Ebola - on viruses, outbreaks, and fear. *OT* (Off-Topic)

by car15, Saturday, August 09, 2014, 16:30 (3549 days ago)

Alright guys. I need to talk about this ebola thing. Frankly, it's scaring me shitless. Yeah, I know the likelihood of a pandemic or epidemic is low, and viral outbreaks happen every now and then. Swine flu. SARS. Where are they now, right?

But ebola is scary shit. Ebola basically shuts down your organs and makes you bleed to death, and about 50% of all people who contract the virus do not survive, and there is absolutely no treatment or cure, and the virus could easily be spread to other countries thanks to the wonders of global airline travel.

Okay, okay... so this latest outbreak probably won't spread beyond Africa, and if it comes here, we'll probably be able to contain it before it spreads too far... but the whole situation has gotten me thinking about how little we can actually do to prevent viral outbreaks in general. We don't even know where these things come from. A 16 year old boy named Robert Rayford from the Midwestern United States died of AIDS in 1969. NINETEEN SIXTY FUCKING NINE. The HIV virus wasn't supposed to have left Central Africa at that point in time, yet somehow this kid had it.

But here's the really freaky part. He had never traveled anywhere outside of the Midwest and told doctors that he had never received a blood transfusion. The prevailing theory is that he contracted the virus via homosexual intercourse... But how exactly does that work?! What is the likelihood that an infected Central African man traveled to the Midwestern United States and had sex with this underage boy? It's possible, yes. But likely? Hell no. The kid had symptoms for three years before he died, which means he would have been 13 when he developed AIDS, and even younger when he contracted HIV.

So somehow HIV was in the United States in the mid 1960's and nobody knew about it?

I don't know about the rest of you, but that TERRIFIES me.

***

That case serves to illustrate how quickly and silently viruses can spread. If the Ebola virus were to spread to the developed world, either during this outbreak or at some point in the future, is there really all that much we could do about it? Perhaps we could contain the spread, but even if we did, we couldn't do a damn thing for the people who had already contracted the virus.

I don't know. Maybe the media hype has made me a little paranoid. But it's a sobering thought.