“Many lives” doesn’t necessarily mean “many lives in the U.S.” The CDC is sending staff to the four affected African countries. In Africa, where this disease is actually a problem, they frequently perform rituals after people die. Rituals that involve exposing themselves to the bodily fluids of the dead. That’s the main reason it spreads so much there. And that’s the reason there isn’t a realistic chance that it’ll be widespread anywhere else (at least anywhere else where they don’t regularly subject themselves to sick/dead people’s bodily fluids).
If you’re the type who always sees storm clouds gathering or an apocalypse coming, this is a perfect opportunity for you to panic. But nothing is going to happen to you. There will be no pandemic.[/quote]
When Swine Flu was killing everybody in Mexico City, a guy I work with (who’s from Mexico City) was totally unworried. He said that because the people generally aren’t the healthiest there and the air is so bad, any time there’s a Flu, it kills a lot of people there. I think it’s the same thing with Africa.
The one advantage to Ebola is in how fast it kills.
Sure, there’s the off chance that you end up on a plane with an Ebola victim who’s travelling on holiday from Sierra Leone to Maui, but that’s pretty remote. Then there’s the scenario that every body’s worried about of the contagion spreading. While in Maui, you come across a traveller that has contacted the Ebola patient from Sierra Leone and the Sierra Leone patient coughed up infected blood all over said traveller and the second person got ingested it through an open wound or inhaled droplets. A person who is at the point of hemorraging Ebola virus is going to already be in bad shape, and your fellow traveller is going to take a while to build up enough virus to start hemorraging it and at that point will probably be too sick to contact you in a way to make you sick. Then they only have a small number of days left to infect fellow people. I just don’t think it’s that contagious.
Also, Ebola’s been around a while and despite the poor sanitation and post mortem practices in Africa, it still hasn’t exploded into a huge outbreak there.
