 70s that if you can get and keep patients in a proper infection control facility that you can stop Ebola. The problem we have right now is that we don’t have anywhere near enough functioning infection control facilities in the affect countries and we are not doing anywhere near enough to put them in place. The scale required is beyond anything ever attempted outside of a war setting.

swframe 12y ago

I think a "corporate micro-city" might be the solution for poverty in the 3rd world. I think a joint venture with google, facebook, apple, and 1st world governments etc to build a "hong kong/singapore styled city" next to a 3rd world capital could be the catalyst for transforming the country. I don't think providing internet access is enough. You need to break the cycle of poverty from birth to college. And you need a vehicle/brand that the 1st world can invest in/trust. I think you can avoid the obvious pitfalls by creating multiple independent neighboring "corporate mirco-cities" so there is competition for residents.

phkahler 12y ago
>> I think a "corporate micro-city" might be the solution for poverty in the 3rd world. Funny, I was thinking it contributes to the problem. It clearly creates inequality which can be seen in this article. The company simply doing the minimum to exploit the resources in the area with no spill-over into the larger region. It would be more helpful to the locals if they were vertically integrated right there - producing tires. That would require building more infrastructure and more manufacturing capability and such. But no, they just want to grow the rubber there and keep the higher value stuff elsewhere. To clarify, I'm not saying "companies=bad" just that companies only have self-interest and are not inherently good for the broader region they inhabit. This is abundantly clear from TFA which I don't think is the message they wanted us to take away.
briandh 12y ago
An idea along these lines is that of the Honduran ZEDEs: http://fee.org/the_freeman/detail/startup-city-redux http://fee.org/the_freeman/detail/startup-city-redux (I'd link to a less ideological source but libertarians and their fellow travelers are the ones giving them the most comprehensive coverage and the Wikipedia article is atrocious.)
BrandonMarc 12y ago
Interestingly, that's similar to what Firestone did nearly a century ago - built a city in Liberia, and has been the major influence of the city ever since. I'm not sure about Apple, Google, Facebook, et al (and even less hopeful about the success of building an ultra-modern city right next to an existing, poor-er [by comparison] capital) ... but ... there's a good notion here. With a large plantation of rubber trees, it makes sense for Firestone. Rather than re-creating silicon valley in the jungle, finding and exploiting an economic resource there - and doing well by the locals at the same time - seems to be a great model to follow. From the article: Asked what's needed to turn that around, Flannery says, "More Firestones" — places that have the money, resources and unwavering determination to stop Ebola. Maybe I'm oversimplifying, but this sounds like a situation where what we tend to call globalization turns out rather well for all sides.

dammitcoetzee 12y ago

Wow, a company that can handle a thing like this in stride has to make a good product. I will look at them next time I need tires.

innguest 12y ago
Wow, someone that understands capitalism. :)
- mcguire 12y ago
  Or is simply vulnerable to good marketing campaigns. It's been a while since I used Firestone tires, but I'll bet anyone quite a lot that their product development and quality control have very little to do with their human resources practices in the third world. (Even though I think they sound really good, too.)
  - innguest 12y ago
    It's a marketing campaign that ends up helping people and the real world. They have that money to spare because their customers think their products are desirable. It seems to me you're trying to detract from what happened here by trying to argue that their products aren't that good? I'm not sure what you're implying, but I'll repeat, they've only been able to help, even as a marketing ploy, because they have accumulated profits - proof that their customers value what they produce. The quality of their product, in the eyes of their customers, has everything to do with their ability to pull off this stunt.
    - mcguire 12y ago
      I'm not trying to detract from anything they've done, and their products are fine, as far as I know. What I'm saying is that there is no correlation between their success in dealing with an infectious disease in the area around one of their facilities and the quality of their consumer products.
      - 12y ago

BrandonMarc 12y ago

All I can do is scratch my head, wondering what the reporter isn't saying. Just what is it that Firestone is doing differently? It sure appears to be working, so it would be great to replicate if possible. Marbel is a company town of 80,000 ... a city more or less owned and run by Firestone, benevolently it appears, for nearly a century. Perhaps they're better at guarding and enforcing their border ... effectively keeping themselves mostly isolated from disease vectors coming in. Perhaps that helps them avoid being outnumbered by the sick and, more importantly, the ignorant [1]. After all, it's easy to keep an eye on those exposed when they're comparatively few and you have reliable information ... which comes from having a literate, educated population you've been working with for decades. Perhaps it's also easier to get honest [2], voluntary compliance when you're a close-knit community and the infected are usually coming from the outside (and, again, are few in number). It sure is interesting that while Firestone has hazmat suits intended for dealing with chemical spills, that infected nurse in Spain [3] says the blame goes to her Level 2 biosafety suit since it wasn't the preferred Level 4. Please correct me if I'm wrong ... I get the sense Firestone's suits aren't comparable to Level 4. Contrast this to the success (lack thereof) of the CDC, WHO, RSF, and other aid organizations. Sadly, they're either overwhelmed or incompetant. So what's needed is more Firestones, really? That's interesting. ----- [1] Yes, ignorance is massively lethal. See this story from August, of a mob who decided it would be fun to ransack and rob and already-overwhelmed Ebola clinic, stealing everything and taking it home ... all while taking Ebola home with them. http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/08/16/man-without-a-country/ http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/08/16/man-without-a... [2] As opposed to the diplomat who deceived his way into continuing on to a meeting of regional leaders ... thereby effectively causing the outbreak in Nigeria. And as opposed to the CDC today handing out fliers in airports and expecting voluntary compliance, in a sense informing travelers of how to lie in order to get into the USA where the good hospitals are. [3] http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/10/07/paradigm-shift/ http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/10/07/paradigm-shif...

danieltillett 12y ago
>All I can do is scratch my head, wondering what the reporter isn't saying. Just what is it that Firestone is doing differently? It sure appears to be working, so it would be great to replicate if possible. They are doing nothing different than what has worked in all the other Ebola outbreaks which is catch the outbreak early and implement effective infection control. A better question is why did this outbreak get out of control? The sad reason is incompetence. The WHO staff in west Africa appointed to watch out for Ebola outbreaks were, to quote Peter Piot [1], “[not] the most capable people but ... political appointees”. Some genius had also decided that gutting the department for hemorrhagic fever and the one responsible for the management of epidemic emergencies at the WHO was a great idea. This meant that there was no one around to respond. The outbreak was allowed to run wild for six months until it got so big that it overwhelmed the local health authorities (this occurred around August) and the case numbers took off exponentially. [1] http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-peter-piot-discoverer-of-the-ebola-virus-a-993111-2.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-pet...

facepalm 12y ago

"They grabbed a bunch of hazmat suits for dealing with chemical spills at the rubber factory and gave them to the hospital staff. The suits worked just as well for Ebola cases." I suppose having a rubber factory nearby helped a lot. Not to diminish their managerial achievement, but I imagine getting proper equipment might be a major obstacle in other parts of the country.

lotsofmangos 12y ago

Donation pages for Médecins Sans Frontières: http://www.msf.org.uk/make-a-donation http://www.msf.org.uk/make-a-donation https://donate.doctorswithoutborders.org/ https://donate.doctorswithoutborders.org/ Send MSF money and we will see more successes like this. Ebola can be beaten, but only if the resources are there.

peter303 12y ago

Nigeria has ended Ebola too. But its proximity to the main infections could mean reoccurence.

mcguire 12y ago

"Forty-eight were treated in the hospital and 18 survived." That's an interesting point on the actual lethality of the disease under more modern treatment conditions. Still, 60% is only slightly less scary than 90%.