Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Mathematics of Ebola Trigger Stark Warnings

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 176 posts

Re: The Mathematics of Ebola Trigger Stark Warnings

#91

Post by ekianjo »

waps wrote: post #85
narrator wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The American perspective is to solve every problem with the military or money. We believe that violence and more money are the only effective solutions to every single problem the world faces. Original thinking just doesn't happen. A creative solution would be to temporarily halt all regulations on anti-ebola drug development and let them experiment on any willing person in Liberia who wishes to receive treatment. Th…

And who pays for the, potentially unbounded fallout from that decision ? Let's say this happens : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide (First read about the advantages of the drug, then move to the crises. in particular the birth defects crisis) And please don't just say that people knowingly took the risk, read the article first to see how that played out. People won't accept the consequences of decisions made u…

Why? When you are going to die you should have the choice to go on a treatment which is untested. That's what people with AlS have been asking for YEARS and still cannot get because they have to follow the usual regulatory process.Cancer patients can get drugs as soon as Phase I, I don't see why we don't allow other patients who are in critical condition to try whatever is new out there. What do you have to lose?

Re: The Mathematics of Ebola Trigger Stark Warnings

#92

Post by hueving »

ng12 wrote: post #86
waps wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who pays for the, potentially unbounded fallout from that decision ? Let's say this happens : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide (First read about the advantages of the drug, then move to the crises. in particular the birth defects crisis) And please don't just say that people knowingly took the risk, read the article first to see how that played out. People won't accept the consequences of decisions made u…

I would argue there are at least a few orders of magnitude between someone with morning sickness and someone who will almost definitely die of Ebola or T1 Diabetes. It's a calculated risk, sure, but I don't think the Thalidomide example is particularly relevant.

>It's a calculated risk, sure, but I don't think the Thalidomide example is particularly relevant.

It's very relevant. It shows that people are too willing to take risks with major unknowns. Where do you make the cutoff with your drug experiments? Only people that are certain to die? People with high exposure risk? People that are having difficulties recovering? Any selection you pick there is completely arbitrary because you don't know the potential downsides to the experimental stuff you want to try.

Re: The Mathematics of Ebola Trigger Stark Warnings

#93

Post by DanielBMarkham »

Time to face some brutal facts here.

1) We are due for another pandemic. If this one isn't it, there will be another.

2) Democracies run on public opinion. Right now everybody is riled up about some homicidal idiots in Iraq. This is off their radar. Hundreds of thousands of people die from some natural cause or another all of the time. It's not a huge spectacle on YouTube.

3) The enemy really isn't Ebola. Ebola is just the opportunistic pathogen that came along. The enemy is really weak governments with little or no public health systems, combined with very poor local sanitation practices.

4) There was a time when air-dropping in a thousand healthworkers with tent hospitals might have stopped this. That time is over. Now it's in the big city, and trying to control or service a population of several hundred thousand is beyond most any country's ability to project intervention.

5) If it doesn't go airborne and stay lethal, which is where the safe money currently is, we'll end up with hundreds of thousands or millions dead and it should burn itself out over the next year or two. That's the optimistic scenario. We have no reason not to believe that's the way it's going to play out.

6) If it goes airborne and stays lethal, we're in for a major shitstorm. But I really don't think second-guessing how we responded will be useful. There are different countries in the world. They have different governments. We do not have one world government, nor do most of us want one. That means that there are always going to be large pockets of humanity where something like this can take off. Structurally humanity is huge. Disease is going to be an issue for us for a long time.

Re: The Mathematics of Ebola Trigger Stark Warnings

#94

Post by quarterwave »

I searched for R_0 data on flu pandemics and found this:

http://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/healthtopics/documents/0905_pan...

Note the sharp jump as R_0 goes from sub-2 to over-2, which should not be surprising (hand wave about branch processes, light of a thousand suns, etc).

Over to someone better qualified to comment - is the present situation with Ebola taking us into a pandemic territory similar to 1918 H1N1?

Re: The Mathematics of Ebola Trigger Stark Warnings

#95

Post by ghshephard »

hueving wrote: post #92
ng12 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue there are at least a few orders of magnitude between someone with morning sickness and someone who will almost definitely die of Ebola or T1 Diabetes. It's a calculated risk, sure, but I don't think the Thalidomide example is particularly relevant.

>It's a calculated risk, sure, but I don't think the Thalidomide example is particularly relevant. It's very relevant. It shows that people are too willing to take risks with major unknowns. Where do you make the cutoff with your drug experiments? Only people that are certain to die? People with high exposure risk? People that are having difficulties recovering? Any selection you pick there is completely arbitrary be…

"Where do you make the cutoff with your drug experiments? "

I don't know where you make the cutoff, but I'm comfortable saying that its somewhere below having a disease with a 50% mortality rate in under 14 days. I'm pretty much okay taking any risk at that point.

Re: The Mathematics of Ebola Trigger Stark Warnings

#96

Post by Crito »

Afforess wrote: post #81
lotsofmangos wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethical theory is not much use once you are dead.

All of the world religions disagree with you.

In all of my years on this planet, I have never seen religion benefit a corpse. The living may find comfort in it, but the dead are indifferent.

Re: The Mathematics of Ebola Trigger Stark Warnings

#97

Post by tonyedgecombe »

aianus wrote: post #19
aaron695 wrote: post #17

I find it interesting that people worry about Ebola going airborne but not something like AIDS. I guess there's a biological reason....

Ebola kills 90% of its victims in a matter of weeks while the life expectancy for someone with HIV in the first world is almost the same as anyone else [1] [1] http://www.aidsmeds.com/articles/life_expectancy_1667_24972....

Ebola hasn't been killing 90% of its victims in the current outbreak, that figure comes from a particular outbreak some years ago.

Re: The Mathematics of Ebola Trigger Stark Warnings

#98

Post by swombat »

lettergram wrote: post #32
polarix wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps we could quarantine air & sea travel.

Even with air and sea travel the chance of someone being infected outside those areas is minimal (unless they give you a nice bloody hug or you are feeling frisky). Much less an outbreak or something of that nature. Most of the infected cannot even afford to travel.

Most.

You only need a handful propagating a suddenly airborne version of the disease to London, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Beijing...

Most is not good enough.

Re: The Mathematics of Ebola Trigger Stark Warnings

#99

Post by swombat »

kijin wrote: post #56
ChuckMcM wrote: post #23

Going 'meta' for a moment, this is a tragedy of huge proportions, the question I have been considering is whether or not it is even possible to avoid? Updates from MSF which highlight the level of mistrust and superstition amongst the infected population, where people hide their sick relatives from isolation wards and take them back to their village. We cannot exactly put a giant fence around the place (and not that…

> forcing them to stay in their village violates their basic human rights Better-informed villages, towns, and cities have every right to refuse to admit, or interact with, individuals from superstitious villages. Self-defense is a powerful right, and I'd say it easily trumps a potentially infected person's right to visit a cousin. People are free to die for their beliefs, whether such beliefs are true or not. But th…

That sounds reminiscent to what happened during the Black Death.

Unfortunately, it doesn't sound like it worked particularly well, considering the Plague still took a sizeable percentage of the human population at the time.

Re: The Mathematics of Ebola Trigger Stark Warnings

#100

Post by justin66 »

techdragon wrote: post #67
joesmo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you bring up some good points and I don't mean to discount the moral dilemma here, but in reality such moral considerations are hardly ever considered. I don't think the article is suggesting invasion, but if that was the best solution, I don't see a problem with it if it prevents an epidemic or worse, a world wide pandemic(especially if it mutates into airborne transmission). After all, the US has invaded ma…

And given the level of equipment and training the military have with regard to doing their job while wearing full Nuclear/Biological/Chemical protection. I would honestly prefer that if the situation escalates and we see confirmation of airborne transmission, the situation be dealt with by prompt deployment of fully NBC trained military medical units and sufficient security forces to ensure that whatever those doctor…

> And given the level of equipment and training the military have with regard to doing their job while wearing full Nuclear/Biological/Chemical protection. I would honestly prefer that if the situation escalates and we see confirmation of airborne transmission, the situation be dealt with by prompt deployment of fully NBC trained military medical units and sufficient security forces to ensure that whatever those doctors say is law within the quarantine.

I don't think the people speculating here understand how bloody military quarantine imposed by a foreign power could be - however well intentioned - compared to the mere 2,200 people who have died of the disease so far.

Send in a U.S. Marine division of 20,000 people (or maybe make it a "coalition" and send in a few hundred European troops as well to, ahem, share the burden) and tell them that they need to direct some people from one place to another, keep some people penned up, keep all these people fed, keep them from doing anything unfriendly to the nice doctors in the space suits, and everyone who resists - resistance here includes rioting or just not being able to follow instructions because, you know, the troops don't speak the language - needs to be taken into custody with that legendary marine gentleness while being treated as a potentially lethal disease carrier. Keep the troops mindful that if they err on the side of laxity they could get a disease that might cause them to die bleeding from their bodily orifices.

Multiple massacres should be the expected outcome of such an operation. The projected cost of the disease needs to pretty horrible before it becomes worth contemplating such a high-risk, low-reward action and we'd want to exhaust all other means of supplying these countries' civil authorities with what they need before we took such a step. We haven't done that yet.

Post reply on HN