Not true ... The larger the population of infected people.... The more likely it will spread world wide. There is growing concern that the virus might become endemic in the general populations of west Africa ... Like the chicken pox is in much of the world. Forecasts allow reasonable orders of magnitude to be calculated for accessing the requirements of a proper response and even more importantly, if the efforts of that response are being effective or not. Forecasts address real world important things like how much, how many, who is paying and can we even get what we need.... Or in assessing the return on the efforts required to restrict travel to a large heavily populated area on another continent.... Really what is the impact and what extra measures need to be taken to assure that the restrictions are not circumvented?... It cannot be an easy task to put a wall around a group of countries with 10's of millions of citizens ... Who might want to get the f*** out of dodge when we start confining them... Consider their view..... It may look to many that we would just be condemning many to die just because of their location proximity and nothing else. Whatever these costs are ... It certainly wont be cheap.
Forecasts are pretty damn important if they are done right ... Behind all the hysteria spun up by the press someone actually has to do some real work as there isn't a money faerie in my reality that will magically pop in and solve the problems, though I am sure many in congress do believe there is such a thing based upon the legislation churned out in evidence of this. Having an idea of how many people that are likely to die right now and over the next few months I think could be useful. Transmission from the dead to the living is rampant in west Africa so assessing the true requirements for proper handling of the dead might be of some importance as the scales of magnitude between 50,000 and 500,000 are not insignificant.
There is so much unknown about the ramifications of this disease running through a large population. This is our first experience. In the previous 40 years since it Ebola made its public appearance out of the jungle, there has been nothing like this..... If we assume we know all we need to know right now and allow ourselves to start questioning the necessity of many of the current extra precautions and measures underway internationally, while the virus is still spreading exponentially, sure feels like a lot of undue and untested confidence. Decisions made in a vacuum which could just make things worse. What's important right now is the mechanics at work in the hot zone. You can't change the media spinning shades of hysteria, its how they make money and you shouldn't allow yourself to get sucked up in the hype it drives, honestly who cares ... This is just noise. However, being very very concerned about a disease spreading exponentially with a 70% mortality rate is extremely reasonable.
Some things we are still discovering have far reaching ramifications...imagine ... Men may be carriers of the disease for 6 months after an Ebola infection... in their semen! Allowing Ebola to become endemic for a lack of planning due to poor forecasting could really be a big problem and not just for west Africa. This would affect everyone world wide in how we interact with people knowing how many carriers there may be out there, HIV takes years to kill and look how that has effected human behavior... Ebola transmitted the same way as HIV ... well... I can't imagine ... Really I just don't want to..
The virus changes all the time ... mutation is the norm in the virus world. Ebola mutates at a relatively mild rate as compared to HIV which mutates 40x more often than Ebola in any given time. Mutation will not necessarily make worse, in fact many feel that Ebola will moderate its self becoming less deadly if it becomes a regular passenger of human hosts.... but then again, maybe not. The best choice is to snuff it out ASAP. The less exposure to humans as host the better.
Unlike H1N1, Ebola isn't an airborne easily transmitted disease... but if you do a little homework from the most credible scientific sources out there you will find data indicating some exceptions may exist. Lab experiments have shown strong evidence for airborne transmission between monkeys and pigs. while the virus was not the same strain that is in west Africa right now but it is from the same family tree. Again, every reason we need to justify an over the top response on this now... to kill it now .... is right in front of us. Snuff it out of the human population ... Don't let the virus become comfortable in human populations. Humans currently are not the Ebola's first choice as hosts and we should do what we can to keep it that way.
I would agree that the normal flu is of more concern for us in the USA than Ebola and it is likely to stay that way. H1N1 is not a laughing matter ... we shrug it off for the most part. However, a strain of H1N1 in 1918-1920 killed more people world wide in those two year that the total killed in all the years of WWII.
The world population is up nearly 350% from 1918..... over 7 billion people, who on average have less than .01% genetic diversity between each other. We put too much blind faith in science and we may have inadvertently set ourselves up for something far worse than 1918-1920.
It seems to me that the efforts in forecasting should be welcome and managed at a high standard so that the decisions that are made are informed ones and not just stupid mistakes made by underestimating the resources required to handle this or any other such incident.
Exponential math ... we loose control quickly if we don't respond appropriately.
