by Alex Coopersmith, opinions editor
There is a confirmed case of Ebola 181 miles from our school. Ebola is a virus that kills between 25 to 90 percent of people who come in contact with it. These two facts alone make it really easy to panic and start acquiring all the hand sanitizer money can buy.
But there’s no reason whatsoever to panic about Ebola here in the United States. That is because Ebola, while deadly, is not difficult to stop.
Why is it so easy to stop the spread of Ebola? Ebola is not that transmissible. You can only get Ebola if you have direct contact with the bodily fluids of someone who has Ebola and shows the symptoms of Ebola. Ebola isn’t airborne (nor is it waterborne, after a few minutes.)
To put it more bluntly: unless you touch the blood, vomit, sweat, saliva, urine or feces of a person who has been diagnosed with Ebola, or has been in West Africa recently and displays all of the symptoms listed below, you don’t have Ebola.
- Fever (greater than 38.6°C or 101.5°F)
- Severe headache
- Muscle pain
- Weakness
- Diarrhea
- Vomiting
- Abdominal (stomach) pain
- Unexplained hemorrhage (bleeding or bruising)
The way to stop the Ebola pandemic isn’t contained in a vaccine — though that would certainly save lives — but in contact tracing. Contact tracing has proven effective in stemming the 33 other outbreaks of Ebola. First, hospitals isolate and provide care to patients with Ebola. Then, officials find everyone who came into contact with the patient while the patient showed Ebola symptoms. These people are monitored for 21 days to ensure that they do not have Ebola. That’s it. Through contact tracing, even Nigeria, which has one of the poorest healthcare systems in the world, has managed to stop the spread of Ebola.
Because Ebola is so hard to transmit, and because the United States has one of the best healthcare systems in the world, Ebola poses a minuscule threat to America. So what can you do? Don’t exchange bodily fluids (blood, vomit, sweat, saliva, urine or feces) with a person who has been in West Africa in the past week or two. And please: remain calm. Panic is often worse than its cause.
Couple minor corrections… Saliva and sweat have low viral loads in ebola. Thus, neither of those will provide sufficient inoculum, in most cases, to be a vector.
Incubation for ebola viral infection is 2-21 days. No one has demonstrated an infection in less than 2 days, no one has, more than 21 days after exposure, and without repeated exposure to contagion, converted to virus-load-positive.
Ebola acts by activating the inflammatory processes in the body, usually associated with endothelial cells. The bowel is, apparently, particularly sensitive to the virus, but it’s an endothelial inflammatory process.
I am much more worried about influenza and measles, which, this year, are more likely to kill more people than ebola ever will.
Jonathan, thanks for spreading the word in a calm and factual manner.