Thursday, September 25, 2014

Ebola Predictions From CDC

September 23, 2p14 NPE reports:
Both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization agree that the epidemic is speeding up. But the CDC's worst-case scenario is a jaw-dropper: If interventions don't start working soon, as many as 1.4 million people could be infected by Jan. 20, the agency reported in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
 Read World War Z to consider the social consequences of pandemic, or Gina Kolata's Flu, a history of the 1918 flu pandemic.  I'm not  sure which is scarier.

2 comments:

  1. I'm not too worried. An epidemic is very different from a pandemic. So far, Ebola is looking like an epidemic. It is spreading due to inadequate sanitary precautions in poor, uneducated countries.

    It's only a threat to us, or as a pandemic, if it mutates enough to spread *efficiently* through the air. The likelihood of this increases with the number of cases, but it's still pretty low.

    However, it's a horrible tragedy for Africa.

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  2. An article today by a mathematical epidemiologist today says that Ebola would be easily stopped in the US, and that it hasn't changed its transmissibility.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/09/29/some-good-news-about-ebola-it-wont-spread-nearly-as-fast-as-other-epidemics/

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