Biggest Ebola Outbreak In History- ~10000 Cases

[Simon_Jester]

The rate of spread does clamp down periodically, there's something that can restrain this epidemic, but it's managing to get worse anyway- one step forward and two steps back for the people fighting it, in other words.

[madd0ct0r]

it might just be a few missing reports in the data set.

[Rycon67]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/ ... SF20140821

According to the WHO the outbreak in the Congo is not believe to be Ebola at this time, but samples are being flown out of the area for further testing. The Medical charity MSF states that is too early to tell. Hopefully this is a bad but overall isolated coincidence and not another part of the outbreak, or we could see regional medical resources stretched past the breaking point.

Whatever it is in Congo, five healthcare workers, including one doctor are dead because of it though.

[Simon_Jester]

it might just be a few missing reports in the data set.

I kind of doubt it. First of all, a monotonically increasing infection rate is too... 'neat' to be believable. Secondly, it wouldn't just be a few missing reports, it'd have to be lots of them.

[madd0ct0r]

yeah, true. I guess the next task is to repeat the exercise, but breaking it down by country.

[Purple]

So is this whole thing still not a threat to us in Europe?

[madd0ct0r]

nope. just don't go on holiday to Liberia.

[Alyrium Denryle]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/ ... SF20140821

According to the WHO the outbreak in the Congo is not believe to be Ebola at this time, but samples are being flown out of the area for further testing. The Medical charity MSF states that is too early to tell. Hopefully this is a bad but overall isolated coincidence and not another part of the outbreak, or we could see regional medical resources stretched past the breaking point.

Whatever it is in Congo, five healthcare workers, including one doctor are dead because of it though.

It could be Marburg with that mortality rate.

[madd0ct0r]

someone else where requested a country breakdown, and my thesis is giving me a headache:

[fgalkin]

The rate of spread does clamp down periodically, there's something that can restrain this epidemic, but it's managing to get worse anyway- one step forward and two steps back for the people fighting it, in other words.

People die, infection rate goes down. People are buried by their relatives, who also divide their possessions. Relatives get infected. And so on?

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[madd0ct0r]

humph, it looks like there's quite a lot of cross border traffic betweeen guinea and sirerra leone - the later spikes match up perfectly.

[madd0ct0r]

I was asked if I could estimate the number of cases that have been missed in the official stats.
Without building a detailed connection map, or at least having a statistical distribution of the number of infectees per infective case the answer is no.

but we can highlight statisically unlikely hot points:

[Simon_Jester]

I'm a little confused there.

Are you positing that on each day an infected person might infect one or more persons when the fourth graph goes above one on the y-axis?

Or that infected persons on that day presumably infected more than one person each when the fourth graph goes above one on the y-axis.

The former would be insanely alarming, the latter a bit less so.

That said, if the latter we still have a major problem because the rate of spread has been 1 or more new infectees later on per person who gets the disease since some time in late June...

[madd0ct0r]

Nth I'm still figuring exactly what the ratio can tell us. It's the ratio of New cases predicted from who reports to New cases predicted from the first prediction. I came up with it after a request to try and see if historically any cases had missed. The idea was if a case was missed some of the New cases caused by it would show up later in the stats. Seems to happened early in april

[madd0ct0r]

New WHO report. Congo oputbreak is ebola, not connected.
http://www.afro.who.int/en/clusters-a-p ... -2014.html

Epidemiology and surveillance

The total number of probable and confirmed cases in the current outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD) in the four affected countries as reported by the respective Ministries of Health of Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone is 3 069, with 1 552 deaths.
The outbreak continues to accelerate. More than 40% of the total number of cases have occurred within the past 21 days. However, most cases are concentrated in only a few localities.
The overall case fatality rate is 52%. It ranges from 42% in Sierra Leone to 66% in Guinea.
A separate outbreak of Ebola virus disease, which is not related to the outbreak in West Africa, was laboratory-confirmed on 26 August by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and is detailed in a separate edition of the Disease Outbreak News: Disease Outbreak News: Ebola virus disease in Democratic Republic of Congo

[mr friendly guy]

http://www.news.com.au/world/bodies-of- ... 7064747703

Bodies of eight aid workers found in septic tank after they were killed by villagers in Guinea

EIGHT people who were part of a team sent to educate villagers in south-eastern Guinea about Ebola have been found dead after they were attacked by angry locals, the government says.
The bodies were recovered from the septic tank of a primary school in the village of Wome, government spokesman Albert Damantang Camara said.
“It’s very sad and hard to believe but they were killed in cold blood by the villagers,” he said, adding that he would do everything in his power to bring the perpetrators to justice.
The victims, said to include local health officials and journalists, had been missing ever since their delegation was pelted with stones during an outreach visit on Tuesday.

At least 21 people were wounded during the unrest, according to local police.
It was not immediately clear what prompted the violence, but the spread of Ebola has been accompanied by fear and paranoia by villagers who feel the government and international community cannot be trusted.
Many Guineans believe local and foreign health care workers are part of a conspiracy which either deliberately introduced the outbreak, or invented it as a means of luring Africans to clinics to harvest their blood and organs.
“The villagers violently attacked the delegation led by the governor, Lancei Conde, with stones and sticks,” said police lieutenant Richard Haba.
Protesters thought the outreach team had come “to kill them because they think Ebola is nothing more than an invention of white people to kill black people”, he said.

A delegation led by the Health Minister Remy Lamah travelled on Wednesday to the town, in the forested region of southern Guinea at the epicentre of the outbreak, to restore calm.
The epidemic emerged in Guinea at the start of the year and has killed 600 Guineans out of a total death toll across four African nations of more than 2600.
Meanwhile, Sierra Leone began a three-day lockdown, forbidding people to leave their homes in a bid to halt the deadly epidemcia.
Streets across the normally chaotic capital Freetown, a bustling city of 1.2 million people, emptied from midnight and by dawn on Friday the rare echo of rain on tin roofs and the rumble of thunder had replaced the usual blare of motorbike horns and the din of market stall music.
“Everyone seems to be complying and this is very good. This is an important way to fight Ebola. We expect everyone to stay at home,” Freetown police chief Francis Munu said.

Shops and offices were shut across the city, and only emergency vehicles plied streets which are normally jammed with traffic throughout the day.
Mr Munu said his officers, covering the day in two shifts of 12 hours, were accompanying burial teams picking up bodies around the city and were prepared to protect them if they encountered resistance.
“Ose to Ose Ebola Tok” - “House-to-House Ebola Talk” in the widely-spoken Krio language — will see more than 7000 volunteer teams of four visiting the country’s 1.5 million homes over the coming days.
The population of six million has been told to stay indoors for 72 hours except for essential business, with only emergency services, security forces and other key workers exempt.

Almost 30,000 volunteers will go door-to-door to educate locals and hand out soap, in an exercise that could lead to scores more patients and bodies being discovered in people’s homes.
Ebola fever can fell its victims within days, causing severe muscle pain, vomiting, diarrhoea and — in some cases — unstoppable internal and external bleeding.
More than 550 people have died from the disease in Sierra Leone alone, one of the three hardest-hit nations alongside Guinea and Liberia.

Summary - Sierre Leone seems to be doing what it can, Guinea has goddamn conspiracy theorists.

[fgalkin]

Stay classy, 4chan

(Of course, it, predictably, failed, as would have been obvious to anyone other than 4channers who are dumber than hammers. But still, an incredibly awful thing to do)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- ... e-disease/

The message-board 4chan has been rightly blamed for many unsavory Internet things: the celebrity nude scandal, the dangerous “bikini bridge” meme, the brief virality of the self-harm hashtag #cuttingforBieber.

Now, the denizens of one of the Internet’s least-principled places are attempting to propagate another tasteless meme: She’s called Ebola-chan, and she’s some cross between a prank, a witless joke and a truly vile strain of racism.

“Have you welcomed her into your heart yet?” Asks one post on 4chan’s “politically incorrect” message board, /pol/. “I’m talking, of course, about Ebola-Chan. The viral goddess of love and Afrocide … Our shrines and incantations give her strength.”

Ebola-Chan is not, needless to say, a goddess anywhere outside of 4chan’s diseased imagination: The character is a /pol/ invention, a cartoon mascot for the virus that could infect half a million people within the next four months.

In fan art — of which there is, surprisingly, quite a lot — she’s depicted as a pointy-chinned, wide-eyed anime character with pink pigtails that curl into the shape of the virus. Wherever she’s posted, users are expected to reply with choruses of “I love you, Ebola-Chan” or “thank you, Ebola-Chan.” But of course, they reply with all kinds of stomach-turning stuff, as well: hopes for Ebola to wipe out all of Africa, to strike other continents or demographics, and to otherwise “remove … [the] subhumans,” as one particularly racist post put it.

It’s hard to tell how much of the chatter is genuine: 4chan, with its reputation for both ammorality and mischief, has always attracted a crowd of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ lolz-seekers along with the sincere racists, misogynists and homophobes.

But regardless of whether the fine people of 4chan actually hope Ebola kills more people, some seem bent on helping it do just that. On Sunday, an anonymous 4chan user took responsibility for a series of fake posts about Ebola-Chan on the Nigerian Web site Nairaland, which claimed, among other things, that Ebola was a demon sent by a “new racist cult in Europe and in the USA.” The posts also claimed that some Western Ebola doctors belonged to the cult. While the “rumors” were reported by outlets like Vocativ and the International Business Times, Nairaland users promptly called out the trolling — much to the prankster’s disappointment.

“The whole thing needs more effort,” he complained.

(4chan)

This is, of course, all in the standard 4chan playbook. 4chan pranks usually unfold in predictable stages: an inside joke of some kind is born on the boards, its participants invent fake handles on forums or social networks to propagate it elsewhere, and everybody dances in the resulting confusion. (“It made it into the news in my country,” one man wrote of a Swiss article on Ebola-Chan. “Pretty funny.”)

It stops being funny, of course, the instant that anyone misses the “joke” and takes it seriously. In January, 4chan’s bikini bridge “joke” went viral within the Internet’s pro-anorexia and -bulimia communities, to the enormous alarm of the National Eating Disorder Association. In Africa, where misinformation and superstition about Ebola flourish, that risk could be particularly high: As Reuters reported in late June, suspicion and fear of doctors has already undermined efforts to fight the disease — and that’s without rumors that said doctors belong to some Ebola-worshipping death cult.

(Nairaland.com)

4chan’s moderators seem to be aware of the problem, at least: While the site didn’t respond to The Post’s request for comment on the issue, they’ve apparently started to go after Ebola-Chan threads.

“MODS!” one user posted. “Ebola-chan threads are not allowed. Pls remove.”

But even if the mods do remove them, Ebola-Chan may have done her damage. Much like the disease itself, now that she’s out there, there’s no controlling her.

“I loved witnessing the birth of ebola-chan,” another user wrote over the weekend. “However things are [e]scalating to some weird levels.”

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Broomstick]

Worse yet, this "Ebola-chan" might seem all too plausible to a region of the world that used to have a smallpox god: Sapona/Omolu among the Yoruba and Shakpona among the Dahomey. Granted, the overlap with the affected region isn't exact, but it doesn't have to be.

[K. A. Pital]

Just when you think chan trolls can't hit a new low, they do it.

[Borgholio]

As an update - New Yorker tests positive for Ebola.

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ebola- ... la-n232561

And Paul Allen pledges $100 million to helping to fight Ebola.

http://money.cnn.com/2014/10/23/news/pa ... index.html

This comes after Zuckerberg donated $25m. Nothing like an epidemic to actually get people to donate money to help research a treatment, right?

[K. A. Pital]

I have updated the title as the number of cases is now reaching 10 000.

[Dartzap]

I have to ask this in the kindest way possible: Are some US medical staff a bit daft? Between the nurses, who between them got on a plane and a cruise ship a few days after treating the chap who died, and the doctor who decided to go for a ride in the subway and go bowling in NYC having spent some time treating people in west Africa, could have potentially infected vast numbers of people.

It just seem pants-on-head idiocy to even contemplate doing such things , especially when the gear being used, or rather, the procedure for getting out of it is known to be an infection route. i'm fairly certain nurses spend three years in university and that infection control is a core part of the course. Doctors even more so!

Am I being harsh? Or being dense myself?

[K. A. Pital]

You are not particularly harsh: Europe is a lot closer to Africa but seems to be doing a better job so far and nothing so egregious surfaced... So far is the key here, however.

[Broomstick]

American medical culture has an element of denial in it that's simply not funny. Doctors and nurses are taught to deny discomfort, pain, emotional trauma, and illness to get their jobs done. It's one reason they make the worst patients, and there's a significant level of substance abuse among them. I have to wonder if that's a factor. Add in American distaste for being told they can't go where they please when they please, in the case of the nurses some bad advice given to the one who went to Ohio who was told it was OK to travel, and there you go. It's probably no coincidence that, of the NBC news team that returned from Liberia when one of the camera men can down with Ebola, it was the doctor who broke quarantine. (The camera man has survived, is now Ebola free and went home yesterday.)

At least when the nurses started feeling bad/showing an elevated temperature they immediately sought medical help and went into isolation. The doctor, who really should have known better, was apparently gallivanting around NYC with a fever for at least a day! WTF was he thinking? I have to think there was a lot of denial going on there. That's exactly the kind of action that can spread the disease.

On the upside, many other people who have either worked in Africa in Ebola areas or in the US treating Ebola cases ARE maintaining a 21 day quarantine and monitoring themselves, limiting travel and contact with others.

[jwl]

I have to ask this in the kindest way possible: Are some US medical staff a bit daft? Between the nurses, who between them got on a plane and a cruise ship a few days after treating the chap who died, and the doctor who decided to go for a ride in the subway and go bowling in NYC having spent some time treating people in west Africa, could have potentially infected vast numbers of people.

It just seem pants-on-head idiocy to even contemplate doing such things , especially when the gear being used, or rather, the procedure for getting out of it is known to be an infection route. i'm fairly certain nurses spend three years in university and that infection control is a core part of the course. Doctors even more so!

Am I being harsh? Or being dense myself?

Wouldn't it be more likely that the ones that get infected are the ones that are worse at infection control?