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EBOLA will claim 6800 new victims this month. By January, the number infected could soar to 500,000, the Centre for Disease Control warns.
The startling new estimates, reported in the Washington Post today and due to be released later this week, is a vast increase over World Health Organisation estimates released last month which said up to 20,000 would be exposed before ebola was controlled.
A study published in PLoS Outbreaks on Friday states mass quarantine efforts appear to have made the outbreak worse.
1) quarantine has been historically used to discriminate against minorities;
2) studies demonstrate that mass quarantine is ineffective;
3) a large scale quarantine would be difficult to implement.
An outbreak should meet the following three criteria for quarantine to be a useful measure of disease control:
* people likely to be incubating the infection must be efficiently and effectively identified;
* those people must comply with the conditions of quarantine; and
* the infectious disease in question must be transmissible in its presymptomatic or early symptomatic stages.
The use of quarantine in the Toronto (SARS) outbreak failed on all three counts.
“There may be other reasons for the worsening of the outbreak spread, including the possibility that the virus has become more transmissible, but it’s also possible that the quarantine control efforts actually made the outbreak spread more quickly by crowding people together in unsanitary conditions,” research professor Sherry Towers of Arizona State University wrote.
The study also reports that the risk of international spread has increased because the African outbreak has spread to densely populated areas.
T emporal Variations in the Effective Reproduction Number of the 2014 West Africa Ebola Outbreak
……If effective control measures are not put in place, and the current rate of exponential rise of new cases continues, we predict 4400 new Ebola cases in West Africa during the last half of the month of September, with an upper 95% confidence level of 6800 new cases.
…..The temporal patterns we observe may thus partly be due to variations in surveillance during the outbreak, under-reporting, and/or reporting delays. In addition, serial passage of the disease as the outbreak progresses may be leading to increased pathogenicity, and a subsequent increasingly larger rate of increase in case counts . However, it also must be considered that otherwise well intentioned attempts at intervention may in fact be making the situation worse, at least in some regions….
…….Our analysis indicates that the spread of the disease to densely populated cities, and/or the imposition of cordons sanitaire (quarantine) in West Africa may have accelerated the spread of the disease in some regions.
...[French NGO Doctors Without Borders (MSF)] has said, "We don't need a lot of fancy hospitals. What we need is to turn every single stadium and sports arena into a secure location that people cannot escape from, put cots in there, [provide] shade and protection from the rain, bring all the infected people into these spaces, and give them what little care we can." It's not a bad idea. The notion that we are going to build enough hospitals at the pace that we're going, to keep up with the spread, is absolute nonsense.
Sierra Leone starts nationwide lockdown to stop spread of Ebola
….aid agency Médecins Sans Frontières, also known as Doctors Without Borders, said the lockdown is unlikely to stop the spread of the disease.
…."It will be extremely difficult for health workers to accurately identify cases through door-to-door screenings as this requires a certain level of expertise," the group said. "And when cases are identified, there will not be enough Ebola management centers to care for them."
To stop Ebola killing thousands more, we need doctors who are willing to put their lives on the line
....Today, the emergency is the Ebola plague, and according to Joanne Liu, the organisation’s president, the international response so far has been “lethally inadequate".
…..(MSF) is urgently seeking to recruit medical professionals to bolster its teams in the field.
Ebola: MSF Presentation to UN Security Council
September 18, 2014
….Right now, as I speak, people are sitting at the gates of our centers, literally begging for their lives. They rightly feel alone, neglected, denied –left to die a horrible, undignified death.
We are failing the sick because there is not enough help on the ground. And we are failing those who will inevitably become infected, because we cannot care properly for the sick in safe, protected environments and prevent the spread of the virus.
….We need what is referred to as contact tracing, to follow up every person who has been in contact with someone who is sick with Ebola or has died from the virus. We need to raise awareness about this disease, because there has been so much denial, even now, and despite the international attention.
We need more care centers, so that everyone can find a bed and not have to stay at home and risk infecting their families. We need to get our medical staff trained in proper procedures so they can keep the centers running. We also need to get health services running, and to make sure that it is safe for health staff to go to work. We have seen too many health workers and ambulance drivers come into our centers as patients, facing the same fate.
So please send your helicopters, your centers, your beds, and your expert personnel. But know that we also need the basics. There are still homes in Monrovia that do not have soap, water, and buckets. Even these simple things could help curb the spread of the virus.
does any one know if it can survive in cold weather???
SURVIVAL OUTSIDE HOST: Filoviruses have been reported capable to survive for weeks in blood and can also survive on contaminated surfaces, particularly at low temperatures (4°C).... When dried in tissue culture media onto glass and stored at 4 °C, Zaire ebolavirus survived for over 50 days Footnote 61. This information is based on experimental findings only and not based on observations in nature. This information is intended to be used to support local risk assessments in a laboratory setting.
Antartica here i come!!!
SURVIVAL OUTSIDE HOST: Filoviruses have been reported capable to survive for weeks in blood and can also survive on contaminated surfaces, particularly at low temperatures (4°C).... When dried in tissue culture media onto glass and stored at 4 °C, Zaire ebolavirus survived for over 50 days Footnote 61. This information is based on experimental findings only and not based on observations in nature. This information is intended to be used to support local risk assessments in a laboratory setting.
Antartica here i come!!!
originally posted by: intrptr
a reply to: soficrow
Thanks for adding the disclaimer. I did say it was "lots more difficult" for viruses to spread in colder climes, not impossible.
Scary factoid, though. Since viruses readily adapt, who knows how many strains there may be in a year?
And who knows what that might bring?