Restricting 80% of air travel from Ebola-afflicted countries would give world three extra weeks to contain epidemic, says report

Tuesday, October 28, 2014
By Paul Martin

by: Ethan A. Huff
NaturalNews.com
Tuesday, October 28, 2014

A scientific assessment published back in early September warned that, if air travel from West Africa wasn’t restricted, Ebola would quickly spread across the globe. Using the Global Epidemic and Mobility Model to simulate incidence and seeding events for the disease, a team of international scientists determined that barring even just 80 percent of air travel from the affected countries would add an extra three weeks to the amount of time that the world has to contain the epidemic.

After calculating the number of people who travel by plane every day, the team integrated a special disease model that it used to generate a three-month forecast of Ebola spread. In the short term, researchers determined that the likelihood of Ebola spreading internationally was “small,” though this has since occurred with the arrival of “patient zero” to Dallas, Texas, from Sierra Leone.

In the long term, however, it is basically inevitable that Ebola will spread outside the borders of West Africa, as it already has. If travel restrictions had been enacted early on, this scenario likely could have been avoided. But it now appears that containing the virus may be out of the question entirely, as the reproductive number in West Africa has exceeded 2.0 in some areas, and travel is still wide open.

“Unfortunately the modeled growth rate of the epidemic indicates that more aggressive implementation of the surveillance and containment policies have to be adopted,” explained the authors of the assessment. “We have explored the scenario assuming an 80% airline traffic flow reduction to and from the West African region that provided evidence of a general time-delay of the distribution characterizing the probability of case importation of about three to four weeks.”

Obama and CDC ignore science, say travel restrictions unnecessary

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