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

131–140 of 176 posts

Re: The Mathematics of Ebola Trigger Stark Warnings

#131

Post by krschultz »

narrator wrote: post #75
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…

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…

So far it seems like quality of medical facilities & care is far more important than the availability of drugs. I think even without the drugs, if all of the original patients had access to great hospitals, this wouldn't have spread the way it has. Unfortunately those resources simply do not exist in the affected countries.

I'm all for effectively unlimited money from the first world to help pay for a response to this outbreak, but even if there was unlimited resources you can't just build up a whole medical infrastructure with the snap of your fingers.

Re: The Mathematics of Ebola Trigger Stark Warnings

#132

Post by krschultz »

ekianjo wrote: post #120
x0x0 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The death rate from the current ebola is approximately 50%. While that sucks, what patients have to lose is both a 50% chance of living and their right not to be a playground for medical experimentation. edit: and just who vets the people/companies who get to offer drugs to desperately ill people? Does anybody with $1k to buy needles get to make a sign and advertise curative injections? I'm sure glibertarian idiots w…

> edit: and just who vets the people/companies who get to offer drugs to desperately ill people? Look at the scientists who were helping fight Ebola in Africa. When they discovered they were infected as well they had the chance to take a new treatment and they took it. And they recovered. The question of who decides is important, I'm not saying it should be overlooked but the possibility is not even there for those w…

And some of the people that were given the experimental drug in Africa died as well. Correlation does not equal causation.

We all love silver bullets and magic serums, but the real answer here is to get the basics right. There are major improvements that can happen in sanitation, medical care, keeping quarantines effective, proper handling of the dead, etc. A lot of major epidemics were stopped in the 1800s and early 1900s with these kind of things, Ebola can be fought in many ways without inventing a drug.

Solving the crisis on a large scale isn't really a "medical" challenge in the normal sense, it is about logistics and resources and public trust in government & doctors.

Re: The Mathematics of Ebola Trigger Stark Warnings

#133

Post by ekianjo »

krschultz wrote: post #132
ekianjo wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> edit: and just who vets the people/companies who get to offer drugs to desperately ill people? Look at the scientists who were helping fight Ebola in Africa. When they discovered they were infected as well they had the chance to take a new treatment and they took it. And they recovered. The question of who decides is important, I'm not saying it should be overlooked but the possibility is not even there for those w…

And some of the people that were given the experimental drug in Africa died as well. Correlation does not equal causation. We all love silver bullets and magic serums, but the real answer here is to get the basics right. There are major improvements that can happen in sanitation, medical care, keeping quarantines effective, proper handling of the dead, etc. A lot of major epidemics were stopped in the 1800s and early…

I'm not saying it's a silver bullet, and I never implied causation either on n=2, while it may be that they recovered because of that. Don't change the discussion. My point is, if you are dying from Ebola and you'd like to test a last treatment before all bets are off, why not accept it ?

I think that if you were yourself in such a situation, with any incurable disease, you'd see the world in a different way. It's always easy to talk about things that do not concern oneself directly. And again, right NOW, Cancer patients have that choice, so why not others?

Re: The Mathematics of Ebola Trigger Stark Warnings

#134

Post by JoeAltmaier »

ekianjo wrote: post #133
krschultz wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And some of the people that were given the experimental drug in Africa died as well. Correlation does not equal causation. We all love silver bullets and magic serums, but the real answer here is to get the basics right. There are major improvements that can happen in sanitation, medical care, keeping quarantines effective, proper handling of the dead, etc. A lot of major epidemics were stopped in the 1800s and early…

I'm not saying it's a silver bullet, and I never implied causation either on n=2, while it may be that they recovered because of that. Don't change the discussion. My point is, if you are dying from Ebola and you'd like to test a last treatment before all bets are off, why not accept it ? I think that if you were yourself in such a situation, with any incurable disease, you'd see the world in a different way. It's al…

Its historically been where lots of abuse happened - quacks offering miracles; legitimate researchers overstating the hope and downplaying the suffering involved in 'new' treatments. So there's a lot of rules in place.

Re: The Mathematics of Ebola Trigger Stark Warnings

#135

Post by ekianjo »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #134
ekianjo wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying it's a silver bullet, and I never implied causation either on n=2, while it may be that they recovered because of that. Don't change the discussion. My point is, if you are dying from Ebola and you'd like to test a last treatment before all bets are off, why not accept it ? I think that if you were yourself in such a situation, with any incurable disease, you'd see the world in a different way. It's al…

Its historically been where lots of abuse happened - quacks offering miracles; legitimate researchers overstating the hope and downplaying the suffering involved in 'new' treatments. So there's a lot of rules in place.

> So there's a lot of rules in place.

I'm not sure if you are aware but in Africa right now people infected are actually going to see the quacks and shamans because they have no other option. Maybe it's time to think about providing them with something that has more scientific ground to actually work.

Re: The Mathematics of Ebola Trigger Stark Warnings

#136

Post by jcromartie »

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…

This is not a proposal for developing general-purpose drugs. This is for developing emergency treatment for an acute viral outbreak emergency. If an anti-Ebola drug works, then it saves lives. If it doesn't work (or is dangerous) then it's still less dangerous than Ebola itself.

Re: The Mathematics of Ebola Trigger Stark Warnings

#137

Post by DanBC »

ekianjo wrote: post #135
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its historically been where lots of abuse happened - quacks offering miracles; legitimate researchers overstating the hope and downplaying the suffering involved in 'new' treatments. So there's a lot of rules in place.

> So there's a lot of rules in place. I'm not sure if you are aware but in Africa right now people infected are actually going to see the quacks and shamans because they have no other option. Maybe it's time to think about providing them with something that has more scientific ground to actually work.

People are also taking relatives from clean hospitals because they don't trust those workers.

Re: The Mathematics of Ebola Trigger Stark Warnings

#138

Post by wcoenen »

biot wrote: post #51
wcoenen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's taking about the number of people infected per unit of time, which will indeed increase over time if the reproductive number stays larger than 1.

Growth is number of people per unit time. Rate of growth is number of people per unit time squared. Just as with speed vs. acceleration, there certainly is a distinction.

I'm not a native speaker so I could be wrong. But in the wikipedia article about exponential growth, "growth rate" is defined as the first derivative with respect to time, which contradicts what you are saying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth#Differentia...

I understand the distinction you are trying to make, but I think what you call "growth rate" would actually be "growth acceleration".

Re: The Mathematics of Ebola Trigger Stark Warnings

#139

Post by VLM »

icegreentea wrote: post #36
[deleted] wrote: post #28

[deleted]

ClO2 can be used to carve out safe zones at best. It could definitely be used to control airborne transmission in hospital, or other controlled, high risk settings - but it fundamentally is not a cure. We cannot simply fumigate entire cities at 0.3ppm for weeks at a time until an outbreak dies out. Other means will always be needed. And as a nice aside, here's a nice paper about ClO2 use to control flu form a Japanes…

"We cannot simply fumigate entire cities at 0.3ppm for weeks at a time until an outbreak dies out."

It would be interesting to see the natural selection effect on other things, both primary like killing off something beneficial-ish and secondary like wiping out a niche which is then re-populated by something tough that is ClO2-proof. The tertiary effect would be most interesting. Imagine if you could kill ever garbage eating plague rat during the black plague era... and then after the plague burns out, all of the rats come back all at once and hyper over populate eating a years worth of garbage and debris in a month.

Re: The Mathematics of Ebola Trigger Stark Warnings

#140

Post by andygates »

ghshephard wrote: post #95
hueving wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

What about preventative treatment? Say we have a prototype vaccine. Now you have to find the cutoff between a chance of getting a fairly deadly disease, and the chance of a vaccine not working or having nasty side effects. That's a much greyer area.
Post reply on HN