It's now official! The pale horseman has been unleased!




September 2014 – AFRICA – The killer virus is spreading like wildfire, Liberia’s defense minister said on Tuesday he pleaded for UN assistance. A German Ebola expert tells DW the virus must “burn itself out” in that part of the world. His statement might alarm many people. But Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit of the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg told DW that he and his colleagues are losing hope for Sierra Leone and Liberia, two of the countries worst hit by the recent Ebola epidemic. “The right time to get this epidemic under control in these countries has been missed,” he said. That time was May and June. “Now it is too late.” Schmidt-Chanasit expects the virus will “burn itself out” in this part of the world. With other words: It will more or less infect everybody and half of the population – in total about five million people – could die. Stop the virus from spilling over to other countries. Schmidt-Chanasit knows that it is a hard thing to say. He stresses that he doesn’t want international help to stop. Quite the contrary: He demands “massive help.” For Sierra Leone and Liberia, though, he thinks “it is far from reality to bring enough help there to get a grip on the epidemic.” According to the virologist, the most important thing to do now is to prevent the virus from spreading to other countries, “and to help where it is still possible, in Nigeria and Senegal for example.” Moreover, much more money has to be put into evaluating suitable vaccines, he added.



In the headquarters of Welthungerhilfe, a German non-governmental aid organization that is engaged in helping with the Ebola epidemic, Schmidt-Chanasit’s statement causes much contempt. Such declarations “are not very constructive,” a spokeswoman said. Jochen Moninger, Sierra Leone based coordinator of Welthungerhilfe, told DW, Schmidt-Chanasit’s statement is “dangerous and moreover, not correct.” Moninger has been living in Sierra Leone for four years and has experienced the Ebola outbreak there from the beginning. “The measures are beginning to show progress,” he says. “The problem is solvable – the disease can be stemmed. If I had lost hope completely, I would pack my things and take my family out of here,” Moninger adds. Instead, he and his family will stay. In Sierra Leone, the government has ordered a quarantine of 21 days for every household in which an Ebola case occurred. Soldiers and police are guarding these houses preventing anyone who has come into contact with an Ebola patient from leaving. According to Moninger, that is exactly the right thing to do: isolating sick people – should it be necessary, even with military force.

She admits, though, that the situation especially in Liberia is “very intense.” The government is completely outstripped and as soon as a new Ebola treatment center has opened, it is overflowed by patients, she says, adding that Liberia has the highest number of cases and deaths in West Africa with a 60 percent case-fatality rate. The situation is getting worse after 80 health workers, doctors and nurses, have died after contracting the disease. The WHO even expects thousands of new cases of Ebola in Liberia over the next few weeks. –DW

Forgot Sauce

http://theextinctionprotocol./

A virus mutates with every victim. It's an incomplete code. When it can spread most successfully by killing half its victims, we will see what we have here now. Slow transmission. Funerals and medical staff who come into direct contact with the dead or dying.
One of the mutations will ,inevitably, cause a longer incubation time or less immediate death. This will allow the virus to become more successful. Imagine Ebola that doesn't kill for months or years. This is the strategy that HIV and Hepatitis has evolved.
Yes it may be too late to stop the virus. But this doesn't mean it will maintain its kill ratio. The faster a virus kills people the less likely it will infect more people. BUT- If Ebola mutates the ability to spread by a sneeze , for example, we could see it become a pandemic. Especially if can pick up several other mutations like a longer incubation period. A less deadly Ebola may kill a larger total amount of people. The common cold is a virus. It kills WAY more people than Ebola does.
The ability to stop these mutations is directly related to how many new victims the virus has to mutate. This is why this virologist is probably so disappointed.
The only positive here is on an evolutionary scale. A species can get genes from a virus in the same way a virus can get genes from a species. All of us humans have ancient virus genes in us that contribute to our biology. About 5-10 percent of you , 100,000 code strands, are from virus. Look at it as a way of exchanging successful genes with other animals without sex.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsandsoda/2014/08/28/343734184/ebola-is-rapidly-mutating-as-it-spreads-across-west-africa:
For the first time, scientists have been able to follow the spread of an Ebola outbreak almost in real time, by sequencing the virus' genome from people in Sierra Leone.

The findings, published Thursday in the journal Science, offer new insights into how the outbreak started in West Africa and how fast the virus is mutating.

Called a hero by the Sierra Leone government, Dr. Sheik Humarr Khan treated dozens of Ebola patients before catching the disease himself. He died July 29.i
Called a hero by the Sierra Leone government, Dr. Sheik Humarr Khan treated dozens of Ebola patients before catching the disease himself. He died July 29.

Courtesy of Pardis C. Sabeti
Doctor Remembered For Dedication To Fighting Deadly Ebola
An international team of researchers sequenced 99 Ebola genomes, with extremely high accuracy, from 78 people diagnosed with Ebola in Sierra Leone in June.

The Ebola genome is incredibly simple. It has just seven genes. By comparison, we humans have about 20,000 genes.

"In general, these viruses are amazing because they are these tiny things that can do a lot of damage," says Pardis Sabeti, a computational biologist at Harvard University and the lead author of the study.

Hidden inside Ebola's tiny genome, she says, are clues to how the virus spreads among people — and how to stop it.

"As soon as the outbreak happened and was reported in Guinea," she says, "two members of my lab flew out and worked to set up the diagnostics to pick it up in Sierra Leone."

The team helped to find the first Ebola cases in Sierra Leone. They also immediately shipped diagnostic samples from the patients back to the U.S. and started sequencing the viruses' genomes.

"We had 20 people in my lab working around-the-clock," Sabeti says.

Their furious pace paid off. After just a week or so, the team had decoded gene sequences from 99 Ebola viruses. The data offered a treasure-trove of information about the outbreak.

Too strong, too late: A person's immune system eventually gets its act together and mounts a massive attack against Ebola. But in the end, the immune system overreacts and causes huge amounts of collateral damage.
Goats and Soda
How Ebola Kills You: It's Not The Virus
For starters, the data show that the virus is rapidly accumulating new mutations as it spreads through people. "We've found over 250 mutations that are changing in real time as we're watching," Sabeti says.

While moving through the human population in West Africa, she says, the virus has been collecting mutations about twice as quickly as it did while circulating among animals in the past decade or so.

"The more time you give a virus to mutate and the more human-to-human transmission you see," she says, "the more opportunities you give it to fall upon some [mutation] that could make it more easily transmissible or more pathogenic."

A scientist tests a patient's blood for Ebola at the European Mobile Laboratory in Gueckedou, Guinea. The first cases reported in the outbreak occurred in a small village about eight miles outside Gueckedou.
Goats and Soda
Could A 2-Year-Old Boy Be 'Patient Zero' For The Ebola Outbreak?
Sabeti says she doesn't know if that's happening yet. But the rapid change in the virus' genome could weaken the tools researchers have to detect Ebola or, potentially, to treat patients.

Diagnostic tests, experimental vaccines and drugs for Ebola — like the one recently used to treat two American patients — are all based on the gene sequences of the virus, Sabeti says. "If the virus is mutating away from the known sequence, that could be important to how these things work."

The laboratory at the Kenema Government Hospital in Sierra Leone, where scientists test for Ebola in fluid and tissue samples from patients.i
The laboratory at the Kenema Government Hospital in Sierra Leone, where scientists test for Ebola in fluid and tissue samples from patients.

Courstey of Stephen Gire
The new genomic data also indicate that the outbreak started when just one person caught Ebola from an animal. Since then the virus has been spreading through human-to-human transmission — not through humans eating infected bush meat (wild game) as was first thought.

"We're really concerned because a lot of the messaging going around ... is, 'Don't each bush meat; don't eat mango; don't anything that might be in contact with animals,' " she says. "When you see some of those fliers, you're like, 'OK, you just told them not to eat all the main sources of food.' "

So the advice from health officials to avoid bush meat may be doing more harm than good, she says.

Sabeti and the team also compared the Ebola genomes from Sierra Leone with those found in previous outbreaks in Central Africa. Their findings suggest the virus has been circulating around West Africa for about a decade.

"This study is really an impressive tour de force," says virologist Stephen Morse of Columbia University.

But he says he's not surprised the virus is mutating so rapidly.

"We've seen this in a number of infections — SARS for example, influenza and HIV of course," Morse says. "Very often when a new virus is introduced into the human population very suddenly, it will show accelerated rates of evolution."

So should we be concerned that the virus might pick up a mutation that makes it more contagious or deadly?

"That's very hard to say. In most cases, the answer would be 'no,' " Morse says. "But Ebola is obviously a concern and very virulent. I'd say it's too early at this point to speculate on what any mutation or any change, even with rapid evolution, might lead to."

A number of scientists working on the project contracted Ebola while treating patients. "Five of them passed from Ebola," Sabeti says, including Dr. Shiek Humarr Khan. He was Sierra Leone's top virologist and had treated dozens of Ebola patients before catching the virus.

Health workers in Sierra Leone, who talked to NPR in the spring, blamed a lack of proper protective equipment for infections at the government-run hospital in Kenema, where Khan worked.

"The work [treating patients] is just that dangerous," Sabeti says. "Another British nurse at the hospital has just come down with Ebola. You're seeing so many infections going on. It's an extraordinary thing that's going on right now [in Sierra Leone]."

ChiefJusticeFuk: It's now official! The pale horseman has been unleased!

[b]“The right time to get this epidemic under control in these countries has been missed,” he said. That time was May and June. “Now it is too late.” Schmidt-Chanasit expects the virus will “burn itself out” in this part of the world. With other words: It will more or less infect everybody and half of the population – in total about five million people – could die.[/b]

God protect Nigeria I am getting scared oh! Government a beg yield to the demands of the west and give them resources in exchange for drugs oh!

ChiefJusticeFuk:

Stop the virus from spilling over to other countries. Schmidt-Chanasit knows that it is a hard thing to say. He stresses that he doesn’t want international help to stop. Quite the contrary: He demands “massive help.” For Sierra Leone and Liberia, though, he thinks “it is far from reality to bring enough help there to get a grip on the epidemic.” According to the virologist, the most important thing to do now is to prevent the virus from spreading to other countries, “and to help where it is still possible, in Nigeria and Senegal for example.” Moreover, much more money has to be put into evaluating suitable vaccines, he added.

Isn't this reason enough to shut the freaking borders and embassies?

phreakabit:

God protect Nigeria I am getting scared oh! Government a beg yield to the demands of the west and give them resources in exchange for drugs oh!



Isn't this reason enough to shut the freaking borders and embassies?

It is darn too late

Here is a predicted infection curve for Ebola



it's not that ebola is near impossible to stop. it's that the people in Liberia and Sierra Leon are nearly impossible to convince to take the proper precautions. Ebola is actually very containable. The flu is orders of magnitude more difficult to contain. Ebola on the other hand is pretty simple to contain. Don't touch bodily fluids, don't touch corpses of people who had ebola. simple quarantines are extremely effective, they don't even have to be quarantined that far away from people. they don't need air tight rooms or tents or anything like that. a simple rope works just fine so long as both patient and people around adhere to the quarantine rules.
the problem, as with many things in war torn and third world countries, is education. education is almost always the key to many problems.

ChiefJusticeFuk:

It is darn too late

Here is a predicted infection curve for Ebola



it's not that ebola is near impossible to stop. it's that the people in Liberia and Sierra Leon are nearly impossible to convince to take the proper precautions. Ebola is actually very containable. The flu is orders of magnitude more difficult to contain. Ebola on the other hand is pretty simple to contain. Don't touch bodily fluids, don't touch corpses of people who had ebola. simple quarantines are extremely effective, they don't even have to be quarantined that far away from people. they don't need air tight rooms or tents or anything like that. a simple rope works just fine so long as both patient and people around adhere to the quarantine rules.
the problem, as with many things in war torn and third world countries, is education. education is almost always the key to many problems.

Honestly I don't care about them. . . Sorry to say, but they brought it upon themselves leaving dead bodies on the streets and failing to adhere to simple instructions on personal hygeine and precautionary measures. I suggest A joint W.African military coalition protecting the borders of Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana and all other unaffected/uninfested nations right now! God help us!

phreakabit:

Honestly I don't care about them. . . Sorry to say, but they brought it upon themselves leaving dead bodies on the streets and failing to adhere to simple instructions on personal hygeine and precautionary measures. I suggest A joint W.African military coalition protecting the borders of Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana and all other unaffected/uninfested nations right now! God help us!

The healthcare that is present is completely lacking (pre-outbreak there was 1 doctor per 100,000 people. Just imagine that!). There's stories of individuals (and families) going around Monrovia from health center to health center looking for some facility to take their sick person (who they don't know has ebola or not). When you're faced with an uncertainty that any facility can actually take the person, facilities that are understaffed/possibly unsafe for patients, and a 50-80% mortality rate-- you'd sure as sh1t be scared too, and you may not know what to do.
The country needs help.

Yes, there are a lot more people ignorant of the basics of how diseases are spread, but blaming them and somehow acting like they deserve this terrible tragedy for being ignorant is ridiculous. Only a small minority of sick have run away from doctors or avoided treatment, and that is born entirely from a lack of education in societies of unimaginable poverty torn by recent civil wars.
Even then, you would see people absolutely attempting to break out of quarantine and conceal their disease in the first world, people are not rational at all when faced with imminent death while very sick. In fact the person who spread it around Nigeria was an educated official who absolutely should have known better.

in all, I think Nigeria handled the ebola spread better than I expected. we ll get rid of it in no time

Oh God, my heart goes out to the people of Liberia and Sierra Leone, please protect my family in Nigeria and all Nigerians in Jesus name amen. Nigerians, I stand with you all the way from the United States. We stand with you, we will fight this, I love you all!!

ChiefJusticeFuk:

The healthcare that is present is completely lacking (pre-outbreak there was 1 doctor per 100,000 people. Just imagine that!). There's stories of individuals (and families) going around Monrovia from health center to health center looking for some facility to take their sick person (who they don't know has ebola or not). When you're faced with an uncertainty that any facility can actually take the person, facilities that are understaffed/possibly unsafe for patients, and a 50-80% mortality rate-- you'd sure as sh1t be scared too, and you may not know what to do.
The country needs help.

Yes, there are a lot more people ignorant of the basics of how diseases are spread, but blaming them and somehow acting like they deserve this terrible tragedy for being ignorant is ridiculous. Only a small minority of sick have run away from doctors or avoided treatment, and that is born entirely from a lack of education in societies of unimaginable poverty torn by recent civil wars.
Even then, you would see people absolutely attempting to break out of quarantine and conceal their disease in the first world, people are not rational at all when faced with imminent death while very sick. In fact the person who spread it around Nigeria was an educated official who absolutely should have known better.

Let's face it- Liberians are not trainable, they have weak government, they are arrogant and so stubborn. If Nigerians didn't take personal preventive measures and refused to follow WHO guidelines, I can't even begin to imagine what would have happened. Liberians need a real firm PM, not this woman and they need very strong millitary presence, not just medical relief. They find it so difficult to follow simple instructions to save their lives-They've stoned volunteers, they've fled quarantine, Sawyer escaped undetected to naija, they've broken into isolation wards to steal soiled beddings... You can only sensitize a reasonable group of people. Gain real and firm control of Liberians and half the war is won.

Unfortunately, they are close to us but by God's grace help will come their way soon. However, in the light of the mutation rate of this virus, it will do Nigerian government a world of good if they don't allow Liberians to stroll in through our borders again because they may be carrying a deadly version of the virus.

candy:
Unfortunately, they are close to us but by God's grace help will come their way soon. However, in the light of the mutation rate of this virus, it will do Nigerian government a world of good if they don't allow Liberians to stroll in through our borders again because they may be carrying a deadly version of the virus.

Judging by this map we are relatively safe somewhat as
Far as land borders are concerned. . Still need to tighten up though. We should however watch our waterways keenly, that's where we are most vulnerable.

There is palpable fears that Ebola "has gone airborne". God save us.