Ebola

In a few more weeks, Obama will have created Ebola to scare Americans away from Kenya where his official birth certificate is kept.

If this were the case, it would show up in the larger population, not just in healthcare workers. If the virus has gone airborne or if asymptomatic carriers became infectious, you would be seeing entire populations dying off. So far, the spread is consistent with the known modes of transmission which are bodily fluids from symptomatic patients.

I am not in the know, but that is what I would suspect as well. Double gloving is usually used to protect against a tear in the outer glove, or unexpected contamination of the outer glove. I use double gloving when handling radioactive samples so that if something drips on the outer glove I can get rid of it quickly and still be protected. Virulence usually refers more to the lethality or the damage that a pathogen does instead of how easily it is trasmitted, although the terms can intermingle a bit. Grammar Nazi moment over . . .I wouldn't be surprised to see a virus that is a bit hardier in terms of surviving in the environment a bit longer since this would help transmit the disease in bats. However, I wouldn't expect to see resistance to disinfectants since the virus has become highly evolved in the absence of disinfectants. On top of that, most of the spread has been outside of hospitals in third world nations where disinfectants are rarely found.

Which of these is more worrisome:1. A disease with a 90% mortality rate that infects 10,000 people.2. A disease with a 0.1% mortality rate that infects 1 billion people.

I was under the impression that such diseases as measles had an R0>2, sometimes in the double digits. Is this not the case?

If that outbreak is confined to 10,000, which is more worrisome?

10,000 people is not the 6 billion person human population. In this scenario, you would have 9,000 dead. In this scenario, you have 1 million dead which is several orders of magnitude higher than scenario 1. I would personally think that 1 million dead is more worrisome than 9,000 dead.What I am trying to contrast is the mortality rate vs. the rate of infection.

Someone said that they were more worried about the mortality rate than they were the rate of transmission. I was trying to contrast the two, showing that a virus with a much lower mortality rate but higher rate of transmission will cause more deaths.

It also depends on who feels threatened. WHO reported that over 400,000 people died from malaria in 2012 alone, and possibly as many as 800,000. They considered that a good year."About 3.4 billion people — half of the world's population — are at risk of malaria. In 2012, there were about 207 million malaria cases (with an uncertainty range of 135 million to 287 million) and an estimated 627 000 malaria deaths (with an uncertainty range of 473 000 to 789 000). Increased prevention and control measures have led to a reduction in malaria mortality rates by 42% globally since 2000 and by 49% in the WHO African Region."
Malaria More people die of malaria every year than have died from Ebola in all of the modern age.

Any type of inheritance would much more likely involve other immune proteins (e.g. HLA markers) or the proteins in the host cell that the virus interacts with (e.g. CRC4/5 mutants and HIV resistance).Other than that, you inherit the entire suite of antibody gene segments from your parents. You hacked these gene segments up during B-cell maturation to make your own library of antibodies. You don't inherit your mother's B-cells which is what you would need to pass on any longer term immunity.

As mentioned earlier, vaccines most often present non-infectious antigens to your immune system. B-cells are the antibody factories. Each B-cell has one antibody that it makes. If an antigen binds to that antibody on the surface of the B-cell, then that B-cell is told to divide a whole bunch and start pumping out that antibody. Different types of antibodies offer short and long term immunity, as well as immunity in different parts of the body (blood vs. mucous membranes). This is called active immunization.Some of the recent Ebola treatments are purified antibodies from humans that have been infected, or genetically modified mouse antibodies that have been raised against the virus. These can bridge the gap between nasty initial infection and the time frame that a person can mount their own immune response. This is called passive immunization, and is similar to what mothers supply for their newborns.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

I should have been more clear, then. What I meant to compare was the total number infected in a specific outbreak.

Decontaminating with something as simple as 70% ethanol before attempting to remove the gloves would seem to be the safest of all. Although I wouldn't recommend it, after a good decon with alcohol, you could probably remove the gloves with your teeth and not have to worry about it.

As we all know, people choose to be homeless in the US because they prefer the fresh air and also prefer the taste of 3 day old garbage to fresh produce.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

That was the original claim, Jon.How is the rate of disease transmission different?