Yes, We Were Warned About Ebola

On the flip side, even Liberia's ministry of health (see author's credentials) could afford the $45, then disseminate to the clinics.

// Disclaimer: I lived and worked in Cameroon in the 80s, writing software for tracking and publishing data for various govt ministries.

You should look into the whole "open access" movement in research. There is a huge, HUGE disparity in access to journals and research between scientists in North America / Europe and developing countries.

Researchers in the US do not cite African journals and likely do not read them; African scientists often cannot afford journals from US universities -- journal access on SAGE or Taylor & Francis can run well over $10K per year.

The premise isn't hard to believe if you've spent any time in research institutions or academies in these countries, and it's extremely unfortunate.

I have no experience in the health science world, but in IT most scientists say it's only about publishing papers nowadays. Discoveries don't matter, making it useful doesn't matter. Write a paper, get it published, rinse, and repeat.

Health is a much much older area, so I would be pessimistic about finding more fresh and reasonable patterns there. So the article sounds very reasonable to me, but I really, really hope that what you write is true.

While it's true that "hindsight bias" is a thing, and should be guarded against, this kind of throw-away comment dismissing issues like this bothers me. We can similarly dismiss everything said by everyone prominent by referring to "Argument from Authority," as if that's a bad thing. But in truth, people with a great deal of experience sometimes rise to a position of authority purely because they tend to be right, and so Bayesian Analysis suggests that we really should give more weight to what they say.

Similarly here. Don't simply say "Oh, hindsight bias, this is completely irrelevant." If you don't provide some sort of evidence that this particular instance is "simply hindsight bias" then I will tend to dismiss what you say.

You may be right, but you have provided no evidence. Just a baseless accusation.

I was reluctant to say what follows, as I didn't want to be accused of an ad hominem attack, but I have decided to say it as I feel that it is information to be shared. In looking through your previous comments I see that you have a track record for providing a relentlessly negative response to things. There is value in that, as such critical and sceptical responses balance the relentless, boundless positive viewpoints of others, but it means that now I have a more informed context in which to interpret your contributions.

Hindsight bias is a nice broad stroke to dismiss an area in which you have no or limited expertise in.

It's like your management team saying "So what, we've been getting alerts for CPU above 50% utilization every day, but the site is still processing orders fine". To which your response would be "When did they start? How frequently are they occurring? Has CPU utilization stayed at 50% or is it steadily increasing? Why didn't anyone call me?"

Getting the right information to the right people is important for determining what should be acted upon.

Any region that has evidence of endemic Ebola will benefit from having an organized public health approach to combating it.

The warnings in the headline are papers published in the 1980s that contained evidence of endemic Ebola in Liberia.

The article is making the point that had knowledge of these papers been more widespread, especially among medical personnel in Liberia, that Liberia likely would have responded differently to the problem.

It isn't really about what readers of the American press should have done to prepare for Ebola in Liberia (which is the meaning I infer from your first sentence, maybe that's wrong).

Ebola is a very "clever" virus with its interferon-blocking properties. But still, out of the infections we still cannot vaccinate against, influenza has been the single most deadly one in the past, and sexually transmitted diseases are the real issue in the developed world. Why don't we encourage people to have flu shots and use condoms? Well, we do. But this is boring.

So I guess Ebola is big news because it is something new on the panic scene, sweating with blood sounds crazy dangerous, the fears have been accelerated by having the outbreak in a place that "has been forgotten by the god", devastated by wars being fought by children. As to why there is nothing to be afraid of, take a look at the CDC's data.

http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/2014-west-africa/prev...

This was my exact thought. In fact before reading the article I actually thought that this was just an article about Ebola that an HN admin had retitled after being annoyed by the NYT paywall.

Is that really true though? The right to distribute a work isn't tied to a specific medium. A contract between an author and a publisher can divide up the right by medium if it wishes but an unspecfied "right to publish" would include the web already. Seem like you'd need to read the specific contract in question and have a good knowledge of the relevant precedents to draw a conclusion here.

Even if you're correct, works after 1923 would not enter the public domain, because the author never relinquished their exclusive right to web publication.

Of course even for a public domain work, there's nothing to prevent a publisher from charging for it.

The title of the paper in question is presumably "A serological survey on viral haemorrhagic fevers in liberia".

(linked in another comment by DangerousPie)

So even if you take a step back from calling it a warning about Ebola, the question of why it was not well known in Liberia is still an interesting one.

So the main conclusions of the paper were not behind a paywall, just the full paper. And yet it still went unseen. Probably more because it was an old paper in a journal with a miniscule impact factor [1]. Even if it was open access, I really doubt that would have changed anything.

There are problems here, and I'm a huge open access supporter, but blaming this on a paywall seems like a red herring.

[1] http://jis.sagepub.com/content/25/5/413.abstract says it is 0.122, which is really fucking low and basically means nobody reads it

Use chrome's/firefox porn mode

I found the reference in someone else's blog, and followed the guidelines by submitting the original, and not the link to the blog. I kept the title as it was on the blog because that's what auto-completed when I used the bookmarklet, and it felt justified given the line:

    Even today, downloading one of the papers
    would cost a physician here $45, about
    half a week’s salary.

The mods appear to agree with you, though, so even though the title I used was the title from where I first found it, and even though it matches one of the lines in the article, and even though it helps provide more information about the content/conclusion, it's been reduced to the less informative exact title of the original.

Perhaps the submitter encountered the NYT's own paywall