People are afraid of Ebola, and they have a right to be”but they also need to understand it.
Ebola is a highly dangerous viral infection, killing more than half of those infected. The death rate is higher than that in cases without hospital care, lower when supportive therapy (oxygen, intravenous fluids, dialysis) is available.
It is transmitted by direct contact (through breaks in the skin or mucous membranes) with every kind of body fluid, from blood to sweat to semen. At this point, there’s no known example of airborne transmission between people: be thankful for that. We also know the virus doesn”t last long in the open air.
It’s clear that Ebola isn”t all that contagious”nothing like influenza or measles, which are airborne. It seems that it can only spread widely in favorable conditions”either crowded West African slums where people’s burial customs expose them, or, paradoxically, in less-than-perfect hospitals, where carelessness and improper gear leave medical personnel vulnerable. I say carelessness, but “errors” might be a better word. Working in a hospital with no resources or electricity, filled with desperately ill people who are bleeding and puking, seems to increase almost everyone’s error rate.
Another factor that limits Ebola’s chance of becoming the next pandemic is its sheer virulence, coupled with direct person-to-person transmission: people are only infectious for a few weeks at most, after which they”re either dead or immune to that strain.
Ebola is not originally a human disease at all. Its reservoir is thought to be fruit bats, which carry the virus, but don”t seem to get very sick.
In any epidemic, the key statistic is the number of new cases per case. If that parameter is greater than one, the number of cases grows exponentially, and you have an epidemic. If less than one, the disease dies out. That parameter may not be the same in every environment: it’s obviously greater than 1.0 in Liberia, but as long as Americans don”t have their entire extended families handle the body at a funeral, it’s almost certainly well under 1.0 here.
So”what short-term risk do Americans face from infected people flying here from West Africa? Small national risk: under current policy, you might see a sick West African visitor infect one or two Americans, likely hospital personnel. And some of those infected people would die, even with good care. Second question: Why take this risk? There’s no reason to do so. The administration claims that limiting incoming travel from Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone would backfire. Why do they say that?
I”d say that it’s because they”re nuts, which is often the deep reason behind federal action. Oh, undoubtedly they”re thinking something nonsensical about the horrors of profiling black Africans, but let’s be real: we”d quarantine Sweden if they had something like Ebola, be they ever so blond, and we”d be right to do so. At the end of the day, nuts, like I said.
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (part of NIH), said a travel embargo on West African countries that are struggling with Ebola would make it much harder for them to control the virus.
“You isolate them, you can cause unrest in the country,” Fauci told Fox News Sunday. “It’s conceivable that governments could fall if you just isolate them completely.”
So, we”re supposed to believe that blocking flights to the U.S. for the duration would destabilize an African government. Riiight. But Fauci had to say something. He has no logical explanation for the administration’s position”but then, none exists. He’s just being a loyal bureaucrat. Everybody and his brother are closing that door: Air France and British Airways have both temporarily halted flights. Since they read the polls, if nothing else, the Obama Administration will probably end up doing the same.
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A meteor exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk around 9:20AM local time Friday. First there was a fireball brighter than the sun, followed by a blast wave that blew down doors and smashed windows. More than 1,000 people were injured, mostly from flying glass.
Chelyabinsk is a tough town; it makes Chicago look like Fire Island. In Russia they make Chuck Norris-style jokes about its inhabitants.
The city grew when Uncle Joe relocated heavy industries there back in the Great Patriotic War”people used to call it Tankograd. Later it became a center for nuclear weapons development. In 1957, a chemical explosion in a plutonium plant in nearby Kyshtym released vast amounts of radioactivity that just missed Chelyabinsk. For years there were minimum speed limits on the highways going through the contaminated zone. You had to go faster than that minimum”because the area was so radioactive, you see. I doubt a mere meteorite will leave much of an impression on Chelyabinsk.
Friday’s explosion was powerful”perhaps 25 times stronger than the Hiroshima bomb, judging from sonic data. Damage was limited because it occurred at a very high altitude. It appears to be the largest since the Tunguska impact, which exploded over a remote region of Siberia in 1908. That earlier explosion was even more powerful, a thousand times greater than Hiroshima. It leveled about a thousand square miles of forest, but there seem to have been no casualties since the region was uninhabited.
Injuries from such cosmic collisions are extremely rare. A meteorite crashed through the roof of a house in Sylacauga in 1954, bruising Mrs. Elizabeth Hodges. Evidently stars do fall on Alabama. In 1911, one hit and killed an Egyptian farmer’s dog. Worse yet, a meteorite totaled a red Chevy Malibu in Peekskill, NY in 1992. Chelyabinsk’s casualties are unprecedented.
Powerful meteor explosions like the one over Chelyabinsk are not so rare. In recent decades, military satellites have detected many such events. Generally they strike oceans or other uninhabited regions, since cities cover only a tiny fraction of the Earth’s surface.
Should we worry? Yep. If this meteor had exploded at a lower altitude, it would have smashed that city flat and killed hundreds of thousands of people. How likely that was depends on the details”most meteors are not strong enough to hold together during that kind of re-entry, although some nickel-iron meteors may be. The Tunguska explosion would have utterly destroyed any city it hit.
It’s not quite as bad as a nuclear weapon: It would only kill you with fire and blast, rather than fire, blast, and radiation. You’d only die twice”Sean Connery might survive.
However, someone might mistake such a natural explosion for a nuclear strike, and that would be bad. I know that we spend most of our time worrying about terrorists from Trashcanistan wielding box cutters, but the nukes are still around, and they still matter.
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If Harvard geneticist George Church gets his way, we may be seeing Neanderthals in the not-so-distant future”without having to first drink a quart of Old Overcoat.
The kerfuffle arose when Der Spiegel interviewed Church about his recent book, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. People got the impression that Church favors using ancient DNA to create a Neanderthal and is looking for a woman crazy enough to be the surrogate mother. He’s trying to back off, but there’s no reason to believe him. He does favor this experiment, although he doesn’t have want ads out for the crazy lady. Yet. Here is the relevant passage in his book:
If society becomes comfortable with cloning and sees value in true human diversity, then the whole Neanderthal creature itself could be cloned by a surrogate mother chimp”or by an extremely adventurous human female.
That’s clear enough. For some reason people make a distinction between what you write in a book and what you say to a reporter, presumably because no one ever actually reads the book. It only becomes controversial when it comes straight out of your mouth.
George Church says he believes that conjuring up a Neanderthal could be done in the near future and that it would be a good idea to do so. Genetic technology has been advancing furiously over the past decade, and if anything the pace is accelerating. And there is no fundamental reason why this couldn’t be done. So he’s likely correct in thinking that this will soon (ten years?) be possible”except that you certainly wouldn’t want to use a chimpanzee surrogate. Neanderthals had big heads, larger than those of people today, and I doubt if a lady chimp could manage. Church is a world-class expert in lab genetics, but he clearly doesn’t know much about birthin’ babies.
Church is not just thinking about creating a single Neanderthal. In the Der Speigel interview, he says:
You would certainly have to create a cohort, so they would have some sense of identity. They could maybe even create a new neo-Neanderthal culture and become a political force.
He’s a classic mad scientist”not that there’s anything wrong with that!
I am not sure that reviving the Neanderthal race would be a good idea”but it sure would be interesting.
A number of people have said that recreating Neanderthals would be fraught with ethical problems. Of course that does not matter one way or the other. It’s impossible to imagine contemporary Americans refraining from anything on ethical grounds. No, the key question is whether there’s any money in it.
There might be. For one thing, Neanderthals were a good deal stronger than modern humans. They would revolutionize football, and what could be more important than that? They could out-hit Sosa and McGwire”without steroids. They’d dominate power events such as weightlifting, and people have done worse things than revive extinct species in the quest for Olympic gold. Certainly the East Germans did.
Their minds might differ in interesting ways, and that could be profitable. People think of Neanderthals as stupid, mostly because they lost out to us, but we really don’t know whether they were or not. Their brains were certainly bigger than those of modern humans. For all we know, they were smarter. If they turn out to be a lot smarter, there could be trouble. I think we’ve all seen that movie”the good one, with Charlton Heston, not the crappy one with Wahlberg. But even if they end up enslaving humanity in the long run, they might first give some hedge fund a short-term edge. Which is what counts.
Real money, though, is made by lawsuits rather than doing anything useful. The real value of Neanderthals must lie in their grievances rather than their possible accomplishments.
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