Ebola For Dummies (And Why It Isn't Going To End The World)
Connor Strange
Co-Editor-in-Chief
Ebola has been the hottest deadly disease on the block recently, and it has everyone a little anxious - especially with the Ebola patients being brought to the U.S. for study and treatment.
A patient was flown to Omaha for treatment, making the apprehension of nearby Nebraska residents even more real.
But it really shouldn’t be.
Ebola isn’t going to become much more than it already is. This outbreak originated in a part of the world ripe for spreading diseases, and it’s going to stay there. Cases in other more developed countries are the result of mistakes or attempts to study the disease. When those cases are discovered, they’re quarantined like nobody’s business and treated as effectively as possible.
That treatment often includes a new experimental drug called brincidofovir. The drug treats several other viruses, and though it isn’t entirely cleared for use against Ebola, it’s had a decent success rate so far.
Because of modern medicine, it isn’t going to cause an epidemic in the first world - even if the disease wasn’t kind of bad at spreading itself.
It’s only transmitted through direct contact with bodily fluids, which can be an issue in countries like Liberia, but not all that much in any developed place. According to the CDC, t’s not air or water borne, and isn’t carried by mosquitoes.
One thing to consider about this most recent outbreak is that it’s much more severe in the countries it has affected than previous epidemics. The ones before were only located in one small area and only affected a few hundred people in 1976 and from 1995 to 2012.
This outbreak is another story. The body count has already reached to nearly 5,000 dead, and probably won’t show a reassuring sign of a finish line anytime soon.
For Africa, it’s a very real problem and the infrastructure in the afflicted countries isn’t stable enough to reliably keep it from spreading. For the United States, it’s very unlikely that anything will happen. So hopefully we can find out a way to reliably cure the disease and get to work on those in western Africa.
