Ebola: We’re months from being out of the woods

Monday, October 6, 2014
By Paul Martin

By Rick Moran
AmericanThinker.com
October 6, 2014

Even if the present Ebola outbreak is confined to a few cases in Texas, the US is still in danger of a large scale epidemic down the road.

Two prominent former health care officials have penned an op ed in the Wall Street Journal warning that the virus could break out of West Africa and cause a pandemic all over the world. The chances then of a trickle of cases in the US turning into a wave go up exponentially.

Public-health workers will contain the Ebola case—and any secondary spread—diagnosed in Dallas. But the decisive risk to the U.S. will emerge in a few months. If the virus continues to spread in West Africa at its current pace, much larger global outbreaks will become likely.

Should these outbreaks coincide with the cold-weather peak of the flu season—when symptoms of influenza can be confused for the early signs of Ebola—the health-care system’s ability to quarantine all the people with suspected Ebola infections, and test them in the required specially equipped labs, could be overwhelmed.

And if Ebola does decisively break out of West Africa, we may be unable to control the spread of the disease solely by conventional public-health tools of infection controls, tracking and tracing sick contacts, and isolating the ill. If this happens, we may face a global pandemic early next year.

For now, we must pin our hopes on drugs or vaccines that are still in early stages of development.

The good news is that there are a number of promising therapeutics that have already shown activity against Ebola, from an immune-based drug called ZMapp that was given to seven infected patients, to at least two vaccines that appear ready for large-scale testing. ZMapp showed remarkable efficacy in bolstering the immune system to directly attack the virus in monkey experiments and may also have helped several Ebola sufferers recover.

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