Ebola Outbreak: Worldwide Air-Transportation, Relative Import Risk and Most Probable Spreading Route

I just happened to see this and thought others would be interested. This interactive website calculates and graphically displays the relative probability of Ebola spreading by air to many airports around the world from airports in West Africa:

2014 Ebola Outbreak: Worldwide Air Transportation
and Relative Import Risk

On first glance, it is not the easiest website to read and interpret, but it is extremely interesting. This should help you get started understanding it.

At the upper left, select the airport in Africa that would be the point of origin.

At the bottom of the graphic you can select a destination country if you want to limit the data that is shown graphically somewhat.

At the bottom of the page below that are buttons that pop up explanations of various details.

The output is an interactive graphic with tiers of colored bubbles or circles that represent destination or connecting airports. These are connected by lines that represent likely spreading routes from airport to airport.

The bubbles/circles are not laid out on a map, unfortunately. But the color of the bubbles/circles are color coded to represent geographic areas of the world and the list of countries below the graphic are color coded the same. Hover over any bubble/circle and you will see the name of the airport it represents and a lot of data, of which the primary concern to most will likely be the Relative Import Probability expressed as a percentage.

The authors crunched a lot of data to create this. There is a technical paper that goes into great depth about how they did the probability modeling here:

2014 Ebola Outbreak: Worldwide Air-Transportation, Relative Import Risk and Most Probable Spreading Routes

The authors are:

Dirk Brockmann (Robert Koch-Institute, Berlin, Germany; Institute for Theoretical Biology, Berlin, Germany; and Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA)

Lars Schaade (Robert Koch-Institute, Berlin, Germany)

Luzie Verbeek (Robert Koch-Institute, Berlin, Germany)

I was originally going to post this in one of the other threads about Ebola, but I figured it would get lost amongst the posts, and it's too good of a resource to get lost so quickly.

It can spread. The western world (especially America) mainly their major cities are filthy. Sewage odors, uncleaned public facilities, dirty transportation, unhygienic workers, weakened immune systems.

It's a bug in the system. It's a big one.

a reply to: ikonoklast

Well, based on that, it looks like Paris has the biggest risk...and from there, then Asia.

a reply to: ikonoklast

Was looking at this from dec 2013.
Terrifying-video-reveal s-London-Heathrow-spread-pandemic-DAYS.

interesting that a contagion could possibly travel more quickly between busy airports in different countries than between cities in the same country.

Hopefully they will use the data they get from ebola and do some predictions.

a reply to: loam

I thought it was pretty shocking that they calculated about a 1 in 12 chance of Ebola spreading to Paris from Guinea alone, without even considering other paths.

But I suppose I should really be more surprised that it's not known to have spread outside of Africa yet, not counting a few evacuated patients who caught it in Africa. And I suppose I should really wonder if cases outside of Africa are being covered up.

a reply to: joho99

Interesting, thanks. I don't know if you noticed or not, but that video comes from the same team who put together the interactive website for the spread of the Ebola outbreak by air.

originally posted by: ikonoklast
a reply to: loam

I thought it was pretty shocking that they calculated about a 1 in 12 chance of Ebola spreading to Paris from Guinea alone, without even considering other paths.

But I suppose I should really be more surprised that it's not known to have spread outside of Africa yet, not counting a few evacuated patients who caught it in Africa. And I suppose I should really wonder if cases outside of Africa are being covered up.

Got to be lower than 1 in 12
A Comprehensive Look at the Ebola Virus

Scroll down to potential of spreading internationally and have a look at Europe.

a reply to: ikonoklast

Nope did not know and was looking for the teams name to lol

originally posted by: joho99
a reply to: ikonoklast

Was looking at this from dec 2013.
Terrifying-video-reveal s-London-Heathrow-spread-pandemic-DAYS.

interesting that a contagion could possibly travel more quickly between busy airports in different countries than between cities in the same country.

Hopefully they will use the data they get from ebola and do some predictions.

That's no surprise. You can fly down from Edinburgh to London in an hour. Always amazed me that I could get a taxi at 9.30am, arrive at the airport at 9.45am, check in, and my flight leaves at 10.30am, get into London at 12pm. If you try and travel by train, it's a 7 hour journey, pray that nobody had taken your seat, there aren't any delays due to someone not understanding the special offers and refusing to pay a fare.
London and Paris are only an hour away by the Chunnel.

a reply to: joho99

I think the two sources are talking about different numbers.

The approximately 1 in 12 chance I mentioned was only for the probability of transmission from 1 airport in Guinea to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. It looks like the probability for Ebola transmission discussed at the link you posted was for all airports in Europe that have flights coming in from affected countries in Africa. For that, the probability is definitely higher.

Looking at the big picture, the creators of the interactive site analyzed data for:

4000+ airports
25,000 direct connections
3 billion+ passengers per year

The airports represented graphically are less than that, but they say the data accounts for 95% of all global air traffic per year.

So if there is about a 1 in 12 in chance just between 1 airport in Europe and 1 airport in Africa, that's really, really bad...

a reply to: ikonoklast

Just meant with Europe getting you may as well say 30% of the traffic for august from the infected country's and France been the last to stop flights odds of 12 to 1 seemed relatively high .

stop with the ebola threads... its too fast to create any danger. So unless it mutates, theres no danger of an ebola world wide pandemic killing billions...

Although if it mutates, then we should be worried. Until then... it just kills to fast to even be a cause for concern.

I think one of the biggest ways diseases will spread from person to person, is that stuff we all carry every day. MONEY.

a reply to: FraternitasSaturni

Thats the problem it does not kill fast enough.

And it is in multiple city's with millions of people not remote locations that are easily controlled like previous outbreaks.

a reply to: ikonoklast

Global corporations are active in West Africa - and the biggest dangers come from executives flitting in and out of the nations, going back and forth between their corporate offices off-continent. Of course they can afford the best private clinics, bypass government reporting rules and as well, can pay whatever is required to protect their (and their corporations') absolute privacy. Interesting that Nigeria is not on that map.

...and fyi - this map, developed by the Robert Koch-Institute, clearly promotes genocide by quarantine. You DO know that the Robert Koch-Institute has long history of supporting Eugenics policies, right?

_][The Department for Tropical Medicine of the Robert Koch-Institute during the "Third Reich": research areas, actors, and contributions to Nazi expansionist politics].

Abstract
Using the methods of institutional history, this article examines the Department for Tropical Medicine of the Robert Koch-Institute for Infectious Diseases in Berlin. The Heads of Department were deeply involved in the crimes against humanity during National Socialism. The relationship between science and politics is analysed with regard to the so-called self-mobilization of scientists, especially during Word War II. Particularly Gerhard Rose accumulated various posts in science, the military and in state organizations during National Socialism, extending in this way his influence on research in tropical medicine.

funny how this bug seems to only occur in oil producing areas of third world countries which have been slated for depopulation and subsequent external resource management...

originally posted by: soficrow
a reply to: ikonoklast

...and fyi - this map, developed by the Robert Koch-Institute, clearly promotes genocide by quarantine. You DO know that the Robert Koch-Institute has long history of supporting Eugenics policies, right?

_][The Department for Tropical Medicine of the Robert Koch-Institute during the "Third Reich": research areas, actors, and contributions to Nazi expansionist politics].

Abstract
Using the methods of institutional history, this article examines the Department for Tropical Medicine of the Robert Koch-Institute for Infectious Diseases in Berlin. The Heads of Department were deeply involved in the crimes against humanity during National Socialism. The relationship between science and politics is analysed with regard to the so-called self-mobilization of scientists, especially during Word War II. Particularly Gerhard Rose accumulated various posts in science, the military and in state organizations during National Socialism, extending in this way his influence on research in tropical medicine.

No, I did not know that, thank you for the information. Strangely, it helps add possible context to a strange statement I saw this morning from the director-general of WHO:

The devastating Ebola virus should not be characterized as an “African disease,” the director-general of the World Health Organization told reporters today.

Dr. Margaret Chan, speaking in a teleconference hosted by the U.N. Foundation in Washington, D.C., explained that any stigmatization of the disease suggesting a racial classification would be detrimental to United Nations effort to control the outbreak.

SOURCE: WND

[NOTE: I know WND can be a pretty slanted news source.]

Hopefully Nazi eugenics stuff is not being perpetuated in this day and age by the German government. Wikipedia says:

As part of the Federal Government of Germany, the Robert Koch Institute organization is responsible for disease control and prevention. It is located in Berlin and Wernigerode, and is a part of the Federal Ministry of Health.

You never know, though, I suppose.

a reply to: ikonoklast

Eugenics principles "inform" corporate-military-government policies all over the world - not just in Germany. It's more than rampant, despite the fact that the misinformed "genetic" premises and assumptions have been thoroughly disproved.

RE: "African diseases." There's an unfortunate perception that "Africans are always dying of something" - usually European diseases like measles, flu and colds imported into isolated regions where tribes have no immunity. The big difference here is that Ebola very well could be exported to Europe and around the world. The "window of opportunity" for controlling the epidemic is closing fast -nobody is sending their emergency biological response teams to help- so it looks like we're in for it.



ETA PS: Most likely, Africans have developed a degree of immunity to Ebola because of ongoing and recurrent exposures, but no one else has.