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Actaeon

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So high ups in the CDC have suggested that Ebola could become airborne, according to several reliable news sources and CNN. Aside from that terrifying possibility, Ebola has long been my standard fallback in conversations about really unpleasant ways to die, and it's gone from obscure to a household name.

 

Meanwhile, flu season is on the horizon and there are plenty of other virulent diseases waiting in the wings. Although I'm unnerved by ISIS (see other topic), I'm more worried about the next big plague or the one after that. I feel like there's never funding until crap has already hit the fan and science is always playing catch up. Does this stuff keep anyone else up at night?

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So high ups in the CDC have suggested that Ebola could become airborne, according to several reliable news sources and CNN.

Pretty sure this is complete crap. Every reliable source I've looked at says this is very, very unlikely. Ebola is scary because of the very high death rate if you actually catch it, but it doesn't spread very easily, and it's pretty unlikely that that will ever change.

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It should be no surprise that Ebola can or could theoretically leave the body via the air in the most limited sense of the idea, but it has an extremely short lifespan when it has no host. So, yes, if your experiment includes placing two animals in separate cages immediately next to each other, chances are it will spread without body fluid exposure. I would expect that of any virus.

 

As far as it being "the next big plague", for the record, swine flu was made out to be the new apocalypse disease and it killed, what, less than ten people? Ebola is one that would certainly be unfortunate to contract, but I doubt will ever become an epidemic in a country that isn't poverty stricken with extremely limited health care.

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Apocalypse, no, but it's already a humanitarian disaster. Over 3000 deaths, and last I heard the projected death toll 6 months from now was something like 40,000. Mind, this is in countries that already have terrible healthcare and infrastructure, and just the quarantine measures etc. are making life even harder.

 

(The Onion recently ran an article about how we're still "50 or so white people away from an Ebola vaccine." I thought that was depressingly accurate.)

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I wouldn't be surprised if the fears about Ebola undergoing a mutation to be able to survive in air aren't based on a Tom Clancy book, since it was a major plot point in a book that sold pretty well.

There has been slow but steady work on vaccines for Ebola and several other diseases that I don't like thinking about for years, but there has never been a priority for funding them, with most of the research dollars coming from government/defense. It is hard to justify all the spending on a vaccine for a virus that kills less than 100 people in a typical year (all of whom are overseas) when we loose 30-400 times that number in the United States due to the flu each year. Developing a vaccine that would protect more effectively against more types of the flu would save far more people in the US and overseas than an Ebola vaccine will.

In terms of 50 or so "white" people, from 1976-2012 Ebola killed fewer "black" people in 36 years than the flu likely did (assumption for world wide) in one year. Based on US demographics, the worst flu year in that same time period killed 40,000 in the US, of whom (ignoring age and socio-economic factors), around 5,000 would have been "black" and 35,000 would have been "other". So in that one year, more "blacks" and far more "whites" died due to flu than the total number people who have died due to Ebola to date.

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Let me clarify that when I said "the next big plague", I wasn't so much thinking about ebola. Flu scares me more, given how things went down in 1918. I'd like to believe that there's adequate funding and research, though. I get a shot every year and almost always fare better than the folks who don't. I suppose that's a different debate.

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A lot of the fear of airborne Ebola is fueled by the related Reston virus that did become airborne. That virus is in the Ebola genus, but it isn't transmissible to humans. Scary? Sure. Could Ebola become airborne? It could. I am neither a virologist nor an epidemiologist, but I think the risk is low. Pandemic influenza is possible, but again, somewhat less scary now. Antivirals have come a long way since 1918 (as in they now exist). More importantly, supportive care has advanced immensely, notably by routine use of IV access. Swine flu was unusually widespread, but it actually wasn't particularly deadly.

 

It is interesting to note that while the number of patients treated for Ebola in first world, high-tech health care is tiny, no one has (yet) died. Ebola may be somewhat comparable to cholera in the type of mortality: high with poor treatment, but actually fairly low with aggressive supportive care. Ebola seems a little more virulent than that, but it's still not clear that high-level supportive care doesn't drop mortality immensely.

 

(The Onion recently ran an article about how we're still "50 or so white people away from an Ebola vaccine." I thought that was depressingly accurate.)

 

It's not so much "white" as "wealthy" that matters here. Vaccines are pharmaceuticals, and they have the unique problem that you're not treating people as they get sick. It may be once, or a few times. Very few diseases get annual vaccination, and flu's the only one that is widely vaccinated against every year. Ebola, unless it somehow does become endemic outside its current range, just actually affects a fairly small number of people in countries that are poor. There isn't a lot of money to be made by developing a vaccine. If the virus goes epidemic in a first-world country then the money's there, but right now it isn't unless organizations step in and essentially offer it as prize money.

 

—Alorael, who will be quick to step in and say that blaming the pharmaceutical industry isn't especially helpful. It's an industry. It chases money because not chasing money is a good way to leave the industry. Funding for orphan drug development and the like is really a public problem.

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I'm kind of surprised that Ebola isn't seen as more of an "active" security risk.

 

I can't really say the viability of Ebola as a bioweapon (maybe this is why I haven't heard this angle yet), but it seems to me like you've a potentially devastating weapon just laying around in some of the poorest and least secured places on earth. Compared to, say, getting one's hands on a nuclear device, getting an active sample of Ebola would have to be a walk in the park. Take it to a suitably evil microbiologist and you've a potential superweapon worthy of a Bond Villain.

 

Ebola on it's own is scary enough, but weaponized Ebola? Yikes.

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If you could make it airborne it'd be terrifying, but enhancing viruses is not easy. And I don't think many terrorists have good virology labs.

 

Now, just grabbing someone with Ebola and leaving him in Times Square, or any busy international airport, or whatever? Maybe. But when you're contagious you're really obviously sick. Everyone would probably steer clear of Patient Zero and health officials would show up really quickly. Most people don't routinely share fluids with strangers! It could work, but it probably wouldn't bring a country to its knees. There might be some panic, but I'm guessing it wouldn't be all that exciting in the end.

 

—Alorael, who also isn't sure Ebola has an ideal disease profile. Sure, killing people is great. But it would be better if even the people who recovered were left with severe lasting harm.

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While it's doubtful the likes of, say... Boko Haram have access to modern biolabs, scientists like Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka have proven that... well, making a disease a whole lot worse is very possible and doesn't even require the kind of cash other "doomsday" weapons typically cost. If the University of Madison can take something like H1N1 and make it effectively immune to the human immune system, well...

 

In terms of "worst thing a terrorist could bring to bear", something like Ebola seems a lot more likely than something nuclear. Then again, there are supposedly a number of general chemical weapons floating around the middle east in the aftermath of the recent chaos, and that has yet to make any major headlines (other than a protracted debacle similar to the Spaceballs "Combing the Desert" scene), so perhaps there's far less potential there than the worst case scenario would suggest.

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What are your sources for all of this? The U Madison H1N1 thing, as far as I can tell, involves seeing how the virus could mutate so that existing antibodies don't provide protection -- not somehow magically making it immune to the immune system entirely.

 

Alorael's right about Ebola. It's tremendously scary, but it doesn't have the sort of easy communicability that would be necessary for a real threat.

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For a terrorist group, a disease is more useful for the hysteria and economic chaos it creates. Look at anthrax after 9/11 where people were buying up possible cures and worrying that they could get infected by contaminated mail while the actual number of deaths was less than from auto accidents.

 

Front page news was the US infected man's home was decontaminated to reassure neighbors and that he moved to a different location where he was less likely to contaminate others. Whereas in Africa the number of potential people numbers in the thousands.

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I read a book on Ebola a few years back. Scary stuff. While the quality of healthcare provided in first world countries would likely bring down the mortality rate should it spread there, it is still highly contagious and a horrific thing of have to face. I for one would not like to die via all my blood in my body being ejected from every orifice. The reason why it's scaring everyone is that in a place like Africa, it is significantly more difficult for the populous to defend themselves against the virus which leads to so many being afflicted by it, and the lack of proper treatment available leads so many of those people to die from it. Again though, if one of the nastier strains like Zaire mutates to become airborne, then it's time to worry. While it would be less fatal in the other counties, a virus as infectious as the flu but makes people undergo massive hemorrhaging is not a good thing in the least.

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Necris, pretty much the only reason that Ebola and several other equally nasty organisms are studied at all are the security implications, fortunately it requires a certain degree of patience, knowledge and equipment to weaponize a BW agent, even going with the lower standards of weaponization that a terrorist would be happy with. Biological toxins are a little easier to exploit, but there hasn't been much use of them either.

 

While terrorist groups have used BW and CW type agents, they have tended to be the cult type groups. So far, fortunately, the results have been underwhelming. Home made explosives is effective enough for most terrorists and is so much easier to obtain and use.

 

The problem with any actual epidemic is what happens when the health system is overwhelmed and you do not have enough ventilators for every flu (or what ever other disease you want) patient who needs one. While we have been very successful with the Ebola patients who have made it to the US, we have had the luxury of providing overwhelming medical resources to each individual. In an actual epidemic, that would not be possible and the survival rate of infected patients would go down.

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Maybe, but strict quarantine of at least three countries with porous borders is impossible, and trying to enforce one would be a human rights catastrophe. A smaller area probably should be quarantined and aid delivered, but this particular epidemic has already gone too far.

 

—Alorael, who just isn't sure that Ebola in the US could reach sufficient epidemic levels to overwhelm all hospitals. It could get bad, sure, but it doesn't require ventilators for everyone. What you really need for most people is just an IV and saline, and both are really, really cheap. A few people might need ventilators or dialysis, but they're the minority. Ebola on the loose in the US

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  • 3 weeks later...

The book version of The Stand used Influenza that has been weaponized and made more aggressive and lethal as its agent. As Sylae pointed out, Outbreak (both the movie and Robin Cook's unrelated book) was Ebola, as was Executive Orders and I believe Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy. Outbreak the movie was okay as a movie, but I think that the overall concept was pretty good.

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