Libertarian bloggers, ebola and black death

[piscator]

Ebola Cure: Chinese Drugmaker To Fast-Track JK-05, Joins ZMapp, TKM-Ebola And Canadian Efforts


A Chinese drugmaker that was once a military scientific unit wants to fast-track an experimental Ebola cure, Reuters reported. Sihuan Pharmaceutical Holdings Group Ltd. and Academy of Military Medical Sciences are looking to file the JK-05 drug with the China Food and Drug Administration by the end of the year.

China, with its large investments in West Africa, has already donated millions in aid and supplies in response to the Ebola outbreak, and the new drug joins an international effort to stop the spread of the deadly virus. Drugs such as ZMapp, developed by Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc., and TKM-Ebola, developed by Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corporation, have been used to treat Ebola patients. ZMapp was most recently given to the Madrid nurse, Teresa Romero, who contracted Ebola on Oct. 6.

JK-05 was developed by the Academy of Military Medical Sciences and is already approved for emergency military use but could follow a process similar to a SARS vaccine that received a sped-up approval process, Reuters reported. The Chinese drug has been tested on mice and is similar to an Ebola treatment developed by Fujifilm subsidiary Toyama Chemical Co. Ltd. Prior to its use in humans, JK-05 will need to pass clinical trials and would need additional approvals to treat non-Chinese nationals.

Experimental drugs such as ZMapp and TKM-Ebola, while successful, have struggled to meet the demand for the treatments. Mapp has stopped production on other drugs in order to increase the ZMapp supply and is looking to partner with the Texas A&M Center for Innovation in Advanced Development and Manufacturing to increase capacity, the Washington Post reported. Due to the limited nature of previous Ebola outbreaks, larger pharmaceutical companies were not developing drugs to treat the virus, which has led to small companies trying to meet the demand.

A Canadian vaccine is currently in clinical trials, with results possible for December. If the drug is deemed safe and successful in the human trial, it could be used in early 2015.

http://www.ibtimes.com/ebola-cure-chine ... ts-1704528

[Seth]

I said nothing about anyone being "isolated and effectively left to die," I specified that medical and humanitarian care should be provided and paid for by every nation on earth, since every nation on earth has everything to lose if a pandemic gets going.

How are they going to do this? By telepathy?

By military transport.

Absolute travel ban from the hot zone.

You do know the meaning of "absolute" surely. How would they get in and out?

I believe I explained that already. Don't pettifog. You know full well that by "absolute" I mean "absolute ban on civilian, non-authorized, non-medical aid or quarantine-related travel between nations."

Don't be deliberately obtuse.

[Seth]

If we were to cut off connections or make it difficult for doctors and others to get there or get out of there. They would all need to spend 30 days in quarantine getting out.

Yes, they would. So what?

[Seth]

They could set up direct flights to a quarantine center in the states or Europe. Yeah, they'd have to sit in quarantine for 21 days when they get back, but that's a small price to insure we don't have infected people wandering through immigration and spreading the disease all over the country. The cost of that would be far less than the cost of dealing with Ebola spreading through major cities. There is no quarantine requirement if you bring in supplies, it's only for people who have direct contact with Ebola victims. That wouldn't include flight crews, cargo handlers and the like, but would certainly include medical personnel.

FFS, we can AIR DROP supplies if necessary directly into the center of the uncontained hot zones. We can parachute in doctors and nurses. We can use helicopters that don't touch down and have them fast-rope in.

There's a thousand ways to get aid INTO a hot zone without danger of spreading the infection, and a dozen ways to ensure that returning workers aren't released into the general population if they are infected...that's what all those FEMA camps are actually for (yes, they do exist), so that infected persons can be isolated and quarantined.

But the first step is to acknowledge that this is a crisis situation that can very, very easily spin utterly out of control that can kill millions or billions of people if drastic measures are not taken right now.

[Seth]

A quick glance at the map shows that a military cordon around the current Ebola outbreak would stretch along a line from about Brownsville, Texas to about Bellingham, Washington in the map above. Fortunately, the Atlantic Ocean blocks the western side of the outbreak, and a naval blockade will, while vast, likely be much less resource-intensive than a linear land effort through the Heart of Darkness.

Who's going to ensure this isolation cordon is less porous than the US/Mexico or Afghanistan/Pakistan borders? No one seems to have been effective at this sort of thing in the past as North Korea and Myanmar, maybe the Chinese. Should the Chinese be running this?

I'm sure the Private Sector would have already handled this, were it not for the heavy burden of regulation and taxation, but Who's going to pay for this shit, citizen volunteerism under a night watchman Libertarian government?

One of the good things is the size of Africa versus the time it takes to travel by foot to other heavily populated areas. If motorized and air travel are banned, refugees who try to escape are largely contained by distance, which is why Ebola hasn't spread widely in the past. By the time an infected person can walk to another major population center undetected they will likely be too sick to move.

It's the speed at which an infected person can travel today that is the greatest risk we face right now. Ebola can spread from Africa to any other part of the world in 15 hours or less...unless travel is banned so that the infection can be identified and contained.

[Tero]

If we were to cut off connections or make it difficult for doctors and others to get there or get out of there. They would all need to spend 30 days in quarantine getting out.

Yes, they would. So what?

You would need to pay them for that. They have regular jobs to return to. $$$$$

[pErvinalia]

There's a thousand ways to get aid INTO a hot zone without danger of spreading the infection, and a dozen ways to ensure that returning workers aren't released into the general population if they are infected...that's what all those FEMA camps are actually for (yes, they do exist),

I thought they were to imprison libertarians and other non-Marxists..

[piscator]

We have the Mormon Church for that.

[laklak]

I'm well aware of how large Africa is. I lived in northern, western and southern Africa for 12 years, drove across a whole lot of the currently infected areas back in my surveying days. You couldn't put a cordon around it with a half a billion troops. However, we're not worried about gigantic rafts of infected people paddling across the Atlantic, we're worried about people getting on aircraft in Monrovia and getting off in Atlanta. Other than inconveniencing a handful of travelers, what possible harm could a temporary quarantine do? Isn't it better to err on the side of caution than to allow a virus we don't actually know much about into the country?

WHO is estimating 5000 - 10,000 new cases a week by the end of the year. CDC has admitted they dropped the ball and were unprepared. The death rate is now listed at 70% in Africa, not the 40-50% they've been claiming. Disease transmission is occurring under level 2 isolation protocols. CDC says Ebola isn't airborne, which is technically true. What they do not tell you is neither is the flu nor the common cold. In fact, Ebola is transmissible in exactly the same manner as flu. An infected person sneezes on you and that's all she wrote. The big difference is it's got a 70% mortality risk rather than the 1 - 2% rate for flu. WHO does not even have a handle on whether the infection rates are dropping or rising, and it's now on the border of the Ivory Coast. So, the "don't worry we'll handle it" litany we've heard for the last several months is falling apart at the seams.

[pErvinalia]

Where did you get this sneezing info?? I understood that it's not transmissible that way.

Usually I keep to myself mostly, but in the last few days of my holiday I spent time at both Melbourne and Sydney (our two biggest cities). And I was at the airport in Melbourne too. I must admit every time used a public toilet I was thinking about contaminated surfaces. Gunna stay out of public toilets from now on. Shit my pants and clean it at home...

Regarding quarantine, it makes good sense to start restricting movement from within to without the infected zone. Although, with all these scanners and shit they have now, they can detect fevers as people enter. Sucks if you have a cold, I guess.

[pErvinalia]

Direct human to human contact. From WHO (who are of course a one world government Marxist conspiracy):

Infection occurs from direct contact through broken skin or mucous membranes with the blood, or other bodily fluids or secretions (stool, urine, saliva, semen) of infected people. Infection can also occur if broken skin or mucous membranes of a healthy person come into contact with environments that have become contaminated with an Ebola patient’s infectious fluids such as soiled clothing, bed linen, or used needles.

http://www.who.int/csr/disease/ebola/faq-ebola/en/

[laklak]

Droplets, man, droplets.

Doctors mean something different from the public when they talk about a disease being airborne. To them, it means that the disease-causing germs are so small they can live dry, floating in the air for extended periods, thus capable of traveling from person to person at a distance. When inhaled, airborne germs make their way deep into the lungs.

Chickenpox, measles and tuberculosis are airborne diseases. Droplets of mucus and other secretions from the nose, mouth and respiratory tract transmit other diseases, including influenza and smallpox.

When someone coughs, sneezes or, in the case of Ebola, vomits, he releases a spray of secretions into the air. This makes the infection droplet-borne. Some hospital procedures, like placing a breathing tube down a patient’s air passage to help him breathe, may do the same thing.

Droplet-borne germs can travel in these secretions to infect someone a few feet away, often through the eyes, nose or mouth. This may not seem like an important difference, but it has a big impact on how easily a germ spreads. Airborne diseases are far more transmittable than droplet-borne ones.

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2 ... a-spreads/

There have been several lab experiments where animals who were not in direct contact with each other developed the disease. Also, the virus can live for extended periods outside the body, a minimum of several hours to several days, depending on the media (blood lasts the longest). The virus is in ALL body fluids, blood, semen, tears, saliva, mucus, urine. Somebody sneezes in your face you can get it. Not as easily as the flu, as flu is a respiratory disease. More scary, to me, is somebody sneezed into their hand and opens the door. You come later and open the door, and touch your face or rub your eyes and BOOM, you're in direct contact with their bodily fluids.

Good blog from a nurse:

http://dtolar.wordpress.com/2014/10/01/ ... rspective/

We've only been studying this disease for a couple of decades, and there have been relatively few outbreaks. We simply do not have enough data. I'm not a conspiracy theorist (well, not THAT much of one), but it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if the information the governments present to the public had been, well, sanitized. It shows up around here and I'm heading for Dog Island, I'll just shoot any boats getting close.

[JimC]

I agree with laklak. I would not like to be around a sneezing Ebola patient, even if the transmission is much less certain than flu or cold...

[laklak]

Op-ed in the NYT, by Dr. Michael Osterholm, seems he has the requisite chops to comment.

Dr. Osterholm is the McKnight Presidential Endowed Chair in Public Health at the University of Minnesota and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP), a professor in the Division of Environmental Health Sciences, School of Public Health, a professor in the Technological Leadership Institute, College of Science and Engineering, and an adjunct professor in the Medical School, University of Minnesota.

He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academy of Sciences and the Council of Foreign Relations. In June 2005 Dr. Osterholm was appointed by Michael Leavitt, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to the newly established National Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity.

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Here's the linky http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/opini ... ebola.html

He figures there are a several possible outcomes, two of which really worry him. One is Ebola, in it's current form, gets into some of the mega-slums in Africa and spreads from there. Lagos, Mogadishu, Karachi, maybe Mexico City. It would kill millions in those places. The second scares him even worse, and that's a true airborne mutation.

The second possibility is one that virologists are loath to discuss openly but are definitely considering in private: that an Ebola virus could mutate to become transmissible through the air....The current Ebola virus’s hyper-evolution is unprecedented; there has been more human-to-human transmission in the past four months than most likely occurred in the last 500 to 1,000 years.

In 2012, a team of Canadian researchers proved that Ebola Zaire, the same virus that is causing the West Africa outbreak, could be transmitted by the respiratory route from pigs to monkeys, both of whose lungs are very similar to those of humans. Richard Preston’s 1994 best seller “The Hot Zone” chronicled a 1989 outbreak of a different strain, Ebola Reston virus, among monkeys at a quarantine station near Washington. The virus was transmitted through breathing, and the outbreak ended only when all the monkeys were euthanized. We must consider that such transmissions could happen between humans, if the virus mutates.

Remember Swine Flu? Shit gets into pigs and mutates, we're really quite similar. I think we should listen to this guy.

[JimC]

The influenza virus has an important difference - it is part of a gene pool of related viruses that can often infect birds, pigs and primates, and swaps genetic fragments with other related strains as it moves among these various hosts. So far, Ebola is not in that category...