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WHO declares Ebola outbreak a global health emergency

nytimes.com

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Re: WHO declares Ebola outbreak a global health emergency

#161

Post by picsao »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #61
picsao wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The WHO is just another politically subverted organization. It declared covid for half an eternity as not airborne. If its connected with a loos of face or economic short term losses- many actors will put the pressur on to prevent the declaration of an pandemic or other travell restrictions. The us is not involved in this mess.

> us is not involved in this mess If by not involved you mean still massively subject to the public health and econonomic consequences of a containment failure, then sure.

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Re: WHO declares Ebola outbreak a global health emergency

#162

Post by Arodex »

jmyeet wrote: post #74
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Covid turned into a pandemic because it wasn't taken seriously at the start. (Looking at you, China.) Public-health experts never seemed concerned about hantavirus. They are with this. It's appropriate to take their declarations seriously. > Ebola generally requires contact to spread "Human infection occurs through close contact with the blood or secretions of infected wildlife, such as bats or non-human primates, an…

First, we still don't know the origins of Covid-19. The most accepted answer is zoonotic origin but there are problems with that, namely that Wuhan is far from the suspected bats and there is no documented case of Covid-19 in any wild population. The other competing theory is the "lab leak" family but again there's no evidence of this eitehr. Research and findings of Covid-19 in Italian sewerage suggest that Covid-19…

>Research and findings of Covid-19 in Italian sewerage suggest that Covid-19 might've been circulating in Italy in 2019 [1].

Nah, it is one paper, and they only did PCR which is extremely sensitive.

It is more likely that they contaminated their samples than they found COVID viruses. It is still more likely they had false positives.

Also they didn't sequence it. There is no data on where it would be in the genetic tree of coronaviruses.

From the paper: >Moreover, it was circulating in different geographic regions simultaneously

Very very likely to be sample contamination or another winter coronavirus triggering a positive PCR. It just doesn't make any sense.

Re: WHO declares Ebola outbreak a global health emergency

#163

Post by Arodex »

rob_c wrote: post #34
ticulatedspline wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

forgot 5. Covid was exactly the right amount of deadly, 0.5-1% which made it easy to "roll the dice" on making containment harder.

[flagged]

Absolutely not.

https://github.com/mbevand/covid19-age-stratified-ifr

Re: WHO declares Ebola outbreak a global health emergency

#164

Post by jjk166 »

lucb1e wrote: post #158
idle_zealot wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If pigs reproduced and mutated as rapidly as viruses then yeah, we would probably need to plan around the eventuality that they would develop wings and escape their pens.

Not answering the question. Is there some small gene change that we're specifically worried about here or was GP wildly speculating? > reproduced and mutated as rapidly as viruses HIV spreads in similar ways afaik (some fluids, I don't know the details of Ebola but it's not respiratory), yet that hasn't gone airborne in decades. I'm well aware that pigs don't get a million offspring each, but it doesn't seem like a c…

> Is there some small gene change that we're specifically worried about here

Yes. A single gene change allows for airborne Ebola transmission. This gene change has occurred in the Reston strain, which luckily does not cause symptoms in humans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reston_virus

Re: WHO declares Ebola outbreak a global health emergency

#165

Post by dgellow »

cm2187 wrote: post #151
EGreg wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ebola can mutate and this would no longer be true

There are a million viruses that can mutate. That's not really an argument for anything.

There aren't million of viruses that are as deadly as ebola

Re: WHO declares Ebola outbreak a global health emergency

#166

Post by dgellow »

VHRanger wrote: post #157
throwaway27448 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and are there for the resources that the DRC has Oh dear. This has found its way on to HN. Since finding resources that clearly explain the situation is difficult from the west and difficult in english, the situation is many times more complicated. It's true that some of the resources that flow out of the eastern DRC flow out through Rwanda. It's true that M23 is clearly backed by Rwandan people and money. And for…

Do you have a better source if I speak fluent French by any chance? Thanks for the recap

I would also be interested, native French speaker

Re: WHO declares Ebola outbreak a global health emergency

#167

Post by dgellow »

rob_c wrote: post #39
mschuster91 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case I'd guess the DOGE cuts to foreign aid are a massive, massive contributor to the problem. A lot of third-world countries heavily relied on USAID et al to keep basic sanitation and healthcare going.

[flagged]

> I'm sure there's a parable about teaching someone to fish rather than feeding them

That's literally what USAID was providing. Both teaching fish AND also feeding them.

Re: WHO declares Ebola outbreak a global health emergency

#168

Post by thelastgallon »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #144
sofixa wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To expand on this, it's universally accepted that they're a group backed by Rwanda, and are there for the resources that the DRC has, which are being trafficked to Rwanda for export.

> and are there for the resources that the DRC has Oh dear. This has found its way on to HN. Since finding resources that clearly explain the situation is difficult from the west and difficult in english, the situation is many times more complicated. It's true that some of the resources that flow out of the eastern DRC flow out through Rwanda. It's true that M23 is clearly backed by Rwandan people and money. And for…

Thank you for the insightful summary!

Found this interesting tidbit on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_Rwanda: > Although these groups were distinct and stratified in relation to one another, the boundary between Tutsi and Hutu was somewhat open to social mobility. The Tutsi elite were defined by their exclusive ownership of land and cattle. Hutus, however, though disenfranchised socially and politically, could shed Hutuness, or kwihutura, by accumulating wealth, and thereby rising through the social hierarchy to the status of Tutsi.

Re: WHO declares Ebola outbreak a global health emergency

#169

Post by dgellow »

bekon wrote: post #96
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to HackerNews, new hacker! Rather than posting things like this, please take a moment to review the posting guidelines [0] , so that you can be a positive member of the community. 0 – https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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If that's what you expect from HN you will be very disappointed

Re: WHO declares Ebola outbreak a global health emergency

#170

Post by hyrix »

AbstractH24 wrote: post #105
cogman10 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. HIV is a good example of this. Without treatment, it is deadly pretty much 100% of the time. However, it takes a long time after the shut down of the immune system before a systematic infection takes over and kills you. That allowed for a deadly disease that's somewhat hard to spread (mostly just through sex) to ultimately go on a rampage.

I never thought about this. So without concern for the humans with HIV* there an argument to be made that treating symptoms without curing made it spread more? *obviously, this is just hypothetical. It’s important to care about the life of those with HIV. No banish them all to something like a leper-colony. Although it explains the logic for those at the time they existed better than a religious one did.

There's a significant difference in the risk and mechanisms of transmission between these two viruses. The modern effective reproductive number for HIV is less than 1, about 30-50% lower than ebola in similar subsaharan countries [1][2]. You can get ebola from contact with an infected person's sweat during the active phase [3]. You can get it from their semen years after they have apparently recovered [4]. We don't have treatments that work in this longer term. The drugs that we do have are used during the active infection period to reduce the probability of death during the crisis. Folks are working on reducing the longer term infectiousness but it's a ways off yet [5]. We also don't have pre- or post-exposure prophylactic treatments for the medical workers who are at the highest risk of infection or the family members--the most common transmission mechanisms for ebola are home caregiving and contact with traditional burial practices. In this context of containing an active outbreak, quarantine is mostly helpful in reducing pressure on the medical system for a short term.

Compare this with HIV, which can be rendered untransmittable with modern treatments, which is primarily a sexually transmitted disease, which has pre- and post-exposure treatments. It's simply not very efficient/effective to exile millions of people with a lifelong latent infection and little risk of transmission.

The instinct towards ostracism of those who are perceived as unclean is some pretty primordial lizard brain shit which was a great rule of thumb two thousand years ago, along with wearing garments made of only one kind of material. It's actually actively harmful to the process of stopping infection. It leads to fear, distrust, and reduced reporting, hindering the medical system's ability to reach the people who most need to be reached, and encouraging the spread of superstition and suspicion of pre- and post-exposure treatments. In both diseases, the actual infection risk is modest compared to an airborne virus like COVID.

[1] https://journals.lww.com/jphmp/Abstract/2022/03000/Estimatin...

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34189844/

[3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4252165/

[4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7875361/

[5] https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/73/10/1849/6168541?logi...

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