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The Ebola Wars

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Re: The Ebola Wars

#61

Post by jonknee »

tedks wrote: post #40
throwaway_yy2Di wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

38 kilobits = 4.7 kB, but yes. Here's the complete genome of the pandemic strain (scroll down a bit): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/KJ660346 Here's the paper sequencing it. ([edit]: I just realized the New Yorker article is largely about this exact paper -- I commented before reading, sorry). Note that five of the authors died before publication; there's a short tribute accompanying it. http://www.sciencemag.or…

...did nobody stop and think "maybe we shouldn't put the source code for a massively lethal virus on the Internet" before uploading that to GitHub?

Probably not. If you're sophisticated and maniacal enough to create and deliver a bio weapon you probably don't need the genome source dump from GitHub. There are trillions of copies of Ebola in the meatspace after all.

Re: The Ebola Wars

#63

Post by psychometry »

kazinator wrote: post #57
psychometry wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find most odd about your comment is that without the quoted text, I'd assume you didn't even read the article. How you could read the relevant portions of the text and still conclude that Ebola could become airborne suggests maybe it's not your ears that are preventing comprehension.

Hi psychometry; I did read read the text which deals with the airborne question. All it says is that there is "no evidence". Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. "There is no evidence" doesn't mean that there doesn't exist evidence, only that evidence hasn't been found so far. You cannot reassure people by insinuating that they lack reading comprehension. That droplets containing the ebola virus could go lo…

There's no evidence that Ebola can't evolve into a sharknado, destroying flying 747s with a whirlwind of teeth. Should we also be concerned with this possible evolution?

Ebola has been researched extensively for 40 years. We know pretty much exactly how it spreads. It's not airborne. We also know why certain viruses are airborne and that Ebola is not such a virus nor could its structure evolve so that it becomes one.

If you read the article again (you probably should), maybe this last point will become clear to you.

Re: The Ebola Wars

#64

Post by hga »

kazinator wrote: post #57
psychometry wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find most odd about your comment is that without the quoted text, I'd assume you didn't even read the article. How you could read the relevant portions of the text and still conclude that Ebola could become airborne suggests maybe it's not your ears that are preventing comprehension.

Hi psychometry; I did read read the text which deals with the airborne question. All it says is that there is "no evidence". Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. "There is no evidence" doesn't mean that there doesn't exist evidence, only that evidence hasn't been found so far. You cannot reassure people by insinuating that they lack reading comprehension. That droplets containing the ebola virus could go lo…

The most important, significant data that this outbreak of Ebola isn't airborne as the term is medically used, and as you're suggesting it might be when you talk about "droplets containing the ebola virus could go long distances, or even dry up leaving a airborne particles" is that we are familiar with pathogens that do transmit like that, and Ebola transmits at a much lower rate.

I count that data as "evidence".

Re: The Ebola Wars

#65

Post by [deleted] »

Steuard wrote: post #59
monsterix wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder who were the people that took the decision to not give ZMapp to Dr. Khan. What were their reasons to take the drug away for what seems like treating white patients first while we can come back to Khan later (sorry but there is no better way to put this). A full enquiry and reportage on that side of story will be helpful I think.

One issue that I've seen raised before is that there's a bit of a Catch-22 in public perception in Africa. As you point out, withholding the experimental drug has nasty overtones of "saving the cure for the white folks". But there's also a real risk that if they gave the first experimental treatment to Dr. Khan, the narrative would be "using the black folks as guinea pigs". Both of these concerns are based on actual…

[deleted]

Re: The Ebola Wars

#66

Post by dragonwriter »

kazinator wrote: post #57
psychometry wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find most odd about your comment is that without the quoted text, I'd assume you didn't even read the article. How you could read the relevant portions of the text and still conclude that Ebola could become airborne suggests maybe it's not your ears that are preventing comprehension.

Hi psychometry; I did read read the text which deals with the airborne question. All it says is that there is "no evidence". Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. "There is no evidence" doesn't mean that there doesn't exist evidence, only that evidence hasn't been found so far. You cannot reassure people by insinuating that they lack reading comprehension. That droplets containing the ebola virus could go lo…

> Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.

Absence of evidence which would be expected (more likely present than not) if a phenomenon existed is, in fact, reasonably viewed as evidence of the absence of the phenomenon.

(Absence of evidence which would indicate the presence of a phenomenon but which would not be expected even if the phenomenon did exist is, OTOH, not evidence of the absence of the phenomenon -- or, more accurately, is only very weak evidence.)

Re: The Ebola Wars

#67

Post by dragonwriter »

hga wrote: post #58
throwaway5752 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Malaria kills 500K-1M people EVERY DAMN YEAR in subsaharan Africa ( http://www.who.int/malaria/media/world_malaria_report_2013/e... ).

The CDC's worst case, last I heard, was 1.4 total million infected with Ebola in January . At the current estimate of 70% lethality, there's your 1M million people 10-16 days after infection. Then it all doubles in 3 weeks. And another 3 weeks. Do the math. If you want to be conservative, dial the starting point back, it won't matter for long. But when I did my own calculations, I found 20,000 cases as of a week or t…

> The CDC's worst case, last I heard, was 1.4 total million infected with Ebola in January.

That was a "no new action" estimate in late September based on data through late August [1]. There has been considerable new action since late August (in part based on the report, or, to the extent that the action in some cases preceded the report, at least an understanding of the general principles behind it.)

[1] http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/su6303a1.htm

Re: The Ebola Wars

#68

Post by pdeuchler »

trhway wrote: post #23
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something fascinating about looking at that code, even though I can't decompile it just by reading the characters. P.S.: It's 37918 bits, about 4.6 kB

the notes to decoded pieces itself fascinating : /note="immunosuppressive region; other site" ... /note="transmembrane anchor; transmembrane region"

What if the noncoding dna sequences are comments and the genome is just extremely well documented FOSS?

Re: The Ebola Wars

#69

Post by tedks »

rwallace wrote: post #45
tedks wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...did nobody stop and think "maybe we shouldn't put the source code for a massively lethal virus on the Internet" before uploading that to GitHub?

In fairness, as things now stand, any nutcase who wanted to obtain Ebola with evil intent could do it more easily by hopping on a plane to West Africa than by reconstituting it from its genome. The threat is from the natural epidemic currently running wild, and making all relevant information freely available might help the search for cures and vaccines.

It takes a serious amount of resources to search for a cure or vaccine; they could just have easily made it available on request without limiting the amount of people who could work on it.

The real threat is in 10/20/100 years in the future, where someone with a desktop bioprinter decides to fuck up a subway station.

Re: The Ebola Wars

#70

Post by Terr_ »

scottious wrote: post #17
ddlatham wrote: post #3

A sample of the Ebola now raging in West Africa has, by recent count, 18,959 letters of code in its genome; this is a small genome, by the measure of living things. Does this mean mean Ebola is essentially about 38 kilobytes?

Yes, but also no. I work at The Broad Institute and I deal with these genomes all the time. Long story short: there's tons of redundant data in these genomes because of the imperfect nature of sequencing so the real file size is many times bigger than that. Though in theory if we had perfect sequencing then it'd be around that size.

For some reason I think of X-ray crystallography: A large number of different pictures go into reaching a conclusion which is much simpler to convey.
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