Ebola

In case 1 you have 10% survivors or 1,000 survivors with antibodies to pass on to descendants. If they are carriers then potentially 90% of human population could die.In case 2 you have 99.9% survivors or 999 million survivors with antibodies to pass on to descendants. If they are carriers then potentially 0.1% of human population could die.So case 2 is less worrisome from a population survival point of view.Enjoy

Yes, I should have said ...In case 1 you have 10% survivors or 1,000 survivors with antibodies, ~500 which can pass them on to descendants. If the 1,000 are carriers then potentially 90% of human population could die.Thanks Antibodies are passed from mother to child, not just in the womb but via mother's milk. Once acquired they are there for life. This is one of the ways mammals have an advantage for survival. And I thought I was clear that the potential was there IF they were carriers. Personally I would think that the potential effect on the whole breeding population of a species is a more accurate gauge on how worrisome a disease should be, and this is based on both infection rate and mortality.EnjoyEdited by RAZD, : addedEdited by RAZD, : clrty

Curiously I don't think your link says what you think it says:

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Conclusions. Children of mothers vaccinated against measles and, possibly, rubella have lower concentrations of maternal antibodies and lose protection by maternal antibodies at an earlier age than children of mothers in communities that oppose vaccination. This increases the risk of disease transmission in highly vaccinated populations.

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Artificial antibodies (vaccines) offer less protection than evolved.Further, this study does not compare live virus vaccines to dead or completely artificial vaccines.As someone who has had to have their antibodies replaced due to chemo\cancer treatments I find the argument that all antibodies disappear after a couple of months very curious ... especially when quite an effort was made to "restore" my defenses.A look at other studies shows a discussion of an exponential decline over time, which I would expect absent any (re)infection, but a retained arsenal against future infection.Otherwise we would be revaccinating children every 6 months, which would be rather impractical.Enjoy.

Just to add a little wider perspective to the discussion ... the ecology of disease

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Diseases have always come out of the woods and wildlife and found their way into human populations the plague and malaria are two examples. But emerging diseases have quadrupled in the last half-century, experts say, largely because of increasing human encroachment into habitat, especially in disease hot spots around the globe, mostly in tropical regions. And with modern air travel and a robust market in wildlife trafficking, the potential for a serious outbreak in large population centers is enormous.

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IT’S not just the invasion of intact tropical landscapes that can cause disease. The West Nile virus came to the United States from Africa but spread here because one of its favored hosts is the American robin, which thrives in a world of lawns and agricultural fields. And mosquitoes, which spread the disease, find robins especially appealing. The virus has had an important impact on human health in the United States because it took advantage of species that do well around people, says Marm Kilpatrick, a biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The pivotal role of the robin in West Nile has earned it the title super spreader.

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And Lyme disease, the East Coast scourge, is very much a product of human changes to the environment: the reduction and fragmentation of large contiguous forests. Development chased off predators wolves, foxes, owls and hawks. That has resulted in a fivefold increase in white-footed mice, which are great reservoirs for the Lyme bacteria, probably because they have poor immune systems. And they are terrible groomers. When possums or gray squirrels groom, they remove 90 percent of the larval ticks that spread the disease, while mice kill just half. So mice are producing huge numbers of infected nymphs, says the Lyme disease researcher Richard Ostfeld.

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Dr. Ostfeld has seen two emerging diseases babesiosis and anaplasmosis that affect humans in the ticks he studies, and he has raised the alarm about the possibility of their spread.

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The best way to prevent the next outbreak in humans, specialists say, is with what they call the One Health Initiative a worldwide program, involving more than 600 scientists and other professionals, that advances the idea that human, animal and ecological health are inextricably linked and need to be studied and managed holistically.

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Gosh, an integrated ecological approach ... with potential predictive power based on evolution ...Enjoy.