> The town [of Kenema] sits in fertile, hilly country, dotted with small villages, ninety miles southwest of the place where the borders of Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia converge in a triskelion. This border area was the cradle of the Ebola outbreak.
I was unfamiliar with the word triskelion in this description. So I looked it up on Wikipedia [1]. Turns out it is an ancient motif or symbol consisting of three interlocking legs or spirals.
So then I checked the border area between these three countries and indeed, it is quite well described as a triskelion although the top border is more like 180 degrees than 120. I have uploaded a cropped Google Map to imgur showing the area [2]. The town of Kenema is in the southwest corner. Guinea is the NE section, Sierra Leone is the western part and Liberia is the SE area.
The description of the conditions in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone and the over-whelming odds that the doctors there are facing was heartbreaking to read.
The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is as much a function of poverty as it is of the Ebola Virus. One of these all of us can fight.
As someone who has spent extensive time in West and Central Africa, poverty is as much a second order (or third or fourth) effect as the Ebola outbreak, and much harder to fight. System fragility (whether it's relative to disease, famine, or other natural disasters), is a function of poor leadership more than anything. What is scary is that there is plenty of evidence that government to government aid does more harm than good, and Western attempts at fixing the problems only make things worse.[1]
"Warlord" implies a military bent. Many of the worst culprits are bureaucrats - spending most of their time wearing $10,000 suits while being wined and dined by Western leaders and skimming millions into the accounts of their inner circle. Power is not always held by physical force.
I am profoundly moved by the heroism Dr Khan and his nurses showed and the example they've set for future generations of medical professionals. I hope it's publicized when Dr. Khan's family finishes setting up the foundation in his name
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 history, so they're not easily dismissed in the region.
I don't know how you balance that. If the treatment is new enough, you really might not know whether it would help or hurt the patient's odds of survival.
>>It'd be really interesting to find out the correlation between the users who down-voted and the color of their skin. I am pretty sure about the outcome.
I downvoted you and I'm first-gen Nigerian in America. Just about everyone else is in Lagos. I feel very confident, at least as far as educated Nigeria is concerned, that most suspect Africans-used-as-experiments more than withholding-for-white-man.
Not giving Dr.Khan the medicine was the right thing to do.
Having a few people like you talking about withholding-conspiracies that don't really make sense... is better than giving him the untested drug, ends up not working(maybe producing horrible side-effects) and the general public freaks out even more and trusts all the doctors even less than they already do.
Because giving a medicine, untested on humans, to an African during this time of panic and mistrust(justified, to be sure) is a ridiculous risk.
Role a dice to see if you can save Dr.Khan.
- If it works[<50%], awesome he lives and they get to work on making more of the stuff while trying to contain it.
- If doesn't work[>50%], the already deep mistrust and panic of the people will increase and everyone freaks out. If later they actually do find a cure, who's going to believe them?
- Third option. Test it on someone who isn't African so whatever the results are, you don't have a PR disaster & mass-panic on your hands.
>>
Don't be stupid, I'm not complaining about racism.
But earlier you said:
>>It'd be really interesting to find out the correlation between the users who down-voted and the color of their skin. I am pretty sure about the outcome.
That's the only reason I downvoted you and replied.
We all read(or should have read) the article here. It was a tough call; some people claim it was the wrong call. I say they made the right call.
Think what you want, I can see I'm not going to convince you. I'm just telling you that I downvoted you and why I did it.
It is absurd and conspiratorial to think that someone would volunteer or work with MSF at great personal cost and risk and then do something so terrible because of racism.
You make a really vile accusation with very poor reasoning against people doing very good, noble work (and calling for them to be named publicly). I didn't downvote you, but I don't have any sympathy.
It is rather more absurd to withhold the medicine from a dying patient simply to manage "public perception" sir. You can go ahead and give a negative vote too, it wouldn't mean a thing.
Yes, people are doing very good, noble work -- Dr Khan was one of them too -- I seek to know the thoughts and names of those who chose to withhold the medicine from him, and give it to others the very next day.
The world should know. And thanks for the article, I did read it before and therefore, I ask for reasons that led to their unfortunate decision.
"It is rather more absurd to withhold the medicine from a dying patient simply to manage "public perception" sir."
That would be awful it it were true. Why do you think that is the case? Neither the submitted article, my Lancet link, nor my CBC link contain those words. However, the CBC article notes:
"The drug had never been tested on humans. What if it caused an allergic reaction that killed Dr. Khan?"
"His blood showed antibodies to the virus, evidence that his own immune system was already in full battle. What if the drug got in the way of that immune response?"
"...the final decision was left with the doctors at the field hospital in Sierra Leone, although it was not a unanimous decision."
Friend of Dr Khan talking about the decision, "I do want it to be clear that these were difficult, delicate decisions that people in a stressful situation had to make."
"The treatment, it was felt, if it was to be used at all, would be better attempted at the more sophisticated hospital in Europe where Dr. Khan was about to be moved."
"A Spanish priest who also received the experimental treatment later died."
All of these undercut your accusations completely.
Given that Zmapp is three "humanized monoclonal antibodies" to Ebola and from memory is therefore intended for early stage disease, giving it to someone who's had Ebola long enough that they're already producing normal antibodies could be pointless, except in terms of Stage I trials (the ones where you test a drug primarily to see if it's safe, and also look for evidence of efficacy).
It could be that most or all of the 7 people given it were at this point, and the testing was really just for safety. In which case we eeeevil white men are obviously going to first test it on ourselves for the political reasons you and others point out. 3 Liberians were given it later.
Just like the vaccine that's in Stage I trials is being first tried on Americans, with a second effort on "60 healthy volunteers at the University of Oxford in England and among 40 healthy volunteers in Mali" and then an expected "40 healthy volunteers in Gambia". (http://www.niaid.nih.gov/news/newsreleases/2014/Pages/EbolaV...)
Important note: no matter how dire this Ebola outbreak gets, we still have to be very careful in vaccine trials, which are given to ostensibly healthy people. You don't, for an extreme, and unlikely given the current state of the art hypothetical, want to find out that it kills 99% of those given it 2 years later. Aside from the universally fatal stuff like rabies there can be worse outcomes than getting the disease.
My intent to know the context of discussions, people and debate that went on for three days while Dr. Khan's health degraded was simply this: Could groupthink have been responsible for the outcome and been avoided? If so, can it be done in the future?
If you look at my original comments closely, I only complained about racially driven down-votes from some users on HN and shared my fears about a similarly driven group-think that might / might not have happened in Africa. Since there is no data on that, it should be outed.
I will not myself be excusable if I were to really accuse someone (or a group) simply by their color, especially after reading some article on HN.
All I seek is the details or think that led to the unfortunate decision. I can form my opinion off it.
Besides if you're hiding the reasons and the team that led to the death of someone of another color it could of course be for noble reasons. Nice sell. And just look at the number of down-votes, lame comments and attempt to cull the discussion. HN at its very best. And it's fucking racist to the core.
There was quite a bit of reportage (both in this article and in the wider news media). For reference:
"If something went wrong with the drug, there was no intensive-care unit in Kailahun. The population of Sierra Leone would be furious if the West was seen to have killed Khan, an African scientist and a national hero, with an experimental drug. But if he wasn’t given the ZMapp, and he died, people might say that the West had withheld a miracle drug from him. “I was making sure my tone of voice stayed neutral,” Kobinger recalled. The debate and the calls went on for three days."
So why not share the names and reasoning the doctors had which perceptibly led to withholding (rather taking it away) from Dr. Khan?
Public perception makes it hard I can understand, but not giving the drug simply to manage public perception is incredibly selfish and stupid no matter how you choose to see or read all the reportage.
> Debates and the call went on for three days?
Lol, sure. Does that even make any sense? Groupthink as a proxy for effort? Seen that before!
How? Throwing money at the problem doesn't yield results (as is typically the case). The issues in Africa seem to be fundamental; they are issues of culture, resources, and structure.
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?
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.
it's even more fascinating. (biochemist here) I think the immunosuppressive regions is a small protein called sGP which ebola causes the cell to produce a ton of. It's not attached to ebola virions, so in a way it's a DDOS on the immune system, by creating a foreign component that the immune system gets distracted by instead of going after ebola.
"DNA vaccines expressing the envelope glycoprotein (GP) or nucleocapsid protein (NP) genes of Ebola virus were evaluated in adult, immunocompetent mice. The vaccines were delivered into the skin by particle bombardment of DNA-coated gold beads with the Powderject-XR gene gun. Both vaccines elicited antibody responses as measured by ELISA and elicited cytotoxic T cell responses as measured by chromium release assays. From one to four vaccinations with 0.5 microgram of the GP DNA vaccine resulted in a dose-dependent protection from Ebola virus challenge. Maximal protection (78% survival) was achieved after four vaccinations. "
There are a few vaccines that work in animals, they just haven't been funded to go through the trials needed to be widely used in humans. There is a good interview on Montana public radio with one of the leading researchers that touches on this:
(Rocky Mountain Lab in Montana is where a large portion of the ebola research in the nation if not world the world happens and mtpr had gotten some really good interviews as a result.)
Correct. Victims bodies are tricked into generating large amounts of cells. This causes the hemorrhaging which is the ultimate cause of death.
Fun fact: The victim's body continues producing cells for several hours after death. In rare cases this (in conjunction with post-death bloating) causes the cadaver to "explode"
Absolutely, but that's true of most information as well. For example, the information in the article is relative to the context of understanding our language and the body of assumed knowledge and references of a reader of the New Yorker.
My understanding of biology is very limited. I've heard how physically small microbes are in every article out there. But never how information-small they are. Fascinating from a software developer's perspective.
I wonder what code golf for a virus would look like.
Like viriods, which make a virus look huge by comparison:
> Viroids are plant pathogens that consist of a short stretch (a few hundred nucleobases) of highly complementary, circular, single-stranded RNA. Viroid genomes are extremely small in size, ranging from 246 to 467 nucleotides (nt), and consisting of fewer than 10,000 atoms. In comparison, the genome of the smallest known viruses capable of causing an infection by themselves are around 2,000 nucleobases in size. The human pathogen hepatitis D virus is similar to viroids.
> Viroid RNA does not code for any protein. Their replication mechanism uses RNA polymerase II, a host cell enzyme normally associated with synthesis of messenger RNA from DNA, which instead catalyzes "rolling circle" synthesis of new RNA using the viroid's RNA as template. Some viroids are ribozymes, having catalytic properties which allow self-cleavage and ligation of unit-size genomes from larger replication intermediates.
> A ribozyme (ribonucleic acid enzyme) is an RNA molecule that is capable of catalyzing specific biochemical reactions, similar to the action of protein enzymes.
The action of ribozymes led to the RNA world hypothesis, as the mechanism for how you could have a simple system from which DNA and proteins can come as later optimizations on particular aspects. Some ribozymes are able to go as far as catalyze the building of their own RNA structure in the right environments (albeit, with limited success so far).
Right. It's so much context dependent that the "hardware" of a different animal may react very differently to it - perhaps even ignoring it altogether.
The genetic information is really the 4.8 kB of "code" PLUS the entire information already contained in the cellular hardware reading it. One doesn't make sense without the other.
At the very bottom, the whole thing depends on the laws of quantum mechanics in this universe, governing the minute details of molecular interaction. That, too, should be considered to go into the "code". Make a tiny change to the Plank constant, and the Zaire ebolavirus code will do something very different.
Thank you for saying that! Its so often repeated that our DNA contains the entire program for a human being. That's patently false. The cellular machinery provides almost all of the OS; DNA is just a script.
I liken DNA to a paper tape containing one of two punches: MAN or MOUSE. Feed it into a bio-replicator and get a man or a mouse. Does the paper tape define the man? Of course not.
> I liken DNA to a paper tape containing one of two punches: MAN or MOUSE
I don't think that really captures it. Yes, it requires external machinery to actually do anything, but DNA is much more information dense and carries much more of an exact definition of the organism to be produced.
Personally, I prefer the analogy of compiler source code. Sure, it can't do anything on its own. But it defines how an working external system (another compiler or an functional cellular environment) can produce a second possibly different system
Yet the dynamic biochemistry of the cell is orders of magnitude larger and more complex than DNA. So its larger than a paper tape, sure, but the comparison is pretty good really.
And yet the paper tape of a plant or animal genome (as opposed to a virus) also contains the instructions for the OS and the bio-replicator, which is part of what's so fascinating about it.
I don't think that's accurate at all. The DNA has no effect on the cellular soup - the RNA etc - that are the bioreactor. That you got from some ancestral Eve. It changes perhaps over time, like anything else through random chance. But its independent of the DNA, which is a tiny part of the whole.
No, the article does not contain more information. It contains more data, but when dealing with genomics you must keep in mind the fact that various codons translate to various proteins, and each of the proteins serve various functions depending on their shape... and proteins can assume different shapes, which changes their effects. This is the importance of protein-folding research.
You hit near it when you gzipped the article -- consider a genome to be an incredibly compressed format, able to explode into a truly stunning amount of information, stored in a relative paucity of raw data.
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.
Requests require committees. Committees require meetings. Meetings take time.
The more red tape you put up, the harder it is for people to get to work on this.
If someone has the ability to print out a working copy of ebola in 10/20/100 years, someone else will have the ability to print out working antibodies. I'd be less concerned about some potential future risk and more concerned with getting out of the way of people who are working on Ebola research right now.
Plus, if some nut job wanted to print out some Ebola with a hypothetical bioprinter, they'd probably end up infecting themselves as well.
> Requests require committees. Committees require meetings. Meetings take time.
This is totally false. Plenty of research material is "distributed on request" where the request is just an email and the validation is just checking that the email comes from an academic domain.
It doesn't really matter if someone can print out antibodies (hypothetically). That won't help the people already killed by the ebola.
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.
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.
Yes. I wonder if being so incredibly small means that replication is more efficient and intense and is therefore a strong factor behind why it's so virulent.
What I get from this article is that they let the most important candidate for the drug die without taking it, but then two random Americans got it because no one was watching.
Is the lesson here to always steal people's vaccines without asking?
This is a good point. A dose of ZMapp was being stored on the very same premises where Dr. Khan lay dying. But instead of giving him the treatment on the spot, considerable risk was instead taken to deliver it to two Americans in another country 250 miles away.
However it would be unfair to say that this was because the Americans' lives were valued more than Dr. Khan's. He was being cared for by Doctors Without Borders. For quite rational reasons they decided to withhold the treatment [1]. The Americans were under someone else's care and thus weren't subject to DWB's decision.
My main ethical disagreement is with DWB's decision not to inform Dr. Khan of ZMapp's existence while knowing that it would be used by others.
I think this was just a bad timing. When deciding to withhold treatment for Dr. Khan they weren't aware that the next patients in line were two white men - a situation they explicitly wanted to avoid.
You idiots wouldn't recognize propaganda if it were wearing a name tag... "I'd like to poke them in their prying eyes with things they'd never see if it smacked them in their temples." -Arctic Monkeys
Good thing we've been cutting science funding across the board! Doubt the NIH and NSF grants were helping science much anyway.
As a matter of fact, science should be privately funded and privately run. What idiot thought it was a good idea to make scientific research a government mandate?
To thy weary, I say: The market shall provide.
P.S. Yes, I am bitter about the current state of science. I've written about it in great detail before [1][2], but the current fascination with free-market everything has truly made me lose hope for this iteration of society. The free market will work, until it doesn't. Some activities which are absolutely crucial, will not be profitable until it's too late. Medical research is a good example, but there are others (energy sources to replace oil, overproduction of consumer waste, pollution etc.)
Seems like today's societies must learn by sticking their fingers in the proverbial wall socket. So be it.
The CDC was and is plenty funded to deal with this threat. If you think they didn't spend it well, well, join the club.
No amount of money is ever "enough" if it not managed responsibly. I'd really appreciate it if those who think the answer is always more government money would start putting more pressure on their goverment to spend it responsibly. I mean that quite straight, not as a snark. It would go a long way towards getting me on the bandwagon of more government spending if it didn't appear to me that the people making this claim didn't always take every opportunity to dodge away from the question of responsibility in practice.
It is not. Sorry, $6B annual budget is not a lot in the context of their responsibility, which is substantially greater than ebola [edit: or even outbreak containment in general, for that matter]. In fact, ebola (as evidenced by the lack of transmission to Duncan's own family or any additional caregivers of his [edit: not to mention a lack of host reservoir in NA]) probably and appropriately very low on the CDC's radar, since it is _not_ a public health threat in the US.
late edit: To put it in perspective, approximately $3B was the total operating expenses for just Massachusetts General Hospital, alone, in 2012. Or just 50% greater than the 2014 budget for UCSF. Or just half of what Apple spent on SG&A in the 12 months prior to Sept 27.
Then my point is even more important given the proportion of it actually spent on infectious diseases. If that's so allfired important than why were they doing anything else with that money?
The answer, of course, is that it wasn't considered so important until a couple of months ago, and thus, it wouldn't matter how much money was thrown at them, it wouldn't have solved the fundamental priority problem.
Contra to some of the press, I took the time to read the CDC's summary budget from the government's website. It wasn't hard to find ("Center for Disease Control" budget). It's full of things that sound superficially wonderful, but none of it matters if it's being spent incompetently or with priorities not connected to the real world, and throwing "more" at such an organization is not a good investment.
You can't get away from it. It isn't about more, it's also about what. What matters a lot. Again, I'd be less vocal about not just handing the government more if the advocates of more would pay more attention... much more attention... to what, and how well. But I can't help but notice the advocates of "more" seem to consider that an attack, when in all seriousness they really ought to be leading the charge. If you are an advocate of giving the government more, shouldn't you consider it very important to your own position that what the government already has be used well? You give away an enormous weapon when you leave it solely to your opponents to point out problems!
I am not trying to be difficult, but I don't understand your point. Ebola is a vanishingly unimportant concern as far as infectious diseases go. This current "outbreak" has resulted in 2 transmissions in the US to date. The reason it appears that the system failed is that the system correctly reacted to a low value threat, but it was amplified into a hysteria because of dynamics in media economics and US political cycles.
If I were the CDC, I'd be spending a boatload on SARS, MERS, MERSA, MDR/XDR TB, any number of the highly virulent seasonal influenza strains, social programs to promote vaccinations (pertussis, for example, kills more babies in the US annually than there have been total US cases of Ebola), annual rabies tracking programs, general education (good hygiene practices)... so many others. And the good news is they are doing this, as I'm sure your research into their budget shows.
edit: thus the downvoter exemplifies the problem, without saying a single word.
OK, I'll down vote you and explain why: your studied inability or unwillingness to do math, to whit, what a disease like Ebola can do in a 3rd World urban environment (or village/small town ones different than the former locations of outbreaks), specifically double the number of infections approximately every 3 weeks.
Right now this Ebola outbreak gives every sign of having the potential to be the most significant public health event in a number of centuries. Like, maybe we'll end up having to go back to the 1346–1350 Black Death for comparison, unless we can develop, test, produce and distribute a vaccine very quickly.
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 two ago (a fairly conservative guess at the true number) would get you to 1.4 million in January.
> 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.)
Your assumption for those numbers is that it will keep doubling everywhere it goes, correct? For example, Nigeria seems to have stamped it out in Lagos, refuting the idea that it automatically breaks out exponentially in "3rd World urban environments".
"what a disease like Ebola can do in a 3rd World urban environment"
Nowhere did I say or ever imply that it "automatically breaks out exponentially" in such environments, just that in this outbreak, it has, and I would hope you would not deny it could in others.
At some point, the danger of handling the bodies of those who die of Ebola will sink into the public consciousness there. The worst case scenario assumes no modification of burial practices.
Note that the article dragonwriter linked says safe burials would have the outbreak ending soon after January:
If, by late December 2014, approximately 70% of patients were placed either in ETUs or home or in a community setting such that there is a reduced risk for disease transmission (including safe burial when needed), then the epidemic in both countries would almost be ended by January 20, 2015
Indeed, there can and eventually inevitably will be changes that decrease R-nought, presumably below 1 where it will then "burn out". Eventually the afflicted region(s) will be decided into those whose behaviors, for whatever reason, do not divided transmission, and those that do, with the latter containing a few survivors (of the myriad other things that kill weakened people as well as of Ebola).
But I'm pretty sure we don't know all that's going on with this outbreak in non-village settings, how mobility of people in this Western region vs. the prior outbreaks in Central Africa is affecting things, how ingrained these burial practices are, etc. We hypothesize, but only time will tell which, if any of these are correct.
However, one of the things I'm concerned about is what happens if or when it hits Latin America, which would then have very direct consequences on the US.
The response to Ebola vs. the other things isn't that different. I see no reason to believe the CDC is caught flatfooted by "Ebola", which is indeed as you say a relatively minor issue that one could almost consider a practice warmup for the "real thing", but will suddenly be a well-oiled machine when the real crisis hits. That is not how human organizations work.
If the CDC is suddenly able to handle Spanish-Influenza-Bird-Flu-2015 with stunning competence, it will only be because we got lucky and got a wakeup call with our complete unpreparedness for and blithering incompetence with Ebola.
Unless, of course, enough people keep covering for the CDC because by golly, they're government so of course they're competent, ignore your lying eyes, in which case we will learn nothing and have the same CDC when the real crisis hits. And next time, it probably won't be Ebola. (Unless someone somewhere gets the bright idea of just how much havoc they could wreak with a simple trip through New York via Liberia... which will be vicious anti-government smearing right-wingnut fear mongering right up until the moment it happens....)
For someone talking about "Vanishingly unimportant concerns" to then go on about SARS, which has caused zero transmissions in years and never reached the point the current Ebola outbreak has reached is...curious.
You're changing the subject. The parent was discussing budget cuts to NIH and NSF, which fund basic research into diseases and cures, including ebola.
CDC is largely a health policy organization. To the extent it does research, it is research to inform and guide government policy. Not fundamental scientific understanding of disease.
Sorry in advance that this going a little off topic (though, I would argue it's somewhat pertinent given the historically notable scientific illiteracy in the Ebola coverage/public response). This is a political site, but the author is an expert in healthcare policy: http://www.balloon-juice.com/2014/10/17/resiliency-is-not-ef...
I tend to agree with you and him on the topic that capitalism as practiced in the US currently is a quarter-to-quarter exercise. It doesn't disincentive externalized and systemic risks enough.
It's a New Yorker thing - they've had whimsical cartoons mixed with serious reportage in their printed editions for decades, if not over a century. It is odd but I suspect it gets people to read more articles than they otherwise might.
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.
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.
The article informs us that there is no evidence that it is airborne which is a slightly different statement.
> There's no evidence that Ebola can't evolve into a sharknado
I hope you aren't invoking these nonsensical examples to try to attack the firm principle that nonexistence of evidence isn't evidence of nonexistence.
How this examples is different is that is no reason to suspect that ebola can evolve into a sharknado. This is because in addition to there being no evidence, there is also no plausible hypothesis on how that could happen which could be grounds for a rational suspicion.
There is a plausible mechanism for how a particles of ebola can become airborne. In fact, it is almost certain that they can become airborne. Any such small particle will turn into a floating dust when the droplet which contains it dries out. The only question is, can they survive in that form (and over what distances), such that they can land on a host and infect.
If this question were settled with iron-clad certainty, would we be hearing it in the indirect language of "no evidence"?
>Any such small particle will turn into a floating dust when the droplet which contains it dries out. The only question is, can they survive in that form (and over what distances), such that they can land on a host and infect.
Not only does the virus have to survive drying out, but it has to be able to make it past the mucous protecting your upper respiratory tract and and infect cells there. Viruses that have evolved this capable are very specialized--most viruses are not transmitted this way.
There has never been a recorded case of a virus evolving a completely new transmission mode. We have never seen a virus that wasn't previously airborne "go airborne", and we have have no evidence that Ebola can be transmitted this way right now. In fact we have plenty evidence that it can't be transmitted this way--if it could be, there would already be millions of cases not thousands.
If Ebola were capable of the same kind of airborne transmission as measles and smallpox, previous outbreaks would already have spread around the globe and killed millions or billions of people.
There are so many things that could wipe out civilization: super volcanoes, comet impacts, nuclear war. Why should we worry about a hypothetical scenario for which there is absolutely no evidence? That doesn't mean we shouldn't do everything we can to contain the outbreak, just that we shouldn't spend our time engaging in existential hand-wringing over unlikely, hypothetical threats.
> There has never been a recorded case of a virus evolving a completely new transmission mode.
Keep in mind that there's a lot that we don't know Ebola and how it behaves in different hosts. For all we know, it may be able to spread via aerosols in its origin host, but doesn't bind well to cells in the human upper respiratory tract.
> We have never seen a virus that wasn't previously airborne "go airborne", and we have have no evidence that Ebola can be transmitted this way right now.
We've seen this for avian Influenza A. Herfst et al. did a mutation/serial passage investigation with avian H5N1 that gained the ability to spread through aerosols among ferrets.
Will Ebola gain this ability? Nobody knows. Is it possible? Possibly. How likely? Unknown. Should we panic over it? Like you said, not at the moment.
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.)
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 was unfamiliar with the word triskelion in this description. So I looked it up on Wikipedia [1]. Turns out it is an ancient motif or symbol consisting of three interlocking legs or spirals.
So then I checked the border area between these three countries and indeed, it is quite well described as a triskelion although the top border is more like 180 degrees than 120. I have uploaded a cropped Google Map to imgur showing the area [2]. The town of Kenema is in the southwest corner. Guinea is the NE section, Sierra Leone is the western part and Liberia is the SE area.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triskelion
[2] http://imgur.com/cOPx4Ty