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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday July 16 2019, @08:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the this-is-very-not-good dept.

Ebola Outbreak: First Case Discovered in DRC's Goma City, Home to 2 Million People:

The first case of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo city of Goma has been discovered.

Goma, a lakeside city with a population of two million people, is close to the Rwanda border – more than 354 km (220 miles) south of where the second-largest Ebola outbreak was first detected a year ago.

The haemorrhagic fever has gradually spread south, infecting almost 2,500 people and killing more than 1,600.

The Ministry of Health said the person with the confirmed case was a pastor who became infected during a visit to the city of Butembo, where he interacted with Ebola patients.

He first developed symptoms last week before taking a bus to Goma on Friday.

When he arrived in Goma on Sunday he went to a clinic where he tested positive for Ebola.

Officials have now located the bus driver and 18 other passengers, who will all be vaccinated on Monday.

[...] Ronald Klain, who served as Barack Obama's Ebola czar, said: "Just one case might be just one case. But, if this is multiple cases in Goma, that is a turning point."

Goma has been preparing for the arrival of Ebola for a year, setting up hand-washing stations and making sure mototaxi drivers do not share helmets.

But in more rural areas, where containment efforts have been hindered by mistrust of health officials and militia violence, the virus has been hard to contain and the number of new cases has spiked.

Also at
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-48985689
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/07/vaccinations-ebola-dr-congo-city-goma-190715111221895.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/ebola-spread-east-congo-s-goma-massively-raises-risk-n1030066


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  • (Score: 5, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @09:11AM (14 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @09:11AM (#867470)

    Fear porn

    Go there and catch the virus. Based on what you say, you have 85% chances to stay alive. Deal?

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  • (Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @09:23AM (13 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @09:23AM (#867472)

    85% chance of symptoms inadequate to justify a trip to the doctor, not staying alive. I mean I've had food poisoning that I'm sure could have killed me via dehydration if I hadn't been in an air conditioned home with plenty of access to water and sanitation.

    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @09:47AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @09:47AM (#867477)

      85% chance of symptoms inadequate to justify a trip to the doctor

      Yes, including bleeding from your mouth and asshole. For some, these are both the same.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @11:00AM (10 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @11:00AM (#867493)

      85% chance of symptoms inadequate to justify a trip to the doctor...

      Ah, but which strain?
      The one they get twitchy about has something like a 90% fatality rate, if you're happy about the idea of catching a.random.strain.of.ebola and thinking you'll survive, you must also like doing shit like playing russian roulette with a revolver with only one empty chamber then...

      • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @11:07AM (9 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @11:07AM (#867495)

        The point is that is a 90% fatality rate of people who are already sick enough to go to the hospital... There is some strong selecting bias going on behind that number. When they check for Ebola antibodies something like 10% the population in Africa tests positive, indicating they were previously exposed but didn't come down with the "classical" symptoms.

        So in the DRC (pop 80 million) perhaps 8 million have been exposed and lets be generous and say 100k have died... So the real mortality rate is more like 1/80.

        • (Score: 2) by epitaxial on Tuesday July 16 2019, @12:03PM (3 children)

          by epitaxial (3165) on Tuesday July 16 2019, @12:03PM (#867505)

          You sir are an autist of the first order.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @12:21PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @12:21PM (#867511)

            Common sense is "autist" now?

          • (Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday July 16 2019, @02:09PM (1 child)

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 16 2019, @02:09PM (#867556) Journal
            Funny how these accusations revolve around outgroup membership. First, it was the gays, now it's the autists. You must be a Republican.
            • (Score: 2) by epitaxial on Tuesday July 16 2019, @04:38PM

              by epitaxial (3165) on Tuesday July 16 2019, @04:38PM (#867601)

              Actually I'm only a Republican in the fiscal sense. I'm liberal socially. So I guess that makes me a Libertarian.

        • (Score: 4, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday July 16 2019, @02:27PM (4 children)

          by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Tuesday July 16 2019, @02:27PM (#867565) Journal

          A lot of people in this thread are confusing rates. Incidence rates don't mean a whole lot in terms of an outbreak, and mortality rates don't mean a whole lot more. Prevalence rates might mean more, and those numbers are not easy to come by as the better rates would show the actual prevalence to the regions where the cases are being reported and not a country population as a whole. Better still is monitoring the exposure to the transmissibility and pathogenicityrates, though there's usually a lot of rubber in those numbers.

          In Ebola we are at least lucky that it appears that the disease isn't transmissible until it is symptomatic - the infectious period begins at the end of the latent period. WHO data as of June [who.int]. In the current outbreak with data over the last three weeks the disease has been fatal in 67% of cases reported, and overall WHO reports that this outbreak's fatality rate is around 50%. So get it and flip a coin if you live or die. Those aren't good numbers.

          As to transmissibility and pathogenicity, one study from 2016 [nih.gov] puts the Secondary Attack Rate at 12.5% ranging from 8%-16% for household members. For nurses it is estimated at 48% with a range from 25%-70%, expected to be higher because nurses must deal with bodily fluids where household members may or may not.

          So yes, not incredibly infectious but still more than enough to be worried about, and for any infection where death is a coin flip is pretty damned serious.

          --
          This sig for rent.
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @02:36PM (3 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @02:36PM (#867569)

            Now the fatality rate is 50%, down from 90%. As they improve surveillance you will see this continue to drop further as more and more less severe cases get included.

            • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday July 16 2019, @05:04PM (2 children)

              by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Tuesday July 16 2019, @05:04PM (#867606) Journal

              Not necessarily. The current fatality rate of this outbreak is 50%.

              It may also be that medicine is able to respond to the disease more effectively and learning how to prolong the life. It may be that populations are getting smarter and responses are getting tighter (for example, in the TFA here it reported they were aware of the bus the patient used and are moving to get the other riders immunized.) Like a lot of mortal infections, knowing how to manage it can be a tremendous multiplier. Keep the body fighting and you may get a survivor on the other side (like a lot of viruses, actually...)

              It may be that this particular strain isn't as lethal. The first recorded outbreak in 1976 in Congo was also the Zaire strain and had 88% lethality, the 1994 Gabon outbreak was only 60%, the 1995 Congo one was 81%, the 2014 Mali was 75%, 2017 Congo 50%, 2018 Congo 61% (source [who.int]), the point being that the fatality rate bounces around even in the same strain.

              As you say, it might also be because surveillance is catching other cases sooner or better distinguishing them from malaria or other conditions.

              --
              This sig for rent.
              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @06:44PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @06:44PM (#867651)

                All those things could also be going on. But we know for certain that only the worst cases have been getting reported.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @11:08PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @11:08PM (#867741)

                > As you say, it might also be because surveillance is catching other cases sooner

                No, that poster isn't factually based. If someone who has had contact gets the vaccine fast enough, their mortality odds drop to about 50% from a > 90% lethality. It's not that surveillance is catching more that would have been survived, it's that surveillance is getting the vaccine to contacted people faster, and improving survival.

                GP AC poster - I think he/she has posted several times here - is utterly incorrect about the nature of the surveillance/survival relationship. The DRC outbreaks this decade have had low mortalities because the vaccine was out. I haven't researched pre-2000 events so can't give info on those, sorry.

                The vaccine doesn't give immunity, but it does dramatically increase survival odds even in post-infection, pre-symptomatic cases.