• Welcome to OGBoards 10.0, keep in mind that we will be making LOTS of changes to smooth out the experience here and make it as close as possible functionally to the old software, but feel free to drop suggestions or requests in the Tech Support subforum!

E is for Ebola (Dallas TX)

jhmd2000 said:
More Americans have died from Ebola than from being suffocated by cops in the last six months. Let's not pretend that the hysteria machine only cranks in one direction.
Click to expand...

#bothblacklivesmattered
 
Police aren't military.
 
jhmd2000 said:
#unlesstheyweretakenbycivilians
Click to expand...

1slj61.gif
 
jhmd2000 said:
More Americans have died from Ebola than from being suffocated by cops in the last six months. Let's not pretend that the hysteria machine only cranks in one direction.
Click to expand...

Come on that was gold
 
This was my concern. Even the "tiny" outbreak completely overwhelmed the system and people were not taking it seriously enough to help. If things had gotten worse as far as infection, there would have been nothing to stop it. It's now considered a huge failure of the system everyone relied on for protection.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsandso...risis-was-whos-big-failure-will-reform-follow

The organization's missteps in the early days of the outbreak are now legendary.

At first the agency that's responsible for "providing leadership on global health matters" was dismissive of the scale of the problem in West Africa. Then it deflected responsibility for the crisis to the overwhelmed governments of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. After eight months, it finally stepped up to take charge of the Ebola response but lacked the staff and funds to do so effectively.

WHO director Margaret Chan recently admitted her agency was unprepared for the epidemic. "It overwhelmed the capacity of WHO, and it is a crisis that cannot be solved by a single agency or single country,"
 
"Could it adapt in a way that makes it airborne?

It’s highly unlikely. It would be unusual for a virus to transform in a way that changes its mode of infection. Of the 23 known viruses that cause serious disease in man, none are known to have mutated in ways that changed how they infect humans."



"The widespread belief is that the Ebola virus would be very unlikely to change in a way that would allow the individual virus particles to be concentrated, and remain suspended in respiratory secretions — and then infect contacts through inhalation.

The Ebola virus is comprised of ribonucleic acid (RNA). Such a structure makes it prone to undergoing rapid genetic changes. But to become airborne, a lot of unlikely events would need to occur. Ebola’s RNA genome would have to mutate to the point where the coating that surrounds the virus particles (the protein capsid) is no longer susceptible to harsh drying effects of being suspended in air.

To be spread through the air, it also generally helps if the virus is concentrated in the lungs of affected patients. For humans, this is not the case. Ebola generally isn’t an infection of the lungs. The main organ that the virus targets is the liver. That is why patients stricken with Ebola develop very high amounts of the virus in the blood and in the feces, and not in their respiratory secretions.

Could Ebola mutate in a way that confers these qualities on the virus?

Anything is possible. But such a scientific feat would rate as highly unlikely. A lot of the speculation that Ebola could be airborne stems from a set of earlier studies that showed Ebola virus may have been able to spread through the air between infected pigs and monkeys. There are reasons why these studies are not applicable when it comes to questions around human-to-human transmission. In animals, Ebola behaves differently than it does in people, for example concentrating in lung tissue."

http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottgottlieb/2014/09/03/can-ebola-go-airborne/
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top