Ebola - Am I being Stupid? Or.......

Travisthedog

I work in animal health for the government I work primarily with disease and disease epidemiology. Why the fuck is ANYONE who has been in DIRECT contact with Ebola victims allowed to fly straight back into the UK or any other country? I know it's a hard virus to spread so long as you don't go round kissing and licking your dead, but surely a two week quarantine period prior to departure from the hot zone to see if there is any clinical expression of the disease. Why are people, who are working in a region with a virus that is known to have a sub clinical stage being allowed to just wander back to heavily populated cities and airport hubs, and just having their temperatures taken - that's such a pointless exercise.

Emp_Fab

There was a doctor on the radio yesterday basically answering that question.  His response was that putting people into quarantine for weeks - just in case - would severely reduce the number of medical staff volunteering to go out there in the first place and so, on balance, it's more effective to not quarantine.  Let's face it - if I were a nurse, it wouldn't be on my 'list of things I can't wait to do' !

monquixote

I think they consider it OK as people without symptoms aren't infectious

VimFuego

clearly we can't have a quarantine as they need an excuse to get the disease into the country, you cant just release it and expect no one to question how it got here. And obviously we've got to have the disease here else the uptake on the new, profit boosting and mind controlling vaccine won't be high enough. It's all in the data, when you know where to look, it all becomes clear.

anyho, can't sit around all morning talking, got 500m of razor wire to string out.

ToneControl

Emp_Fab said:

There was a doctor on the radio yesterday basically answering that question.  His response was that putting people into quarantine for weeks - just in case - would severely reduce the number of medical staff volunteering to go out there in the first place and so, on balance, it's more effective to not quarantine.  Let's face it - if I were a nurse, it wouldn't be on my 'list of things I can't wait to do' !

sounds like a half-baked answer from the doctor, but  doctors are not immune to being wrong or misunderstanding stuff - especially stuff they are unfamiliar with 

Look at the costs and hassle now - flying the woman back to London, tracking down everyone she flew with

increasing the chances of spreading the illness to make it less inconvenient for medics to volunteer? Volunteers are already risking illness, quarantine would be no big extra hassle I would think

Travisthedog

I think they are being incredibly flippant with the virus

Viruses mutate all the time and very very quickly - they are remarkable, incredibly efficient organisms that adapt to survive.

Airborne is just around the corner!

iseverynamegone

^ this

If it goes airborne it's a whole new chord progression.

VimFuego

yeah well, I've got my hopes up before so I'm not gonna count my zombies till they've risen.

meltedbuzzbox

Travisthedog said:

I think they are being incredibly flippant with the virus

Viruses mutate all the time and very very quickly - they are remarkable, incredibly efficient organisms that adapt to survive.

Airborne is just around the corner!

and I am sure Glaxon smith Kline are rubbing their hands at the thought

underdog

Isn't the chances of it becoming airborne absolutely minute, I forget the reasons why but have read it, seen it on TV and it was posted here by some clever ones too.

Travisthedog

The bird flu strain of the H5N1 virus mutated within 6 months

underdog

Travisthedog;461161" said:

The bird flu strain of the H5N1 virus mutated within 6 months

I think that's the point now you mention it. This strain of Ebola is 97% identical to the strain in the 70s and it would take many changes to become airborne, so at it's current rate many decades or more.

Travisthedog

I don't know I'm not clever enough to know the details but 3% is a gulf in genetic terms with aquatic viruses.

There are herpes viruses that affect one species of carp but not another, the same with oysters. If you sequence them they are practically identical

viz

I didn't know oysters could infect carp?

WezV

The thing that surprised me about this story was the transfer to London.

Okay, so they have the specialist isolation unit there.... But why?

Surely it makes more sense not to transport the infected through a major populous to get them into absolute isolation?

strumjoughlamps

viz said:

I didn't know oysters could infect carp?

we will be having no pearls of wisdom from you..

Travisthedog

They can't!!

But they both suffer from strains of herpesvirus that have minute genetic differences. One strain can be massively pathogenic, another may not even kill or present any symptoms

viz

Sorry for my bass humour etc

roundthebend

So, you quarantine people for two weeks in the country where they might have come into contact with the disease, then let them travel elsewhere? Unless you can be absolutely sure that quarantine was 100% perfectly isolated from the disease, then you'd still run the risk of someone contracting the disease inside quarantine and then travelling with it in incubation.

The only sure fire way to stop a disease spreading is to stop people and animals moving from and to infected areas, and then to put physical measures in place to stop the air and water systems escaping from those areas too. It's just not feasible, so you have to take a compromised approach which also allows the world to carry on to some extent. Basically, you identify the risks and you decide what you can do to minimise it or what you can do to minimise the impact of that risk becoming reality.

FelineGuitars

WezV said:

The thing that surprised me about this story was the transfer to London.

Okay, so they have the specialist isolation unit there.... But why?

Surely it makes more sense not to transport the infected through a major populous to get them into absolute isolation?

This is the most important detail - why let them fly a regular commercial airliner and land at a London Airport and send them on by bus or tube - stupidity at it's finest! (unless as Vim stated they WANT to spread an infection or be sen to have a starting point)

ICBM

Given that Ebola is not contagious until the symptoms develop and that can take three weeks, quarantining people in the country of origin for two weeks is the worst possible idea - it will just maximise the risk of symptoms developing immediately on arrival in the UK.

The mistake made here was that they didn't take her own warnings about her possible exposure seriously enough at Heathrow. If someone *voluntarily* asks to be tested for it having just come from working with victims in west Africa, it's pretty certainly a good idea to do so...