First Ebola Case to hit the US

What I worry about more than the virus itself is the social unrest that it causes - because that greatly exacerbates the harm caused by this disease. I've read news reports that people in African countries are superstitiously avoiding, or worse, attacking, people from areas with residents/family members/etc who came down with, and recovered from, ebola. Whole tribes/groups are refusing to do business with/complete transactions with groups they had before and it's causing further economic harm than just the loss of workers. Families will perish from lack of food because of lack of trade, there will more be uprisings and revolts, all because people don't understand the disease and react emotionally.

And this pattern will repeat because 1.) we aren't proactive enough, 2.) we let far too much misinformation from anti-vaxxers go unchallenged and un-denounced leading to our current woefully dangerous levels of un-vaccinated population causing a lack of effective herd immunity.

Ebola Author Says Outbreak Is 'Part of a Pattern' of Emerging, Deadly Diseases
By Andrew Freedman
1 day ago

David Quammen is a science writer who has spent years traveling the globe, researching emerging viruses and the people who study them.

These viruses are officially known as zoonotic viruses , as they live in an animal host and occasionally jump to, or "spill over" into human beings. Quammen's 2012 book on the subject, Spillover, won an award from the National Association of Science Writers, and was shortlisted for three others.

He is the author of the timely forthcoming book: Ebola: The Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus.

Mashable spoke with him by phone from his home in Bozeman, Montana, to get his thoughts on the ongoing Ebola outbreak.

This article is 7 days old, and I've not heard of any new cases in Spain. I wanted to share it for the paragraph below, more than anything.
Ebola Diagnosed in More Health Care Workers
Virus sickens a nurse's assistant attending to an Ebola patient in Spain
October 7, 2014 |By Dina Fine Maron

Ebola is not an airborne infection and the World Health Organization has taken pains to point out that “spread of the virus via coughing or sneezing is rare, if it happens at all.” The virus is transmitted via direct physical contact with infected bodily fluids, the most infectious being blood, feces and vomit. <snip> There is no indication that the pathogen is mutating to become more harmful. Its genetic makeup has remained stable—changing by only a half of a percent—since the beginning of the outbreak, CDC Director Tom Friedman said today in a press conference.

Kudos to this FOX News anchor for reporting the news as it should be. I applaud this man!

My son keeps coming home every day with stories from his friends that there are "25 cases in the US, including ones here in CO" and I have to carefully explain what's really going on. It's frustrating.

Shep Smith's rejoinder to "irresponsible" Ebola coverage:



Video and story via mashable.com/2014/10/15/fox-news-shep-smith-ebola/

homeagain, to follow up with your post, yes it certainly sounds like they did not have proper equipment, nor followed best practices/guidelines for isolating and treating a highly infectious patient. Sadly, that doesn't surprise me - we don't deal with diseases like ebola, those that are quarantined in Biosafety Level 4 (BSL4) units for research, here routinely so we aren't going to be proactive, but reactive. We are arrogant, thinking things like this could never happen here, underfunded for necessary PPE/equipment in all hospitals, and general health care workers under-trained for critical situations like this.

That nurse who treated Duncan, though she had no symptoms, should not have flown anywhere until the 21 day incubation period was up. Was that her fault for choosing to go even though she probably knew, or did she not get instructions explicitly spelling that out and was ignorant of the danger she posed?

CDC: Nurse Infected With Ebola Shouldn't Have Flown to Cleveland

Dallas Nurses Cite Horrifying Conditions in Ebola Care

I sincerely hope that there is a thorough investigation, that those who should have known better are held accountable, and that procedures are put in place across the country to prevent this sloppy and needless risk from happening again. If this were an airborne virus that was highly pathogenic, we'd be screwed.

That being said, we have a ways to go with this outbreak; athough, if this model is validated, then it appears that it will be less severe than the WHO is currently predicting.
This Math Model Is Predicting the Ebola Outbreak with Incredible Accuracy
Written by Michael Byrne
October 14, 2014

Modeling how disease spreads early in an outbreak is a major challenge as sample sizes remain low and variables high. But a recently-developed method of making short-term outbreak projections called the IDEA model has shown promise, and is even doing an excellent job of tracking the current Ebola outbreak.

"If validated, the implications of such a finding may be profound," wrote the model's creators in an open-access 2013 paper in PLOS One, "e.g., the ability to project, with a high degree of accuracy, the final size and duration of a seasonal influenza outbreak within 2 weeks of onset."

The graph above shows how the model is faring with the current Ebola outbreak. So far, it's nearly perfect. If the IDEA model continues to predict the epidemic with the same accuracy, we can expect Ebola to start burning out in December, with a total of 14,000 cases. Currently, according to the CDC there are or have been 8,400.