Ebola is coming to kill us all but it's nothing to worry about

Locutus

Locutus

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Jun 18, 2007
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"Ebola patients are highly recommended to see a doctor instantly."

hmmm...


Me (infected with deadly Ebola): *ring ring*
Dr. Seuss (living a happy ebola-free life): "Hello, Dr. Seuss is loose office".
Me: "I have ebola and would like to make an appointment".
Doc: Hang dang-donglers on your bingle balls. *click*

Me: *ring ring*
Dr. Dre: "yo,yo, Dr. Dre's office".
Me: "I have ebola and would like to make an appointment".
Doc: "Bow wow wow yippy yo yippy yay, ebola's in the motherfukkin house". *click*

Me: *ring ring*
Dr. Pepper: "Hello, I'm a pepper he's a pepper she's a pepper..."
Me (trying to cut in): Hey, I have ebo- : *click*
 
JLM

JLM

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Nov 27, 2008
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There's a possibility it could merely be Mother Nature's Way of thinning the population a bit.
 
Tonington

Tonington

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Oct 27, 2006
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Cliffy said:
The US government holds the patent on Ebola and that is all you can say?
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No, they hold a patent on a type of Ebola discovered in 2007, and the methods to distinguish it from other types of Ebola.
 
Tonington

Tonington

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Diseases like Ebola, and HIV/Aids, for that matter, don’t spread because we don’t know how to stop them. They spread because poor leadership and bad governance prevent early, effective responses, giving these diseases the time and the space they need to proliferate. So Ebola shouldn’t scare us – instead, it is the incompetent governments of this world that we should really be worrying about.
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Ebola: The disease is not the real problem | Daily Maverick

Yep. Great article on the differences between this and past outbreaks. New geographic area where healthcare officials have not dealt with the disease before, and a poor response overall from the local governments.

Secret serum likely saved Ebola patients - CNN.com
Experimental treatment shows promise:
The medicine is a three-mouse monoclonal antibody, meaning that mice were exposed to fragments of the Ebola virus and then the antibodies generated within the mice's blood were harvested to create the medicine. It works by preventing the virus from entering and infecting new cells.​
 
Tonington

Tonington

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JLM said:
You got it! and when that isn't happening fast enough more diseases pop up. When you cure one disease three more pop up! Mother Nature holds the "trump card".
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It doesn't work like that...
 
Locutus

Locutus

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Tonington

Tonington

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JLM said:
Oh, I'm pretty sure it does- we've certainly seen enough cases over the years to bear it out!
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Umm, no it doesn't work that way. You're confusing cause with correlation if you believe this to be true. We've only effectively gotten rid of one infectious human disease. In the time afterwards, we've found many more. To say that nature responds by making new ones is logically absurd. There is no evolutionary pressure there. In fact the only way this idea would even make sense is if there were organisms that have the exact same pathogenesis, that were somehow controlled by the eradicated disease or it's treatment, so we didn't know they were there. That's a very remote possibility.

Now there is cross-protection between infectious diseases, so if you get rid of one organism that produces antibodies in infected individuals that will select other pathogens at a later time, then the removal of said organism will have a detrimental effect. But it's not mother nature creating new diseases to fill some void left by the former.

The infectious disease burden has been going down, not up. It's not some threshold where when we break some value in the population that a new disease will come along to equalize. It's based on the rate of mutations in the disease causing organism and the health of the population. As we've grown, the developing countries have been making gains in sanitation and nutrition, so even the host is becoming more healthy. Eventually you get a very pathogenic organism, but it's not going to be because we crossed some number in the population.
 
gore0bsessed

gore0bsessed

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Oct 23, 2011
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I think humans basically encroached on the Ebola virus' (like HIV) habitat. Maybe its in reservoir host deep in the jungle. As our population grows, deforestation leads to its hosts being killed off. Now we're one of its few ample options as a host.
 
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