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Originally Posted by Outlaw 1963
Then where are these animals getting these diseases from? I'm just trippin at why they can't just come up with a vaccine like they do for other illnesses.
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Most of these viruses and bacteria have been around long before humans have been here and will be around long after humans leave. If you want some reading material to illustrate this: "Level 4 Virus Hunters of the CDC" is a great book.
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But it came over here from Africa, though. I think they should keep it under control here since about 3 people that we know of have it in the US. Then, from that point on, stop folks from going to those countries in Africa that harbor the virus, and vise versa. Because all that's going to happen is folks are going to keep bringing it up in here.
If healthcare workers want to go over to Africa and aid the victims, then they need to keep their asses there until a vaccine/cure is developed.
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It came over here from Africa via Brussels, Belgium. If you ban travel from West African nations, those nations just aren't going to stamp passports--many nations do this now to obfuscate where their residents are actually coming from. If this happens, it looks like your patient zero came from Belgium, NOT West Africa. You've now made it harder to solve your problem of identifying people at risk. Now, everyone who came off an international flight displaying flu-like symptoms is an 'at risk' Ebola patient. You just took the risk pool from small to extremely large...and that's bad.
You keep throwing around a vaccine/cure like it's some easy thing to pull out of a hat. It's not--we have one possibly effective treatment (ZMAPP)--but that may prove in the long term to be no better than standard health practices. Ebola isn't a lucrative or high profile disease for pharmaceutical researchers, so developing a vaccine isn't high on their priority list. Ebola IS interesting for them because it is similar to a number of other related filoviruses, so if you knock out one you might be able to apply it to those other filoviruses...but maybe not.
The Ebola outbreak is a great opportunity for people to educate themselves on public health, science, and how things work in the pharmaceutical industry.
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