Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

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"The current Ebola epidemic may well become the worst human disaster in this century. And we are not doing enough about it."

Ok, I think anyone here generally understands how dangerous Ebola is and could become if it continues to spread.

That being said, already this century:

Smoking has killed roughly 60 million people

HIV / AIDS has killed 20 to 25 million

Malaria has killed eight million

Diarrhoea has killed perhaps 15 million

We're a long ways yet from Ebola competing as a worst human disaster candidate. To put it in stark perspective, it could kill a million people before it's contained (100+ fold more than it likely currently has), and it still wouldn't get near the health disasters I listed. I don't really understand why people persist with inflating Ebola's stature (or downplaying the other health disasters, however you want to look at it). The only conclusions I've come to, are that Ebola has been sensationalized for years by Hollywood and the media (on-going), and its mortality rate and rapid nature are obvious fear points. I still don't see how the fear adds up when compared to millions of children dying from diarrhoea, except that these are things most people think they can't get / won't die from.

At what age did people who died from smoking, first get infected? How many years did they live with the infection? Did they have the difficult but still viable option to quit smoking and survive a few more years or even have a full life?

How many people contracted HIV by hugging someone? Or being in the same environment for a prolonged period of time? How many contracted it because of unprotected sex, or perhaps sharing needles? Again, how long did they live with the disease?

How many people did not die from Diarrhoea and Malaria? Do we have medicines for these diseases?

It takes two weeks to die from Ebola from the moment you are infected. You don't have any choice in the matter. It has extremely low survival rates. We have no cure. It infects anyone and everyone. Being infected with Ebola is closer to being the victim of a random shooting than any of the diseases you mentioned.

And finally, in numbers alone, from the original article: "WHO and Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) both estimate that the number of people infected is doubling roughly every 20 days. This means that in 20 days 6,000 infections would become 12,000 and in 100 days, 6,000 infections would become about 200,000. In 200 days – early April 2015—there would be 6 million infections and in 400 days—roughly Halloween 2015—we would see over 6 billion people infected, nearly as many as the world’s total population."

He does go on to say: "Unsustainable trends will stop; that rate of new infections will slow down.[3] We will not see the world’s whole population infected with, and more than half of us dead of, Ebola before the end of 2015. It is possible that outbreak may end up largely confined to the three current epidemic countries in West Africa. Other parts of the developing world provide some hopeful signs."

So, there is hope. And it may not be as bad as the whole world being infected, but the possibility is much larger than 60, 25, 6 or 15 million. That too in one year, and not in 14.

But the other problems have been with us for a while. Stacking Ebola on top of them is really bad news.

We've already underestimated Ebola in a number of ways. The assumption was that it's not easily transmissible, but it's spreading, so perhaps that assumption is not as true as we thought. The fact that doctors are getting infected is certainly a bad sign. Perhaps this strain is more easily transmissible, or will be soon due to a larger infected population within which it can evolve.

Also, none of those other problems require drastic measures like a 3-week quarantine, which is costly, disruptive, and doesn't scale well.

We've discussed this before. The key differences are that the first two things take quite a long time to kill you; the second two things are very easy to treat/prevent and we know they tend to improve as infrastructure is added. All four of these problems can be managed with current knowledge, at varying degrees of expense. Our failure to eliminate them or other obvious causes of mortality is largely due to a failure of political will, inadequate capital, or some combination of the two. HIV/AIDS is the best example because we don't have a definite cure, and we let it get much worse than it needed to because originally it was treated as a moral disease.

In contrast, we lack the capability to treat Ebola reliably, and it acts fast enough and powerfully enough that patients can't get meaningfully involved in their own treatment the way many HIV patients did in the early days of that epidemic. Our best strategy against Ebola right now is to just isolate people and hope that it burns itself out. Given the size of the area where it is rampant, this is a highly unreliable strategy.

And a hundred years ago 50-100 million people died in the Spanish flu in the space of a few years. A pandemic, which Ebola definitely has a quite high possibility to become, has the ability to do home runs that really blow the ball out of the court when it comes to death tolls.

And this is the problem I have with a lot of the bullshit back and forth idiotic arguments you can read every day on HN.

Hey, moron, let me spell it out for you. If my little five year old girl gets ebola she will be in horrible pain crying out for Mommy and Daddy and her siblings, anyone, really, to comfort her. And if Mommy and Daddy do comfort her mommy and Daddy FUCKING DIE. And Mommy and Daddy will probably kill themselves if they watch their little girl die without comforting her. Parent, sibling, families, neighborhoods would be ripped to shreads. I don't know about you, but I would gladly die hugging my little girl until she goes if she has to.

I am almost crying as I write this because I can imagine it and it hurts. A parent's worst nightmare. How dare you compare it to smoking and AIDS. How FUCKING CLUELESS can you possibly be? This IS different. Very different.

Sorry for the emotion and the language. I suggest readers place themselves in the above scenario before posting stupid fucking comments.

And please, donate some money to organizations that can help the people in Africa going through this horrible problem. You know, the Mom and Dad choosing to hug and kiss their little girl and die with her rather than watch her die while she cries out for their love.

Enough said.

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