11 ms·

The Ebola Wars

192 points by cwal37 12y ago

androidb 12y ago
Very well written article, but does anyone else think that the cartoonish image advertisements don't really fit well with the purpose of the article? The photo of an aid worker removing the body of a dead woman also looks surreal...
- goatforce5 12y ago
  The cartoons are a big part of the New Yorker: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Yorker#Cartoons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Yorker#Cartoons
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  It's a New Yorker thing - they've had whimsical cartoons mixed with serious reportage in their printed editions for decades, if not over a century. It is odd but I suspect it gets people to read more articles than they otherwise might.
ddlatham 12y ago
A sample of the Ebola now raging in West Africa has, by recent count, 18,959 letters of code in its genome; this is a small genome, by the measure of living things. Does this mean mean Ebola is essentially about 38 kilobytes?
- spacehome 12y ago
  Yes. I wonder if being so incredibly small means that replication is more efficient and intense and is therefore a strong factor behind why it's so virulent.
  - harshreality 12y ago
    I don't think that's the most important factor. Influenza, along with ebola and rabies, is small, while smallpox is big. http://www.lehigh.edu/~jas0/viralgenomes.html http://www.lehigh.edu/~jas0/viralgenomes.html
- netcraft 12y ago
  something like that: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nucleotide/NC_002549 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nucleotide/NC_002549 (I get 21K)
- pygy_ 12y ago
  4740 bytes, actually. There are only four nucleotides ("letters") in RNA. You can encode them with two bits.
- throwaway_yy2Di 12y ago
  38 kilobits = 4.7 kB, but yes. Here's the complete genome of the pandemic strain (scroll down a bit): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/KJ660346 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/KJ660346 Here's the paper sequencing it. ([edit]: I just realized the New Yorker article is largely about this exact paper -- I commented before reading, sorry). Note that five of the authors died before publication; there's a short tribute accompanying it. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6202/1369.full http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6202/1369.full http://news.sciencemag.org/health/2014/08/ebolas-heavy-toll-study-authors http://news.sciencemag.org/health/2014/08/ebolas-heavy-toll-... Here's another phylogeny of this strain, including github repo: http://currents.plos.org/outbreaks/article/phylogenetic-analysis-of-guinea-2014-ebov-ebolavirus-outbreak-2/ http://currents.plos.org/outbreaks/article/phylogenetic-anal...
  - ddlatham 12y ago
    Oops, thanks for the bits to bytes correction. It is simply incredible to me that it could be so small (in an information sense). This article (gzipped) is 22KB, more than 4 times as much information.
    - rads 12y ago
      Yeah, but don't forget the complexity of the hardware you need to run ebola versus a website. Our bodies provide most of the implementation details.
      - Florin_Andrei 12y ago
        Right. It's so much context dependent that the "hardware" of a different animal may react very differently to it - perhaps even ignoring it altogether. The genetic information is really the 4.8 kB of "code" PLUS the entire information already contained in the cellular hardware reading it. One doesn't make sense without the other. At the very bottom, the whole thing depends on the laws of quantum mechanics in this universe, governing the minute details of molecular interaction. That, too, should be considered to go into the "code". Make a tiny change to the Plank constant, and the Zaire ebolavirus code will do something very different.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- scottious 12y ago
  Yes, but also no. I work at The Broad Institute and I deal with these genomes all the time. Long story short: there's tons of redundant data in these genomes because of the imperfect nature of sequencing so the real file size is many times bigger than that. Though in theory if we had perfect sequencing then it'd be around that size.
  - Terr_ 12y ago
    For some reason I think of X-ray crystallography: A large number of different pictures go into reaching a conclusion which is much simpler to convey.
FD3SA 12y ago
Good thing we've been cutting science funding across the board! Doubt the NIH and NSF grants were helping science much anyway. As a matter of fact, science should be privately funded and privately run. What idiot thought it was a good idea to make scientific research a government mandate? To thy weary, I say: The market shall provide. P.S. Yes, I am bitter about the current state of science. I've written about it in great detail before [1][2], but the current fascination with free-market everything has truly made me lose hope for this iteration of society. The free market will work, until it doesn't. Some activities which are absolutely crucial, will not be profitable until it's too late. Medical research is a good example, but there are others (energy sources to replace oil, overproduction of consumer waste, pollution etc.) Seems like today's societies must learn by sticking their fingers in the proverbial wall socket. So be it. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8337837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8337837 2. https://hn.algolia.com/#!/comment/forever/prefix/0/by%3AFD3SA%20science https://hn.algolia.com/#!/comment/forever/prefix/0/by%3AFD3S...
- throwaway5752 12y ago
  Sorry in advance that this going a little off topic (though, I would argue it's somewhat pertinent given the historically notable scientific illiteracy in the Ebola coverage/public response). This is a political site, but the author is an expert in healthcare policy: http://www.balloon-juice.com/2014/10/17/resiliency-is-not-efficient/ http://www.balloon-juice.com/2014/10/17/resiliency-is-not-ef... I tend to agree with you and him on the topic that capitalism as practiced in the US currently is a quarter-to-quarter exercise. It doesn't disincentive externalized and systemic risks enough.
  - hga 12y ago
    Bleah. The author ignores the very real opportunity costs in preparing "too much" for low probability events.
- jerf 12y ago
  The CDC was and is plenty funded to deal with this threat. If you think they didn't spend it well, well, join the club. No amount of money is ever "enough" if it not managed responsibly. I'd really appreciate it if those who think the answer is always more government money would start putting more pressure on their goverment to spend it responsibly. I mean that quite straight, not as a snark. It would go a long way towards getting me on the bandwagon of more government spending if it didn't appear to me that the people making this claim didn't always take every opportunity to dodge away from the question of responsibility in practice.
jrkelly 12y ago
Couple old, enjoyable blog posts from Bunnie Huang on viral genomes from CS standpoint: http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=353 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=353 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=1676 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=1676
astrange 12y ago
What I get from this article is that they let the most important candidate for the drug die without taking it, but then two random Americans got it because no one was watching. Is the lesson here to always steal people's vaccines without asking?
- kevinskii 12y ago
  This is a good point. A dose of ZMapp was being stored on the very same premises where Dr. Khan lay dying. But instead of giving him the treatment on the spot, considerable risk was instead taken to deliver it to two Americans in another country 250 miles away. However it would be unfair to say that this was because the Americans' lives were valued more than Dr. Khan's. He was being cared for by Doctors Without Borders. For quite rational reasons they decided to withhold the treatment [1]. The Americans were under someone else's care and thus weren't subject to DWB's decision. My main ethical disagreement is with DWB's decision not to inform Dr. Khan of ZMapp's existence while knowing that it would be used by others. [1] http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11308894 http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&obje...
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    I think this was just a bad timing. When deciding to withhold treatment for Dr. Khan they weren't aware that the next patients in line were two white men - a situation they explicitly wanted to avoid.
001sky 12y ago
On the author of this piece, some useful context http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/books/the-hot-zone-author-tracks-ebolas-evolution.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/books/the-hot-zone-author-...
suprgeek 12y ago
The description of the conditions in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone and the over-whelming odds that the doctors there are facing was heartbreaking to read. The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is as much a function of poverty as it is of the Ebola Virus. One of these all of us can fight.
- throwaway5752 12y ago
  I am profoundly moved by the heroism Dr Khan and his nurses showed and the example they've set for future generations of medical professionals. I hope it's publicized when Dr. Khan's family finishes setting up the foundation in his name http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)61428-8/fulltext http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...
  - monsterix 12y ago
    I wonder who were the people that took the decision to not give ZMapp to Dr. Khan. What were their reasons to take the drug away for what seems like treating white patients first while we can come back to Khan later (sorry but there is no better way to put this). A full enquiry and reportage on that side of story will be helpful I think.
    - Steuard 12y ago
      One issue that I've seen raised before is that there's a bit of a Catch-22 in public perception in Africa. As you point out, withholding the experimental drug has nasty overtones of "saving the cure for the white folks". But there's also a real risk that if they gave the first experimental treatment to Dr. Khan, the narrative would be "using the black folks as guinea pigs". Both of these concerns are based on actual history, so they're not easily dismissed in the region. I don't know how you balance that. If the treatment is new enough, you really might not know whether it would help or hurt the patient's odds of survival.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
kazinator 12y ago
> A particle of Ebola is made of only six structural proteins, locked together to become an object that resembles a strand of cooked spaghetti. An Ebola particle is only around eighty nanometres wide and a thousand nanometres long. If it were the size of a piece of spaghetti, then a human hair would be about twelve feet in diameter and would resemble the trunk of a giant redwood tree. So, 0.08 microns wide, 1 micron long, but ... nope, not air-borne! You have nothing to worry about, folks! You know, pollen is air-borne, and pollen grains start at around 10 microns: ten times the length of a stick of ebola. > The virus is extremely infectious. Experiments suggest that if one particle of Ebola enters a person’s bloodstream it can cause a fatal infection. [ ... ] One common route of entry is thought to be the wet membrane on the inner surface of the eyelid, which a person might touch with a contaminated fingertip. Nope, an infection via the eyelid membrane couldn't conceivably happen via the airborne route. Lalala, fingers in my ears ...
- psychometry 12y ago
  What I find most odd about your comment is that without the quoted text, I'd assume you didn't even read the article. How you could read the relevant portions of the text and still conclude that Ebola could become airborne suggests maybe it's not your ears that are preventing comprehension.
  - kazinator 12y ago
    Hi psychometry; I did read read the text which deals with the airborne question. All it says is that there is "no evidence". Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. "There is no evidence" doesn't mean that there doesn't exist evidence, only that evidence hasn't been found so far. You cannot reassure people by insinuating that they lack reading comprehension. That droplets containing the ebola virus could go long distances, or even dry up leaving a airborne particles, seems very plausible. I do not see how it can be ruled out on the grounds of a lack of evidence. Has someone experimented with spray-drying a mist of ebola-infected fluid to show that it does not survive such a drying and carry through the air? What does lack of evidence mean: how hard have researchers tried to reproduce airborne behavior? Maybe there is no evidence of this "in the wild" because it hasn't spread widely enough.
oska 12y ago
> The town [of Kenema] sits in fertile, hilly country, dotted with small villages, ninety miles southwest of the place where the borders of Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia converge in a triskelion. This border area was the cradle of the Ebola outbreak. I was unfamiliar with the word triskelion in this description. So I looked it up on Wikipedia [1]. Turns out it is an ancient motif or symbol consisting of three interlocking legs or spirals. So then I checked the border area between these three countries and indeed, it is quite well described as a triskelion although the top border is more like 180 degrees than 120. I have uploaded a cropped Google Map to imgur showing the area [2]. The town of Kenema is in the southwest corner. Guinea is the NE section, Sierra Leone is the western part and Liberia is the SE area. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triskelion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triskelion [2] http://imgur.com/cOPx4Ty http://imgur.com/cOPx4Ty
srcmap 12y ago
newyorker should help setup a fund to donate to doctors/nurses who are working in the frontline of Ebola.
- manachar 12y ago
  Or just link to an existing fund with a pretty great track record and truly heroic volunteers: http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/ http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/
vijaygirija 12y ago
Found this article in google how big data can help Ebola statistics. https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/the-big-data-cure/ https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/the-big-data-cure/
mlatu 12y ago
i now have a strange fear of the letter "o"
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
johnnybravado 12y ago
You idiots wouldn't recognize propaganda if it were wearing a name tag... "I'd like to poke them in their prying eyes with things they'd never see if it smacked them in their temples." -Arctic Monkeys
cladams 12y ago
like do you even swag bruh??
cladams 12y ago
do you swag
cladams 12y ago
wrwerer
cladams 12y ago
wrwerer
cladams 12y ago
werw

192 points by cwal37 12y ago

Very well written article, but does anyone else think that the cartoonish image advertisements don't really fit well with the purpose of the article? The photo of an aid worker removing the body of a dead woman also looks surreal...

goatforce5 12y ago
The cartoons are a big part of the New Yorker: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Yorker#Cartoons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Yorker#Cartoons
anigbrowl 12y ago
It's a New Yorker thing - they've had whimsical cartoons mixed with serious reportage in their printed editions for decades, if not over a century. It is odd but I suspect it gets people to read more articles than they otherwise might.

ddlatham 12y ago

A sample of the Ebola now raging in West Africa has, by recent count, 18,959 letters of code in its genome; this is a small genome, by the measure of living things. Does this mean mean Ebola is essentially about 38 kilobytes?

spacehome 12y ago
Yes. I wonder if being so incredibly small means that replication is more efficient and intense and is therefore a strong factor behind why it's so virulent.
- harshreality 12y ago
  I don't think that's the most important factor. Influenza, along with ebola and rabies, is small, while smallpox is big. http://www.lehigh.edu/~jas0/viralgenomes.html http://www.lehigh.edu/~jas0/viralgenomes.html
netcraft 12y ago
something like that: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nucleotide/NC_002549 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nucleotide/NC_002549 (I get 21K)
pygy_ 12y ago
4740 bytes, actually. There are only four nucleotides ("letters") in RNA. You can encode them with two bits.
throwaway_yy2Di 12y ago
38 kilobits = 4.7 kB, but yes. Here's the complete genome of the pandemic strain (scroll down a bit): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/KJ660346 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/KJ660346 Here's the paper sequencing it. ([edit]: I just realized the New Yorker article is largely about this exact paper -- I commented before reading, sorry). Note that five of the authors died before publication; there's a short tribute accompanying it. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6202/1369.full http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6202/1369.full http://news.sciencemag.org/health/2014/08/ebolas-heavy-toll-study-authors http://news.sciencemag.org/health/2014/08/ebolas-heavy-toll-... Here's another phylogeny of this strain, including github repo: http://currents.plos.org/outbreaks/article/phylogenetic-analysis-of-guinea-2014-ebov-ebolavirus-outbreak-2/ http://currents.plos.org/outbreaks/article/phylogenetic-anal...
- ddlatham 12y ago
  Oops, thanks for the bits to bytes correction. It is simply incredible to me that it could be so small (in an information sense). This article (gzipped) is 22KB, more than 4 times as much information.
  - rads 12y ago
    Yeah, but don't forget the complexity of the hardware you need to run ebola versus a website. Our bodies provide most of the implementation details.
    - Florin_Andrei 12y ago
      Right. It's so much context dependent that the "hardware" of a different animal may react very differently to it - perhaps even ignoring it altogether. The genetic information is really the 4.8 kB of "code" PLUS the entire information already contained in the cellular hardware reading it. One doesn't make sense without the other. At the very bottom, the whole thing depends on the laws of quantum mechanics in this universe, governing the minute details of molecular interaction. That, too, should be considered to go into the "code". Make a tiny change to the Plank constant, and the Zaire ebolavirus code will do something very different.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
scottious 12y ago
Yes, but also no. I work at The Broad Institute and I deal with these genomes all the time. Long story short: there's tons of redundant data in these genomes because of the imperfect nature of sequencing so the real file size is many times bigger than that. Though in theory if we had perfect sequencing then it'd be around that size.
- Terr_ 12y ago
  For some reason I think of X-ray crystallography: A large number of different pictures go into reaching a conclusion which is much simpler to convey.

FD3SA 12y ago

Good thing we've been cutting science funding across the board! Doubt the NIH and NSF grants were helping science much anyway. As a matter of fact, science should be privately funded and privately run. What idiot thought it was a good idea to make scientific research a government mandate? To thy weary, I say: The market shall provide. P.S. Yes, I am bitter about the current state of science. I've written about it in great detail before [1][2], but the current fascination with free-market everything has truly made me lose hope for this iteration of society. The free market will work, until it doesn't. Some activities which are absolutely crucial, will not be profitable until it's too late. Medical research is a good example, but there are others (energy sources to replace oil, overproduction of consumer waste, pollution etc.) Seems like today's societies must learn by sticking their fingers in the proverbial wall socket. So be it. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8337837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8337837 2. https://hn.algolia.com/#!/comment/forever/prefix/0/by%3AFD3SA%20science https://hn.algolia.com/#!/comment/forever/prefix/0/by%3AFD3S...

throwaway5752 12y ago
Sorry in advance that this going a little off topic (though, I would argue it's somewhat pertinent given the historically notable scientific illiteracy in the Ebola coverage/public response). This is a political site, but the author is an expert in healthcare policy: http://www.balloon-juice.com/2014/10/17/resiliency-is-not-efficient/ http://www.balloon-juice.com/2014/10/17/resiliency-is-not-ef... I tend to agree with you and him on the topic that capitalism as practiced in the US currently is a quarter-to-quarter exercise. It doesn't disincentive externalized and systemic risks enough.
- hga 12y ago
  Bleah. The author ignores the very real opportunity costs in preparing "too much" for low probability events.
jerf 12y ago
The CDC was and is plenty funded to deal with this threat. If you think they didn't spend it well, well, join the club. No amount of money is ever "enough" if it not managed responsibly. I'd really appreciate it if those who think the answer is always more government money would start putting more pressure on their goverment to spend it responsibly. I mean that quite straight, not as a snark. It would go a long way towards getting me on the bandwagon of more government spending if it didn't appear to me that the people making this claim didn't always take every opportunity to dodge away from the question of responsibility in practice.

jrkelly 12y ago

Couple old, enjoyable blog posts from Bunnie Huang on viral genomes from CS standpoint: http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=353 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=353 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=1676 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=1676

astrange 12y ago

What I get from this article is that they let the most important candidate for the drug die without taking it, but then two random Americans got it because no one was watching. Is the lesson here to always steal people's vaccines without asking?

kevinskii 12y ago
This is a good point. A dose of ZMapp was being stored on the very same premises where Dr. Khan lay dying. But instead of giving him the treatment on the spot, considerable risk was instead taken to deliver it to two Americans in another country 250 miles away. However it would be unfair to say that this was because the Americans' lives were valued more than Dr. Khan's. He was being cared for by Doctors Without Borders. For quite rational reasons they decided to withhold the treatment [1]. The Americans were under someone else's care and thus weren't subject to DWB's decision. My main ethical disagreement is with DWB's decision not to inform Dr. Khan of ZMapp's existence while knowing that it would be used by others. [1] http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11308894 http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&obje...
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  I think this was just a bad timing. When deciding to withhold treatment for Dr. Khan they weren't aware that the next patients in line were two white men - a situation they explicitly wanted to avoid.

001sky 12y ago

On the author of this piece, some useful context http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/books/the-hot-zone-author-tracks-ebolas-evolution.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/books/the-hot-zone-author-...

suprgeek 12y ago

The description of the conditions in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone and the over-whelming odds that the doctors there are facing was heartbreaking to read. The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is as much a function of poverty as it is of the Ebola Virus. One of these all of us can fight.

throwaway5752 12y ago
I am profoundly moved by the heroism Dr Khan and his nurses showed and the example they've set for future generations of medical professionals. I hope it's publicized when Dr. Khan's family finishes setting up the foundation in his name http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)61428-8/fulltext http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...
- monsterix 12y ago
  I wonder who were the people that took the decision to not give ZMapp to Dr. Khan. What were their reasons to take the drug away for what seems like treating white patients first while we can come back to Khan later (sorry but there is no better way to put this). A full enquiry and reportage on that side of story will be helpful I think.
  - Steuard 12y ago
    One issue that I've seen raised before is that there's a bit of a Catch-22 in public perception in Africa. As you point out, withholding the experimental drug has nasty overtones of "saving the cure for the white folks". But there's also a real risk that if they gave the first experimental treatment to Dr. Khan, the narrative would be "using the black folks as guinea pigs". Both of these concerns are based on actual history, so they're not easily dismissed in the region. I don't know how you balance that. If the treatment is new enough, you really might not know whether it would help or hurt the patient's odds of survival.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

kazinator 12y ago

> A particle of Ebola is made of only six structural proteins, locked together to become an object that resembles a strand of cooked spaghetti. An Ebola particle is only around eighty nanometres wide and a thousand nanometres long. If it were the size of a piece of spaghetti, then a human hair would be about twelve feet in diameter and would resemble the trunk of a giant redwood tree. So, 0.08 microns wide, 1 micron long, but ... nope, not air-borne! You have nothing to worry about, folks! You know, pollen is air-borne, and pollen grains start at around 10 microns: ten times the length of a stick of ebola. > The virus is extremely infectious. Experiments suggest that if one particle of Ebola enters a person’s bloodstream it can cause a fatal infection. [ ... ] One common route of entry is thought to be the wet membrane on the inner surface of the eyelid, which a person might touch with a contaminated fingertip. Nope, an infection via the eyelid membrane couldn't conceivably happen via the airborne route. Lalala, fingers in my ears ...

psychometry 12y ago
What I find most odd about your comment is that without the quoted text, I'd assume you didn't even read the article. How you could read the relevant portions of the text and still conclude that Ebola could become airborne suggests maybe it's not your ears that are preventing comprehension.
- kazinator 12y ago
  Hi psychometry; I did read read the text which deals with the airborne question. All it says is that there is "no evidence". Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. "There is no evidence" doesn't mean that there doesn't exist evidence, only that evidence hasn't been found so far. You cannot reassure people by insinuating that they lack reading comprehension. That droplets containing the ebola virus could go long distances, or even dry up leaving a airborne particles, seems very plausible. I do not see how it can be ruled out on the grounds of a lack of evidence. Has someone experimented with spray-drying a mist of ebola-infected fluid to show that it does not survive such a drying and carry through the air? What does lack of evidence mean: how hard have researchers tried to reproduce airborne behavior? Maybe there is no evidence of this "in the wild" because it hasn't spread widely enough.

oska 12y ago

> The town [of Kenema] sits in fertile, hilly country, dotted with small villages, ninety miles southwest of the place where the borders of Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia converge in a triskelion. This border area was the cradle of the Ebola outbreak. I was unfamiliar with the word triskelion in this description. So I looked it up on Wikipedia [1]. Turns out it is an ancient motif or symbol consisting of three interlocking legs or spirals. So then I checked the border area between these three countries and indeed, it is quite well described as a triskelion although the top border is more like 180 degrees than 120. I have uploaded a cropped Google Map to imgur showing the area [2]. The town of Kenema is in the southwest corner. Guinea is the NE section, Sierra Leone is the western part and Liberia is the SE area. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triskelion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triskelion [2] http://imgur.com/cOPx4Ty http://imgur.com/cOPx4Ty

srcmap 12y ago

newyorker should help setup a fund to donate to doctors/nurses who are working in the frontline of Ebola.

manachar 12y ago
Or just link to an existing fund with a pretty great track record and truly heroic volunteers: http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/ http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/

vijaygirija 12y ago

Found this article in google how big data can help Ebola statistics. https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/the-big-data-cure/ https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/the-big-data-cure/

mlatu 12y ago

i now have a strange fear of the letter "o"

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

johnnybravado 12y ago

You idiots wouldn't recognize propaganda if it were wearing a name tag... "I'd like to poke them in their prying eyes with things they'd never see if it smacked them in their temples." -Arctic Monkeys

cladams 12y ago

like do you even swag bruh??

cladams 12y ago

do you swag

cladams 12y ago

wrwerer

cladams 12y ago

wrwerer

cladams 12y ago

werw