God I hope and I have a child on the Autism spectrum...Originally Posted by Eielson
God I hope and I have a child on the Autism spectrum...
The thing about antibiotic resistance is that in the worst case we go back to the world our great grandparents experienced before antibiotics were discovered. Given, that could be pretty bad...
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If God wanted Men to look women in the eyes, He wouldnt have gave em Boobs !
Uh No we dont, Those diseases wont revert back to Preantibotic days . they have mutated and will destroy ya .
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If God wanted Men to look women in the eyes, He wouldnt have gave em Boobs !
I might ruffle some feathers here, but evolutionarily speaking, the world is thought to be about 4,600,000,000 years old, while homo sapiens (not exactly humans as we know them even) are thought to be about 200,000 years old. As this picture shows, in the timeline of life, we're just a tiny blip at the end that you can barely see. There is certainly some wiggle room there, but prokaryotes are clearly much older than humans, and they evolve much quicker.
Anyway, even if you scrap that whole first paragraph, humans haven't been around THAT long. Surviving a few thousand years doesn't make us indestructable. I was just showing how the Spanish Flu killed World War type numbers (sidenote: a huge number of deaths in WWI were actually infectious disease rather than the wounds themself), and the Black Plague wiped out 30-60% of the world's population. That's how bad it's been, and it can certainly get worse. But yes, it is hard to get the perfect storm. Killing the host (humans) is truly a mistake for pathogens. Their real goal is to live off us, so the ideal pathogens keep us mostly healthy, but feed off of us and use us as protection. Ebola is clumsy in that regard, so it's very difficult for a pathogen like it that quickly kills to sweep too far across the world. It's a lot easier for a disease like an STD that goes undetected for a while to spread to millions of people.
Last edited by Eielson; 10/2/2014 at 11:41 PM.
Medically speaking, we know a lot more about diseases now, so we wouldn't head back into the dark ages. We'd still be pretty good from the preventative side, but we'd have a lot harder time killing it. When's the last time you needed an antibiotic to live? It's not that often in our day to day live that a bacterial infection will kill us even without antibiotics. They're just really nice to have. Things like surgery could become a huge luxury, though. Medical equipment could easily get contaminated with antibiotic resistant bacteria, so you may be faced with questions like; will I repair my ACL despite the 10% chance of getting a life-threatening infection, or will I limp around the rest of my life? Also, if you cut up real bad in a car wreck or something, you're odds of survival won't be nearly as high as they were in the golden age of antibiotics.
On the bright side, there are still some antibiotics that can be discovered. The easy ones have been discovered, though, so discovering new ones will cost at least hundreds of millions of dollars (or more). When we had so many antibiotics in circulation, it wasn't worth investing that money. Recently we've caught on, but it takes about 30 years to get an antibiotic through all it's testing and things of that nature, so we probably won't see one for a while. Desperate times could speed that up, though. There are also some alternative therapies that might work like bacteriophage therapy. That was a big deal in research until antibiotics caught on. We stopped researching it at that time, but we've since resumed. I think Russia continued looking into bacteriophages, so they might have a pretty big head start if we can swallow our American pride.
They've mutated to be resistant to antibiotics. How is that worse than the situations we had before antibiotics?
Bacteria was a major killer back then. These antibiotic resistant strains just bring us back to those days.
I don't doubt any of that. Some day we'll have an extinction event. But on a human time scale 200,000 years is a long time. The probability of that extinction even happening in our lifetime is very slim - unless we nuke ourselves there which I think is inevitable. (I don't see us living with nukes for 1000 more years and I don't see that that genie could ever be put back in the bottle. Ending of the Cold War did not end that threat.)
In the larger picture we're in agreement. Humans probably won't survive as a species for a billion years. But I'm talking about on a human timescale because that is what we're talking about when we discuss the potential of this Ebola virus mutating to a form that could be airborne. As with any probability, it could happen but if it were as predictable as some have stated it probably would have happened sometime in the last few hundred thousand years.
All that said, as I stated earlier, we are in a different world than 10,000 years ago or even 200 years ago. We have a higher population density. We have a lot more travel that happens almost instantaneous. Those things do increase the odds of such a mutation. But the idea that such a mutation is inevitable is false. Bird flu has been widespread throughout much of the world and has the opportunity to mutate for years but it hasn't yet mutated to a form that can be passed from human to human. It's certainly not inevitable that ebola will mutate to be transmissible via airborne particles.
not to worry! we have Obamacare, and are now full members of the Brave New World. Golly jeepers!
Put a lid on it! Kiss it goodbye. We gave it away, and apparently thought it made sense to do so.
Perhaps I misunderstood your main point. I absolutely agree in thinking that ebola has an incredibly low likelihood of mutating into a highly infectious disease, and I don't think there is major reason for alarm yet. I just don't want anywhere near that nasty thing.
Agree. I doubt there will be a MAJOR outbreak but there will be more cases
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If God wanted Men to look women in the eyes, He wouldnt have gave em Boobs !
Heh, lasted all the way to post #49 before Obamacare got in the mix...
Originally Posted by RUSH LIMBAUGH is my clone!
not to worry! we have Obamacare, and are now full members of the Brave New World. Golly jeepers!Don't you just LOVE it? It's so effing smart!Heh, lasted all the way to post #49 before Obamacare got in the mix...
Put a lid on it! Kiss it goodbye. We gave it away, and apparently thought it made sense to do so.
It's ironic you come to this particular thread to make that point. If there is anything outside the military that emphasizes the need for government it is in the area of public health during a infectious disease crisis.
We certainly can't count on people to man up and pay for this out of their own self interest. It's simply impossible for someone to invest his own money to protect himself. Everyone has a vested interest in a strong public health system which can track, test, and isolate others.
The health insurance angle is interesting too. I imagine the care of an Ebola patient incurs a huge cost and I'd imagine a large percentage of that is aimed at protecting the public rather than the sick individual. If you or I get sick out of no fault of our own, is it our responsibility to bear that burden?
If that burden gets too much, people may choose not to seek medical care or seek alternatives where the expensive precautions are not taken. That would in turn cause a public health disaster.
If there's ever a time short of war where we have to put individualism aside and recognize that we're all in this together, it is a time like this.
Last edited by jkjsooner; 10/5/2014 at 01:27 AM.
Jkj; looks like we can agree that the government's job in this situation with a life threatening communicable disease is to take appropriate action, to protect and defend the American public.
Put a lid on it! Kiss it goodbye. We gave it away, and apparently thought it made sense to do so.
Something has changed.
In the first couple of Ebola outbreaks it was quickly contained.
In this latest outbreak it appears to be able to get past whatever protocols were effective in those instances or at least it is displaying a greater resiliency than previously shown.
It was contained in Nigeria. Sierra Leone and Libera weren'tin as good of a position to do it with as much unrest and lack of infrastructure as they have
So I'm listening to a Doctor on some show yesterday trying to get across how hard it is to catch Ebola and tells the story that back in 1996, somebody is in a hospital in one of these affected countries for 19 days before anybody came up with the diagnosis he had Ebola. 300+ people had direct contact with the person and nobody caught it.
I wonder if the rate of catching it from being in direct contact has changed now vs what it was in 1996? There is certainly a lot of "excitement" right now so it's hard to get an idea from all of the fog on what the infection rate currently is at this time.
Ebola has only been around since 1960's or 1970's or something like that? Seems like that is fairly short time wise in it's evolutionary development.
Also, where is this dang thing hiding out at between these outbreaks????
Think the 1st was in 76 Most ever one of the out breaks were in Africa. Its deadly but not that easy to catch
Mostly gonna get those whit out good hygiene / Medical services
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If God wanted Men to look women in the eyes, He wouldnt have gave em Boobs !
There are a couple of differences here. These countries that are currently impacted don't have the experience with Ebola that they do in places like Uganda and Congo. In addition, this occurred in more heavily populated areas.
The take away I get from this (and I'm obviously no expert) is that you have to get on top of these outbreaks. An outbreak can be contained but once 1000 people get it in populated areas it's almost too late.
I'm afraid that if some of the predictions of hundreds of thousands of victims in the coming months comes true, we'll inevitably have small outbreaks in the rest of the world pop up. We may contain each one but with so many people infected we'll just keep having new ones pop up.
I'm all for putting on travel restrictions but I'm just not sure how effective they would be. We could restrict access to passport holders of those countries but there are so many foreigners (Americans, Europeans, etc.) going in and out of those areas. Since many of those are needed to help contain the spread of the virus, if we stopped reentry of those people into the U.S. those countries (who need the outside help) may just stop stamping the passports of aid workers. If you take a hard line it might just backfire.
It also reminds me of the mad cow disease episodes. We banned English beef for a time but then later mad cow popped up the the U.S. Then we tried to explain to others that it was an isolated incident and please don't stop buying our beef. Well, we sort of set the precedent.
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