The Washington Post is reporting that the Center for Disease Control's director is warning that the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Ebola outbreak may not be containable. The ongoing conflicts in the region might ensure that the disease becomes entrenched instead of coming under control. If it becomes endemic to the province then it will become impossible to trace contacts, stop transmission chains, and contain the outbreak. Apparently 60% to 80% of the newly-confirmed cases have no known epidemiological link to prior cases, indicating loss of control and fewer options for prevention or treatment. High level political attention is becoming needed at this point for there to be a solution.
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CDC Director Warns that Congo’s Ebola Outbreak may not be Containable
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(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 10 2018, @04:14PM (15 children)
Drop a nuke on the Congo.
It will contain the outbreak there, and solve a lot of other problems.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 10 2018, @04:34PM (13 children)
Alright then, Mr. Tommy Troll. Please explain how a nuke is going to wipe out a virus. You do realize that Chernobyl today provides homes to every kind of wildlife that has ever thrived in the region? Well - except maybe the dinosaurs, mastodons, and sabre toothed tigers. Or, the unicorns, dragons, and wyverns. For that matter, where do you hail from?
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 10 2018, @04:40PM (4 children)
Well, that's not true. There is a solution to containing it.
"No people, no problem" —Stalin. (close enough)
Somebody should nuke this crap website.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 10 2018, @05:15PM (2 children)
it's also funny how short the key is.
(Score: 3, Funny) by edIII on Saturday November 10 2018, @08:02PM (1 child)
1.353708655×10¹⁶ is short?
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 10 2018, @09:27PM
Actually, I think that's a float.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 10 2018, @08:13PM
Somebody should nuke your crappy toy internet service provider.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by edIII on Sunday November 11 2018, @12:39AM (3 children)
Not supporting the troll, but dropping the nuke could make it extremely difficult for the virus to propagate. It doesn't do well outside of the human body, especially in firestorm conditions.
Quite a number of victims will be outright vaporized, which includes the virus. The overall effect is a bit more extreme than wiping down surfaces with alcohol. At the outer edges of the blast zone however, you will have an increasing number of survivors, in varying degrees of distress, and this will include a lot of dead bodies.
The only real valid question is how does the nuke affect the ability of the virus to spread? It's a real shit question to have to answer, but in all seriousness, if it looks like it is escaping containment and you start having cases in major cities worldwide, it's a question we may want answered. Especially if the DNC proves that it can barely handle being a functional government, much less one capable of dealing with a major threat like Ebola.
Personally, if we get to the point where it is easier and safer to wipe out infected populations by the city, then nukes are a bad idea anyway. Neutron bombs and conventional MOABS might be better. Still, nothing that doesn't kill the human beings and Ebola instantly, risks far worse spreading through dead bodies and carrion animals that will be eating them.
They may not be trolling, and that's the only idea that they have for defeating a virus that has been pumped up by Hollywood as the virus to make all of our post apocalyptic fears come true.
Seriously, if I saw CCTV cameras in Norway showing Aliens (the ones from the movie Aliens), wreaking havoc, those cute blonds be damned. Drop the nuke :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday November 11 2018, @11:12AM
It also depends on the form of the nuke. Use a sloika (layer cake) design with Lithium-6 deuteride and sodium so you're producing Na-24 which has a short half-life while producing a ton of gammas. So you light one of those off and a few days later you can walk in and the area will be sterilised, no trace of ebola left.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 11 2018, @01:11PM
Ebola is a major hazard, but not necessarily a credible risk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard#Risk [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @11:47AM
It wants you to imagine a mirror world where McCain won instead of Obama, and the DNC was in control of congress instead of the RNC.
Or y'know, Clinton won, but otherwise the same as the past 2 years of Trump.
Hint for you: It will be just as fucking retarded as the tantrums thrown because 'Black Obama' was in charge, and it will have little to no effect on the continuing mismanagement of the Not So United States of America.
Really, every day that passes, I hope just a little more for it all to burn right down. God must agree with me after all the fires.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday November 11 2018, @05:59AM (3 children)
I'm not going to defend nuking innocent people here, but the key phrase is "contain the outbreak" which is a far weaker thing than wiping out Ebola. Second, kill the carriers and anyone they could spread the disease to, then that would indeed contain the outbreak.
To the AC who apparently thinks that nuking a bunch of innocent people is a viable solution to disease containment - what happens when the disease appears again? As Runaway noted, containing one outbreak is a far cry from eliminating the disease. So the next time Ebola appears, there will be instant mass panic. Not because Ebola is a fearsome disease, but because there are trigger-happy goons with nukes who have already shown they'll use them. So instead of an outbreak which can be contained with normal, humane methods, we would start with the worst scenario, uncontrolled, massive immigration of infected populations to the rest of Africa. How many nukes will it take then to "contain the outbreak"? Hint: a lot more than one.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday November 11 2018, @06:30AM (2 children)
I may not have the ebola life cycle straight in my mind - but doesn't it propagate in other simians? So, basically, we would have to wipe out all the simians in Africa, along with all the humans - AND whatever else the virus is able to infect. In other words, a true scorched earth, to get the last virus. Except, as you note, so long as a couple of infected humans remain, the disease is portable. Half a dozen refugees escape to Australia, another dozen to Asia, half a dozen more to Europe. And, of course, the US will take in another dozen. To destroy the virus, you have to burn Africa to the ground, all at one go, before any refugees take flight. No more trees, birds, large or small mammals, snakes, or anything.
In short, that legendary nuclear winter would follow soon after. The earth itself would be uninhabitable, most likely.
And then, irony of ironies, if we had any people in space, they eventually come back to find - THE EBOLA SURVIVED SOMEHOW!!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday November 11 2018, @01:48PM
If you were trying to eliminate the disease completely via nukes, sure. But Ebola is not endemic to humans, thus, there is a far lower threshold to containing an outbreak of Ebola (at least for the first time, until the target population figures out that nukes might be used in the future) than there is to eradicate it in the wild.
They'd still need to survive long enough to spread it to others. I think it's possible to make that extremely unlikely with liberal application of nukes.
Just the parts that Ebola has shown up at. Maybe a third to half a billion people. Of course, we could just develop an easy to produce vaccine that would render the whole thing a minor health issue, but what would be the fun in that?
(Score: 3, Informative) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday November 12 2018, @06:26PM
Dunno if anyone else replied, but not only simians. Bats, also. [cdc.gov]
And for anyone looking for why Ebola is so hard to fight, it isn't the virus. Frontline [pbs.org] took a look at the Sierra Leone outbreak in 2014. (Which they also think they traced back to a patient zero and a bat.) Basically, it took the virus migrating to the United States for affirmative and direct international action to be taken.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday November 11 2018, @07:25AM
To handle an Outbreak [youtube.com]? Not exactly a nuke, but close.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 10 2018, @04:16PM (2 children)
"The outbreak is taking place in a part of Congo that is an active war zone. Dozens of armed militias operate in the area, attacking government outposts and civilians, complicating the work of Ebola response teams and putting their security at risk."
If those troops somehow contracted Ebola, they would become a lot more cooperative or at least less of a problem.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 10 2018, @04:44PM
> If those troops somehow contracted Ebola, they would become a lot more cooperative or at least less of a problem.
Uh. No? That's contagion. They'd be much less cooperative and much more dead, and then their extremely hazardous remains would be a much much greater problem.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Kilo110 on Saturday November 10 2018, @05:10PM
until they start raping babies to cure themselves
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_cleansing_myth [wikipedia.org]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 10 2018, @04:30PM
Drop a nuke on the Congo.
It will contain the outbreak there, and solve a lot of other problems.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 10 2018, @04:31PM (2 children)
So - it might beat us to Mars? Europa? Alpha Centauri? Dayumn - all of our evolution, and we're going to be beaten by a damned virus!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 10 2018, @05:32PM (1 child)
Do we have the ability to send large numbers of people to those places?
Nope, so it may not be possible to contain the outbreak. One of the benefits of AI cars would be that in extreme situations like a highly contagious outbreak, people wouldn't need to go out and interact with each other. Items could be sterilized at each step of the process the box leaving the robotic warehouse, the box coming into somebody's home, the contents of the box via microwaving.
It might not completely stop an outbreak, but it would likely contain it to a small percentage of the population. Most viruses that are dangerous like that tend not to survive very long outside the body and in cases like this where there's such difficulty in spreading, they'd likely die off naturally in a matter of a few weeks.
However, in the current state of society, it's hard to get everybody to stay indoors away from other people for long enough for such contagious diseases to wipe themselves out by running out of uninfected hosts.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by legont on Sunday November 11 2018, @12:44AM
That's simply because they did not kill us - the observers - yet. Nobody's left to report more robust ones.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 10 2018, @04:46PM (8 children)
Why contain it?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 10 2018, @05:27PM
For easier warehousing, and eventual export, most likely.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 10 2018, @05:36PM (1 child)
It's a bit like a forest fire. It's not generally possible to put the entire thing out, so firefighters focus on containing it so that it runs out of fuel and eventually goes out on its own. We can do that because the forest itself is something that can be reforested and forest fires get to be massive relatively quickly. Contrast that to how we handled buildings that are on fire. Most of the time, the firefighters try to put it out as soon as it can safely be done. Occasionally, the might let the thing just burn down and contain it, but frequently, they can extinguish it.
Trying to put the disease down, would require more or less roaming bands of death squads murdering everybody that's either contracted it or been exposed to it. Yes, it would probably be effective, so long as proper procedures are followed for decontaminating the death squads and disposing of the remains, but few people would suggest that this is an acceptable means of dealing with people.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by black6host on Saturday November 10 2018, @09:44PM
If the groups involved in the conflict decide that killing everyone on sight is better than spreading Ebola through their midst you just might get your roaming death squads. I doubt they're prepared to deal with this outbreak in a medically sound way. This may all lead to increased violence and death. It's a sad situation and I'm glad I don't live there. I feel for those who do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 10 2018, @06:09PM (4 children)
I know right?? Better to let it spread and hopefully wipe out all the racist idiotsbin the world.
Can we engineer viruses to attack certain mental states?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by EvilSS on Saturday November 10 2018, @06:16PM (3 children)
Wait, you didn't thing it was going to work the other way 'round did you?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 10 2018, @06:29PM (1 child)
So being not-racist is liberal huh? Good to know, go plan your little civil war. It'll suck, but at the end maybe we will be rid of the Nazi stain on humanity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 11 2018, @03:34AM
We should study the Russian Revolution. There may be another period of history coming up where international working class has a credible chance at taking democratic control of the means of production and expropriating the wealth of the bourgeoisie.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Monday November 12 2018, @02:49PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 10 2018, @05:29PM
better make that "put" on cobalt a "call" then?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 10 2018, @05:58PM (2 children)
The survivors will be more resistant. Just like bacteria to antibiotics. Keeping everybody alive and letting them breed makes us all weak.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 10 2018, @07:38PM (1 child)
after all, the native americans didn't bother containing outbreaks of small pox in europe, why should modern americans care about ebola in africa?
(Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Sunday November 11 2018, @01:08AM
The fallacy is strong in this one.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 10 2018, @10:08PM (4 children)
If they cant get any epidemiological links, perhaps its some other infection with similar symptoms like
typhoid, malaria, meningitis, or the flu? Its not like they are using accurate blood tests out in these villages (assuming an accurate test does even exist).
(Score: 4, Informative) by Spook brat on Sunday November 11 2018, @06:05AM (2 children)
From the CDC page on Ebola: [cdc.gov]
Most of the early symptoms can be easily confused with the flu and other diseases; but the open, weeping sores in late infection are a dead giveaway. It may be too late at that point, unfortunately.
The diagnosis page [cdc.gov] suggests that a critical part of diagnosis for Ebola is knowing that the patient has been exposed:
As a result, not knowing that the patient has been exposed makes it hard to justify taking blood samples and doing expensive blood work to check for ebola. This leads to a false diagnosis, patient death, and a new outbreak that must be contained, if possible.
Accurate blood tests do exist, they are effective as early as the onset of fever symptoms, and the large overlap with other similar clusters of symptoms means that it's prohibitive to use the blood test unless it can be justified with epidemiology. Which they can't do if the patient doesn't know that the warlord whose land they just bribed their way through was manning the checkpoints with ebola-positive guards. They find out that it's not meningitis/flu/malaria when the patient's skin starts liquifying, but that's not a preferred method for discovering that the original diagnosis was a false negative for ebola.
Travel the galaxy! Meet fascinating life forms... And kill them [schlockmercenary.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 11 2018, @06:41PM (1 child)
I would have used the WHO page since those definitions would apply here, but it sounds like you agree with me anyway.
(Score: 2) by Spook brat on Monday November 12 2018, @12:25PM
Knock yourself out. [who.int] I don't find the WHO website anywhere near as useful for quick reference; it's poorly organized, and when I drilled down to a diagnostics page I was met with a PDF about blood tests. Around here linking directly to PDFs is frowned upon.
Of course, I'm indulging your preference for WHO despite the fact that the nature of Ebola doesn't change depending on where in the world it occurs; I'm fairly certain that its symptoms are the same whether it's contracted in the Congo or the Carolinas. And assuming that you're not just trolling...
<img src="notSureIf.png">
Travel the galaxy! Meet fascinating life forms... And kill them [schlockmercenary.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 11 2018, @01:07PM
Not knowing everything is not the same as not knowing anything.
Reread this part again: