outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

every time this stuff gets in the news i have an anxiety attack just reading about it

do you think we're all going to die of a plague, soon?

I watched Contagion 2x in a row on a recent intercontinental flight and within 24 hours of landing I was sicker than I can ever remember being.

-Peter

that was a scary one because you know that's exactly how it's going to go down, too

my dad is of the opinion that we're all gonna drop dead from mad cow disease eventually from a lifetime of pink slime exposure

Ebola in Uganda, new flu killing East Coast seals...

Who the HECK would choose Contagion for in-flight programming???

-Peter

There is still this other side of me that wishes I'd embarked on one of my many fig tree dream careers of epidemiologist. I really get a kick form this kind of thing. Someday we will all be dead.

So how worried should we be now, anyway.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/25/us-heath-ebola-nigeria-idUSKBN0FU1LE20140725

Fanning flames, paranoia: http://www.sfgate.com/news/medical/article/New-fears-about-Ebola-spread-after-plane-scare-5651721.php

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — No one knows for sure just how many people Patrick Sawyer came into contact with the day he boarded a flight in Liberia, had a stopover in Ghana, changed planes in Togo, and then arrived in Nigeria, where authorities say he died days later from Ebola, one of the deadliest diseases known to man.

Now health workers are scrambling to trace those who may have been exposed to Sawyer across West Africa, including flight attendants and fellow passengers.

Health experts say it is unlikely he could have infected others with the virus that can cause victims to bleed from the eyes, mouth and ears. Still, unsettling questions remain: How could a man whose sister recently died from Ebola manage to board a plane leaving the country? And worse: Could Ebola become the latest disease to be spread by international air travel?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/ebola-virus-top-sierra-leone-doctor-shek-umar-dies-of-disease-9636406.html

Sierra Leone's top virologist has died in the current outbreak.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/health/patient-at-mount-sinai-has-ebola-like-symptoms-hospital-says.html

This is terrible, reports of hospitals shutting their doors, infected rotting corpses in the streets and ebola nurses downing tools after not getting paid measly $30 a week risk money pledged by the Sierra Leone gvt. Conditions described as "medieval" in parts where the health system has totally collapsed.

i heard a woman talking on the radio about it the other day and she was not holding back about how grim it was -- she was a reporter but i don't remember her name
she used the same analogy, like it was medieval in terms of what people believe about medicine as well as the degree to which people receive/shun medical care when they need it

Little did we know all the right wing survivalists had the right idea for the wrong reason. It's not Obama they should fear, but ebola.

I read an article about the stress of being an ebola nurse. Encased in completely enveloping PPE in a hot climate for 12 + hour shifts. Dealing with infectious, dying patients that constantly fall out of beds, spray blood and diarrhea all over the place. The people that deal with these patients ... I just have no idea where they get their courage from.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-armed-men-attack-liberia-ebola-clinic-freeing-patients/

holy shit

Yeah,

Plague Inc is my favorite game

http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsandsoda/2014/08/19/341412011/shadow-and-d-12-sing-an-infectious-song-about-ebola?

dr. brantly speaking now, was just discharged from emory

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/tests-under-way-for-ebola-following-donegal-death-1.1904073

Shit got real. school with this guys sister

Pharmeceutical industry person tries to defend the industry re charges they have not done enough re ebola because it is in poor countries

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2014/08/18/washington-post-off-base-in-critiquing-pharma-efforts-in-ebola/

the incentives for the pharmaceutical industry are what they are, unfortunately

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/25/ebolanomics

Irish guy didn't have Ebola. Was a false alarm.

South Africa and Senegal trying to bar some folks from countries at issue from entry

First US case in Dallas. Take that NYC & LA! We're number one!

Yikes!

I wonder how many crisis of this kind will happen before countries take the WHO seriously and decide to invest in a proper international health structure to prevent this kind of outbreak. Freaking hate to see institutions like the FMI giving up to 130 millions $ but then pressure politicians in the region to go for austerity, it's a waste of money for everyone.

ebola USED to be at the top of my list of irrational fears. presbyterian hospital is about 5 miles north of where i'm sitting right now.

welp

#patientzero

The Frontline piece on this a week or so ago was eye-opening. Hospitals that are barely more than cordoned off fields, mass graves, disinfecting the back of trucks (where patients ride, near death) by tossing in buckets of bleach, doctors and other aid workers more or less forced to visit villages free of any special suits for fear of scaring the shit out of everyone, children orphaned and alone overnight. Just heartbreaking. It's both a matter of doctors struggling to keep up with a rapidly and easily spreading illness and a population almost impossible to isolate. Bodies being dumped and left by the side of the road, families taking members out of quarantine, superstitious treatments co-mingling with modern medicine ...

Here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ebola-outbreak/

The saddest bit may be at the end, where grave diggers, one by one, list all their families members who have succumbed.

I'm just a few miles further away, art. Drive by it almost every day as I head up to Richardson.

Your risk of dying from ebola (total confirmed 2014 ebola deaths: a few thousand worldwide) is still lower than your risk of dying due to complications related to seasonal influenza (on average, 5800-7500 a year in the US). Get a flu shot. Don't get too preoccupied by ebola.

wanna c&p that on every damn facebook post I see for the next week

be my guest

i have total confidence in the medical system to properly handle any other arising cases. that said, i am still illogically terrified

Sick Burn I saw on FB:

Don't worry about Ebola spreading in Dallas. The Cowboys have shown us that people in Dallas can't catch anything.

Ebola spreads by physical contact with bodily secretions and fluids. That makes it easier to contain in a place like the USA or Europe, where there are lots of medical facilities and a patient's recent contacts can be quickly discovered and tracked down.

Even so, if ebola strongly establishes itself in Africa, with a reservoir of infected people who keep the virus continuously viable and circulating, then not only will massive numbers of africans die, but ebola will keep leaping to other parts of the world, including the USA and Europe. It can be compared to sparks thrown out from a wildfire, which land on tinder and start other fires away from the main fire. You can put out many of these small satellite fires, but it is hard to extinguish all of them, and the more new places that start burning the harder the firestorm is to keep contained.

That's a good analogy. I really wish international focus between the Ebola outbreak and ISIL was better divided.

run for the hills imo

*not the hills of West Africa, tho*

http://i.imgur.com/LHm72Rq.png

ugh goddamned parody accounts :(

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/world/africa/ebola-spreading-in-west-africa.html

this is a very difficult article to read

apparently the problem is not money but organization and time

Oh jeez:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/02/texas-ebola_n_5919522.html

at what point is it ok for me to start panicking?

supposed to go to the state fair this weekend and have resolved not to touch any surfaces and to bathe myself in hand sanitizer after it is all over.

the panic is hilarious. Especially from folks who drive on the streets of Dallas. You should be much more afraid of north Texas drivers than ebola.

until there is an effective vaccine I consider ebola as a threat, but in the USA it is a long term threat, which gives the researchers plenty of time to develop that vaccine.

truly despicable imo for rand paul, a physician, to be saying things like this to score political points

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/sen-rand-paul-sounds-ebola-alarm/

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/world/africa/ebola-spreading-in-west-africa.html

this is a very difficult article to read

apparently the problem is not money but organization and time

― I dunno. (amateurist), Wednesday, October 1, 2014 7:27 PM (Yesterday

disorganization and lack of preparedness (not to mention distrust of medical authorities, belief in traditional healing, etc) are consequences of poverty, though. this was from a few weeks ago but i think it's a good primer

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1409494

First, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia are resource-poor countries already coping with major health challenges, such as malaria and other endemic diseases, some of which may be confused with EVD. Next, their borders are porous, and movement between countries is constant. Health care infrastructure is inadequate, and health workers and essential supplies including personal protective equipment are scarce. Traditional practices, such as bathing of corpses before burial, have facilitated transmission. The epidemic has spread to cities, which complicates tracing of contacts. Finally, decades of conflict have left the populations distrustful of governing officials and authority figures such as health professionals. Add to these problems a rapidly spreading virus with a high mortality rate, and the scope of the challenge becomes clear

I went in for a boost today at my HMO (Kaiser Permanente) and they didn't have any of the fancy new boosters, or they'd just run out. So I just got another shot of the same Pfizer I got last time (I believe), as well as a flu shot which hurt quite a bit more than the vaccine. I'm not too worried about it, I think it'll do what it's supposed to do.

sorry for the condescension— it’s just that sometimes the guileless musings of posters here that include heavy judgment of those who don’t “just get the jab already” is really irritating. i want people to get the jab, too, but not everyone works remotely or has adequate company leave.

― broccoli rabe thomas (the table is the table),

all good! I hear you.

I don't really think that's what the convo was about, though? Like, there is definitely a hesitancy to get the newest booster, just as there was a hesitancy to get the original booster in the first place, and it goes well beyond people who are trying not to miss work due to not having sick leave (although yes, that does contribute to it and is an understandable reason).

the uptake of the newest booster and the previous booster are both abysmal enough to be useless at the population level - and there's a myriad of reasons. Yes, one of them being the reason you gave, but some being people who refuse to get the vaccine at all, some who are vaccine-fatigued and were ok getting one or two shots, but don't want to keep doing it, some who have been mislead by misinformation and won't be swayed no matter what you do, some who question the benefit of the booster at all, and some media outlets spreading doubt on the abilities of the booster even before any peer-reviewed articles or robust studies have been published. and also some who mistakenly think COVID is already 'endemic' and basically seasonal so who cares.

I didn't really see any shade thrown at individuals who just haven't gotten to it yet. hell, if you only recently got a non-bivalent booster two months ago or so, it wouldn't make sense to get it now.

xxxpost

I haven't gotten the booster yet because I had covid over the summer and figured that would buy me a few months, and the later I get the booster the longer it will last.

that's pretty sound. having the vid kinda like a boost in itself.

Since the bivalent booster is valid to take just two months after your previous jab, there might be a tweaked bivalent available in the new year anyway. Low takeup of the current shot means the US is likely to catch the UK’s latest wave and roll it into a Thanksgiving / Christmas surge yet again, so the more immunity anyone can add to their personal pile the better imo.

(Current bivalent at least 3 weeks before Thanksgiving is especially advisable for folks travelling then, or gathering with others who have.)

Some interesting new information about goings on at the Wuhan lab on the eve of the outbreak:

https://www.propublica.org/article/senate-report-covid-19-origin-wuhan-lab

Yea that's a no from me

It's very hard to take journalists—and thus, their work—seriously when they:

1. Misquote a source

2. Misrepresent that source's concerns that they might be misquoted

3. Refuse to correct inaccuracies, even when they are pointed out publicly https://t.co/MplvPpATbU

— Dr. Angela Rasmussen (@angie_rasmussen) October 28, 2022

And here. Just conservative politician using a committee to blame China so they can dump the blame for our government's mishandling on them

Recently I've been too busy to engage with the latest cuckoo discussions on SARS-CoV-2 origins, but I wanted to comment on the Senator Burr report that's making the rounds, especially since they use a figure I made (!) for their fig2 https://t.co/jCURIJlAtg

— Spyros Lytras (@SpyrosLytras) October 28, 2022

I think the (fairly minor) correction requested by Worobey has been added to the piece online.

This line from the article seems accurate:

The dispute over COVID-19’s origins, fought in the halls of Congress and on the web pages of scientific preprints, has become more toxic and divisive as time has passed. On Twitter, what should be scientific debate has devolved into a mosh pit of poop emojis and middle school insults. It is unclear what is driving the animus, but political advantage, egos, scientific reputations and research dollars all hang in the balance.

It is unclear what’s driving the animus? O rly?

I truly don't understand why people care about this so much

(And maybe people don't care about this so much and it just gets vocalized a lot on media; I have probably had 1000 conversations about COVID in real life and never once has the origin question come up)

I admit my interest in the question is a bit perverse, in that I’m fascinated by how certain factual questions become coded as partisan and the animus towards the “just askin’ questions” guy that comes from all sides when one of these touchy areas is needled.

One needs only look at the average account pumping the Lab Leak theory to understand what their motivations are.

It's telling that none of the leading virologists endorse the theory - the lab leak theory has been pushed by conspiracy theorists and cranks since basically the beginning of the pandemic, even when we actually had much less of a clue how it unfolded.

Not sure it’s accurate to say that all leading virologists dismiss the possibility, but I don’t have the references handy.

Conversely, you don't see these same sources that discredit the lab leak as a viable theory defending how the Chinese government handled the initial outbreak, or pushing vaccines that underwent little testing and had poor efficacy, so it isn't as if they're being Captain Save-a-China.

Lab leak theorists have since the beginning sought to cast blame on China in an attempt to hold them fiscally responsible, deflect blame away from individual countries that also mishandled the pandemic, and also incite panic that it's going to eventually evade immunity entirely.

I'm going to trust respected peers in the field over Richard Burr and non-peer reviewed preprints every time

Xpost I mean if you want to go the confirmation bias route I'm sure you could find a few rogue scientists sure

Just going to leave the same good article from May that I always do and peace from this discussion

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-lab-leak-hypothesis-made-it-harder-for-scientists-to-seek-the-truth/

Meantime: the hospital where I work at has had single digit cases for the past couple of months. Today it broke back into double digits.

I mean, China is absolutely responsible in that it never shut down the exotic animal/food markets which are a proven source of novel diseases, despite acknowledging this was needed and claiming they had done so. But yet again its almost certainly a case of corruption, laziness and stupidity, not some high-tech conspiracy.

Mike Davis RIP totally called it when he wrote years ago that capitalism had created conditions that made a disastrous pandemic all but inevitable (and likely to increase in frequency); in that respect the origin matters, particularly given those conditions have if anything been exacerbated since covid, but I’m not too bothered about the details or even the where. The next outbreak seems likely to happen in china but per MD it could just as easily happen in the slums of Kenya or at a kfc chicken farm

I appreciated that Scientific American link. That is a good discussion of the perennial popularity of conspiracy theories, and certainly it's fair to say that the lab-leak theory has its share of nutty proponents. However, buried towards the end of the article is this: "Plausible routes for a lab origin do exist—but they differ from the engineering-based hypotheses that most lab-leak rhetoric relies on. The lab in Wuhan could be a relay point in a zoonotic chain in which a worker became infected while sampling in the field or being accidentally contaminated during an attempt to isolate the virus from a sample." So they are redefining "lab leak" hypothesis to include only the engineered virus scenario, however, I would say that if a lab worker became infected from a virus they were working on, that is also a "lab leak" scenario. Perhaps our disagreement is mainly a matter of definition.

Not to stir the pot again, but here is a recent lengthy post by Alex Washburne laying out the case in favor of the engineered virus theory. I'm certainly not expert enough to evaluate these claims, but if he's right, then the engineered virus scenario is not so unlikely as some have claimed.

https://alexwasburne.substack.com/p/the-totality-of-the-circumstances

Since I'm sure his authority to speak on the matter will be immediately questioned, here is his own self-description: "I am a quantitative ecology & epidemiology researcher with a PhD from Princeton who studied pathogen spillover from bats to people for years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic"

I'm certainly not expert enough to evaluate these claims

?

You’re not an expert, a guy whose own expertise is not in virology or anything relevant certainly isn’t. I mean if you need to keep picking the conspiratorial theory scab, be my guest, but don’t blame anyone else when you get infected.

Is it conspiratorial thinking to think that the Chinese authorities would try to cover up something like this? Then yes, I guess I am guilty of conspiratorial thinking

Only you can answer why you’re so set on just asking questions about this.

Because I just think its interesting how there is such as strong push from certain quarters to shut down the debate.

i JuSt ThInK iTs InTeReStInG

but if he's right

Many people are saying...

Hey I'm just one guy on a message board. Don't worry, no one cares what I think.

FYI you are being exceedingly disingenuous and obtuse

if he's right, then the engineered virus scenario is not so unlikely as some have claimed.

wow, if his essay claiming the virus might be engineered is right, the virus might be engineered? sorry, i am lost in your maze of logic

The important thing about the lab leak theory is that it 100% doesn't matter unless you're one of the people weirdly into ramping up Cold War II: The Cold Warring. Natural, lab, alien, magic - all options change absolutely nothing about our behavior or response, now or in the future.

Why does o nate need to believe in lab leak theory? I’d like an answer to that that isn’t some obvious swerve like “I’m just asking questions why everyone is shutting this down!”

OK, that is one view. I don't agree but at least you are willing to state why you don't want to talk about it. Thanks. xp

I don't believe in lab leak theory! If you asked me right now I'd say my (extremely amateurish and uninformed) take is: 5% chance zoonotic crossover at the Huanan Seafood Market, 5% change lab leak from WIV, 90% chance we have no clue.

Why does everyone try to shut down discussion about if the Earth is 6,000 years old? I’m just interested in free inquiry!

Lol, ok, if you think those are equivalent theories. Plenty of scientifically trained people believe the lab leak theory deserves serious consideration. There are also obvious reasons to entertain the possibility that certain quarters of the virological research establishment might be wary of a theory that would most probably lead to very stringent restrictions on the type of research that has been their bread and butter.

I see, I see, biased virologists don’t want to jeopardise their income…whereas random “scientifically trained people”, who I’m guessing do not have the same expertise, are more objective. Hmmm.

the virological research establishment

There are plenty of critics of the way the federally-funded scientific establishment works in the US, but they are mostly disgruntled former researchers, so of course we shouldn't listen to them.

Btw, one reason that the lab leak theory does not lead to a new Cold War is because we (the US) are at least as much to blame as China if it’s true. We have participated in and funded this type of research. WIV worked with American researchers and got funding from the US government to do similar work. If the theory is true, we have plenty of reasons to point the finger of blame at ourselves.

Kudos for taking down Big Virology

Is that the expanded Pearl Jam reissue?

Some optimism here:

https://erictopol.substack.com/p/daily-pandemic-briefing-4-november

Why does everyone try to shut down discussion about if the Earth is 6,000 years old? I’m just interested in free inquiry!

― Lord Pickles (Boring, Maryland), Friday, November 4, 2022 7:14 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Lol, ok, if you think those are equivalent theories. Plenty of scientifically trained people believe the lab leak theory deserves serious consideration. There are also obvious reasons to entertain the possibility that certain quarters of the virological research establishment might be wary of a theory that would most probably lead to very stringent restrictions on the type of research that has been their bread and butter.

― o. nate, Friday, November 4, 2022 9:37 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

These are equivalent theories.