This is our CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/ebola/situation-summary/index.html
And yes, this is a big deal. Public health emergencies of international concern are a short list consisting of, in their entirety: swine flu ('09 to '10), polio ('14 on), ebola ('13 to '16), Zika ('16), ebola ('19 to '20), Covid ('20 to '23), monkeypox ('22 to '25) and now this [1]. It's one step down from a pandemic emergency (which, to be clear, has not been declared).
(Helpful explainer: https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2....)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_health_emergency_of_int...
It's misanthropic behavior, fueled by their big bunch of various essentialist inferiority/superiority complexes.
Also, the article says surveillance picked up the spread late. I wonder if the US's pulling back from the WHO and other international functions had anything to do with this, it used to make up a big chunk of its resources and staff.
Is that like a general rule, or pure bunk? (I'd probably assume the answer 'depends').
That said I'm quite hopeful, since there is a vaccine for other strains.
1. It could spread airborne;
2. It spread relatively easily. Not quite measles-level of contagiousness but still, pretty good;
3. Unlike something like the flu, there really wasn't any kind of natural resistance. What we now call the modern flu is a descendant of the Spanish flu that killed tends of millions in 1919-1920 in its first outbreak and it becamse less lethal for a variety of reasons; and
4. (This is the big one) It would spread when the carrier was asymptomatic. The flu can also spread asymptomatically but AFAIK it's less common. People with the flu tend to self-isolate showing symptoms.
Still, what's probably most concerning about Covid is the number of people who truly believe it was and is fake. The public health implications of that as well as the societal and psychological impacts is something we're going to be studying for decades to come.
The exact contagion mechanism for hantavirus isn't confirmed. Previously it's been from, say, rat to human. It's believed there was human-to-human transmission with the plague cruise ship of doom but whatever the case, it's simply not as contagious.
Ebola generally requires contact to spread. How it's spread in a lot of these African regions has historically been from funeral rites. Family of the deceased would touch the body and this contact would spread the disease. So while it was quite contagious, it didn't spread airborne (as far as we know). It's also quite lethal, which naturally tends to limit spread. The king of long-dormant viruses is of course HIV.
But at least we aren't dealing with cordyceps [1] so we've got that going for us at least.
[1]: https://thelastofus.fandom.com/wiki/Cordyceps_brain_infectio...
Do you have any other fantasy tales you’d like to tell?
>However WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stressed in a statement it "does not meet the criteria of pandemic emergency" and advised countries against closing their borders.
The WHO language is "a public health emergency of international concern," but not "a pandemic emergency."
But I have no clue how far along vaccines are, and even if they exist how feasible it would be to use in e.g Congo. Similar to how we can treat tuberculosis, yet many people keep dying of it.
But, we'll just throw that in to the story anyway, even though we have no facts either way.
We don't have a tight chain of causation. But we have plenty of facts pointing entirely one way.
We know there was "a critical four-week detection gap between the onset of symptoms of the presumed index case...and the laboratory confirmation of the outbreak" [1]. This has contributed to "significant uncertainties to the true number of infected persons and geographic spread associated with this event at the present time" [2]. And tying all of this back to DOGE, we know USAID's "more than 50 staffers dedicated to outbreak response" were cut to "just six people to handle Ebola, Marburg virus, mpox and bird flu preparedness" [3].
Musk and Trump didn't cause this outbreak. But we would have had a better chance of catching this sooner, and with more precision, if we had those resources there.
[1] https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2...
[2] https://www.who.int/news/item/17-05-2026-epidemic-of-ebola-d...
[3] https://www.spyuganda.com/another-one-us-cuts-aid-to-fight-e...
Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern
https://www.who.int/news/item/17-07-2019-ebola-outbreak-in-t...
> 17 July 2019
(people never seem to look for/check dates any more)
Yeah that was not intentional.
> Pursuant to paragraph 2 of Article 12 - Determination of a public health emergency of international concern, including a pandemic emergency of the International Health Regulations (2005) (IHR), the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), after having consulted the States Parties where the event is known to be currently occurring, is hereby determining that the Ebola disease caused by Bundibugyo virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda constitutes a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), but does not meet the criteria of pandemic emergency, as defined in the IHR.
Why would a search engine turn up a 7 year old reference as the top hit.
Seems like the sort of thing one could end up relying on and dead.
2014 was Ebolavirus proper (Zaire, I believe). This outbreak is this fucker of a chimera [1].
The average commentator on this website, if he or she dies this year, will be more likely to die in a motor vehicle accident or due to the complications of cardiovascular disease, or due to cancer.
If you’re going to spend time worrying, worry about all those things instead. When it comes to infectious diseases, the flu is more likely to kill the people here than hantavirus or Ebola. Make sure to get your flu vaccines.
Adding both those risks together still is a higher risk than before...
