Ebola.

[TheLovelyBoots]

I'm quite nervous. AIBU?

[Scarletohello]

Are people also worried about the recent outbreak of the plague in China..?

[Deverethemuzzler]

Plague responds very well to antibiotics doesn't it?

[AuntieStella]

TheLovelyBoots I haven't read the references behind that statement, but it seems to be saying that it can still be found in dried secretions at 'stable' infectivity. Can you confirm that that means you need close contact with clothes, bedding or other items used by an infected person? Is the 'stable' infectivity from dried secretions the same or lower than from ones that have't dried up?

And 4C is colder than the average winter day outdoors in London. Much colder than say than any indoors temperature. Does it lose infectivity rapidly when the temperature is not 4C?

[ParsingFlatly]

Oh god yes, AuntieS, north Kent marshes are home to all sorts of charmers. Very useful for London School of Tropical Medicine: meet your favourite beasties on a day return train ticket.

I don't if there has been climate-related spread yet: like you, I've heard the concerns.

But they do need the wet conditions, so other factors will also have an impact.

[TheLovelyBoots]

Unfortunately the study offers only 4C. No mention of what happens elsewhere in the spectrum between freezing & boiling.

It's the same for dried or wet.

I gather this means that if you encounter dried vomit/feces (bedclothes would be a good example) - it's contaminated for 4 days.

I read that they (WHO?) burn all bedding and spray walls with bleach when retrieving victims/corpses.

I believe there was a plague cluster in the US as well (Colorado maybe?).

[ParsingFlatly]

don't KNOW if

[Northernlurker]

this is a interesting read.

[AuntieStella]

Thanks TLB!

The hospitals can't cope with an outbreak of norovirus. Are they going to do much better against Ebola?

BBC Breakfast is reporting today that the Government is reviewing precautions. Ebola patients would not be treated in ordinary hospitals, so most should be unaffected. There are a couple of designated hospitals where people can be treated in high levels of bio containment. I hope the Government is looking at their capacity.

They will also need to look at how cases can rapidly be identified and transferred to the specialist centres (this will probably be the most challenging part), and how to clean/destroy what an infectious person has been in contact with and to work out whether to have a formal quarantine policy and how it would be implemented.

Temperature scanners at airports will reduce but not remove the risk. But of course it will mean that anyone running a temperature for any reason will be banned from flying and may face onwards measures.

[ParsingFlatly]

Thank you, Northern, that's an excellent article.

[TheLovelyBoots]

Thank you Northern
From your article:

"This means its “reproductive number” – how many people are infected, on average, by each carrier – is very low: about one, compared to 12 for measles. " (of the ebola virus)

[patienceisvirtuous]

I too worry about Ebola but feel much more educated on it after reading this thread :)

Will forward to my brother. It has been one of his big fears since we watched Outbreak with Cuba Gooding Jr and Dustin Hoffman yrs ago as teenagers!!

[AuntieStella]

There's a new Ebola thread in this topic this morning

At risk of being shouted at, I've suggested that people there might like to come and look at this thread. Not least because of the good links that the truly well-informed have added to this one. Thanks for sharing your expertise.

[ParsingFlatly]

(And I don't mean virus at all, for malaria, do I? I mean single-cell parasite.
Bah.
)

[ikeaismylocal]

What an interesting article, thanks northern!

It sounds like a really terrifying situation, I was reading about a group of 4 feverish children being brought to a hospital by ambulance, the mother refused to get out as she didn't believe her children had Ebola, the children were put on an Ebola ward. It must be awful for the parents to have to decide to seek help when their child could well just have a normal childhood virus, as the child would most likely catch Ebola from being kept in the same ward as Ebola patients.

[AuntieStella]

PF: I think the phrase you are after is "any one of 5 species of the parasitic protozoan of the genus Plasmodium"

[AuntieStella]

PF: I think the phrase you are after is "any one of 5 species of the parasitic protozoan of the genus Plasmodium"

[ParsingFlatly]

Well, obvs! Tchah! Who doesn't know that?

[FryOneFatManic]

Re the TB jab talked about previously, hospitals are selective in which babies get the jab.

With DS, I was in a bay with 3 other women. and their babies were given the TB jab and DS wasn't. Seems that it was because these women were from, or had lots of connections to, Asian countries where it's still very common. And DS and I were not.

I can sort of see the logic in that, but I think it does also strike me as health authorities being a little complacent about illnesses.

And I don't think they do the BCG thing as teenagers at school any more, the only jabs I recall DD getting is the HPV one.

I could understand with the smallpox vaccine being stopped, it had been eradicated in the wild, but TB is still prevalent in the world, so I am not sure that in Britain we are really geared up to cope with a virus epidemic. I wasn't really impressed with the swine flu efforts.

[AuntieStella]

I suppose many scientists and health policy planners did think that with antibiotics (and expected new drugs), immunisation and improved hygiene, the risk from contagious diseases would be sharply reduced and stay reduced.

It is only now, with widespread resistance, no great new drugs breakthroughs, emergent diseases for which there is no immunisation (at all or in time) and improved hygiene only working up to a point, that it is beginning to dawn on people that epidemics can (and at some point will) be just as deadly again. And that, with air travel, they will globalise at an unprecedented rate.

[FreeSpirit89]

Thank you, this thread has made me feel slightly more at ease. Nothing to contribute, just marking my place

[AuntieStella]

Well, it does seem to be quite prominently in the news today.

Proper science writers will cover it well. When science stories get into the "mainstream" parts of the media, the quality if reporting is variable (to put it politely - absolute dreadful scaremongering in some outlets).

The piece Northernlurker linked is definitely worth reading.

[TheLovelyBoots]

I was greatly relieved by the article Northern posted. The "reproductive number" makes it a very unlikely epidemic, I should think.

[TSSDNCOP]

Excellent article on a frightening disease.

[externalwallinsulation]

People seem to be treated all viruses as if they are the same. They are not. There are a lot of structural differences between airborne viruses like flu and those that are blood-borne like Ebola (just think about it: the air is actually a pretty hostile environment, so a pathogen needs a lot of adaptations to survive in it). What's more, airborne viruses need adaptations that allow them to infect via the respiratory system.

So what about the media hysteria over 'airborne' Ebola? A lot of this is based on one experiment, in which scientists put a bunch of infected pigs next door to a bunch of infected monkeys and some of the monkeys appeared to get the disease even though there was no exchange of bodily fluids. The best hypothesis of how this happened was that the virus was contained in tiny droplets of water in the pigs' respiratory systems, which were inhaled by the monkeys. This is not 'true' airborneness - it is much more local than, say, the mechanisms that allow flu to spread all over the place, and therefore much less of a public health worry. It's basically a move from an 'exchange of bodily fluids' model to a 'close contact' model of transmission.

In the West, we are able to contain and quarantine infections very effectively (evidence: the complete works of Michel Foucault), so even if Ebola did arrive in the UK, the chances of it become widespread are incredibly low. We also don't have animal species that act as carriers or a big bushmeat trade either, so it very likely wouldn't linger around. However, the legacy of colonialism, a lack of public health education, poverty and a struggling medical system plus raw fear make Ebola a far more deadly prospect in West Africa. Controlling the virus with quarantine measures is almost impossible there. The people working with populations are doing something unbelievably heroic and selfless, and I urge everyone reading this thread to donate Doctors without Borders a few quid because they are making a huge difference.

Right now, there is a lot of fear-mongering in the media, and a lot of very strange postcolonial associations of disease are being played upon (there is a particularly hysterically-toned piece in the Independent right now, which I urge you not to bother reading). To add a bit of proportionality: yes, Ebola is a wee bit scary but there have only EVER (that is, since records began) been something like 2,250 deaths (and that includes the current outbreak), whereas your so-called 'bog standard' flu kills 500,000 people every year and is airborne.

[limitedperiodonly]

(there is a particularly hysterically-toned piece in the Independent right now, which I urge you not to bother reading)

That was like a red rag to a bull external

Thanks for the rest of your post. Actually, thanks for the Independent piece too. I particularly like it when people point out just how often 'quality' newspapers print ill-informed shit.