Humanitarian groups are pulling their people out now. Which will make things worse for people in Africa. You know things are bad when Peace Corps bails on you.
Guess it's not as bad as Captain Trips...
*heads to Boulder, CO*
Any link for that?
The dangers are so real that some humanitarian organizations are pulling out to protect their own.
Samaritan's Purse -- an international evangelical Christian humanitarian agency -- and the missionary group Serving in Mission have recalled all nonessential personnel from Liberia.
The Peace Corps announced Wednesday it is doing the same, removing its 340 volunteers from that country, as well as Sierre Leone and Guinea.
Bart Janssens, director of operations for Doctors Without Borders, said that those figures likely understate how bad things are, noting "there are many places where people are infected, but we don't know about it."
"This epidemic is without precedent," said Janssens, whose group also is known as Médecins Sans Frontières. "It's absolutely not under control, and the situation keeps worsening."
Climate change (and our refusal to do anything about it) and our continued rapid destruction of our biosphere unfortunately make this an untrue statement.
Not yet.
We aren't even close to the point where climate change looks like a real threat to the average person.
ok im legit scared now
what's next?
Yeah but climate change effects have a 20-50 year lead time. If humanity was good about doing things before they got to be a problem more people in Africa would be educated about disease and this outbreak probably wouldn't be as bad as it is.We aren't even close to the point where climate change looks like a real threat to the average person.
Ebola won't nearly be as fatal in Europe or America as it is in Africa. Because Europeans and their descendants have a much greater immune system resistance to viruses as a result of surviving through several plagues over the centuries. Europeans also have a higher resistance to HIV.
I don't think there is too much cause for concern really. Bird flu is several times more contagious than ebola for example, a far greater risk of outbreak, but the fatality rate was far lower than predicted when it did spread (even though Tammiflu was found to be useless against it!). Ebola is fairly easy to quarantine.
Not trying to be racist or anything, just haven't got much medical knowledge, but i was wondering: i live in Italy, where in the last years we've had some serious immigration issues from Africa (as in we get boats with 400 immigrants basically once a week and then stay stuck in our country), do you think this could eventually lead to the virus expanding here too?
Ebola is a terrible candidate for any genuinely widescale epidemic of, say, the Spanish Flu variety, so I'm not really concerned.
My worry is that now that it's such a big outbreak it mutates and goes airborne. There's no chance of that happening right?
You have been playing to much Pandemic.
It's been awhile since we had a big scare like Swine flu. I thought we are due for one.
I'm not too worried about this, but I do honestly wonder if it could mutate and go airborne (serious question).
No. The people with ebola in the affected regions would show symptoms and would be too weak to travel that far.
As for other pathogens, then it could be, which is why I would stress for a humanitarian view of immigration instead of an antagonistic one.
The Death Toll Comparison Breakdown
One of the things about humans is that they die sometimes, and one of the things humans pay a lot of attention to is other people dying. We do a pretty good job of distracting ourselves from the whole “I’m gonna die one day” thing, but the fixation is there, underneath the surface, and one way it shows through is how riveted we are by other people’s deaths.
The news is an obvious example—just open up CNN.com and typically, at least half of the headlines are about people dying. Entertainment is another—nothing locks eyes on a screen like the death of a character.
History is a less obvious example, but it’s the parts of history that involve a lot of people dying that usually compel us the most. That’s why there are so many war movies and so few movies about critical legislation being passed.
But for a crowd so interested in death, humans know surprisingly little about the actual numbers of people that died in key moments throughout history. Most of us know that 3,000 people died on 9/11, but how many Americans know how many Katrina victims there were, or how many people died in the American Revolution. Did the Christian Crusades kill 100 times as many people as the Vietnam War? Or were they identical in their death tolls? Given how much we talk about historical human tragedies, it seems like something we should have a better handle on. So let’s take a look.
Climate change (and our refusal to do anything about it) and our continued rapid destruction of our biosphere unfortunately make this an untrue statement.
What?Come on spread to NYC lol
What?
Those are long term problems. In the face of immediate danger, I think we do OK for ourselves.
I agree with you completely, but I think that's what the original poster intended with his post
if we delay the global emissions peak until 2025, we pretty much have to drop off a cliff afterwards to avoid 2 degrees C. Short of a meteor strike that shuts down industrial civilization, thats unlikely.
How about 2020? Of the available scenarios for peaking in 2020, says Anderson, 13 of 18 show hitting 2 degrees C to be technically impossible. (Doh!) The others involve on the order of 10 percent reductions a year after 2020, leading to total decarbonization by 2035-45.
Just to give you a sense of scale: The only thing thats ever pushed emissions reductions above 1 percent a year is, in the words of the Stern Report, recession or upheaval. The total collapse of the USSR knocked 5 percent off its emissions. So 10 percent a year is like well, its not like anything in the history of human civilization.
This, then, is the brutal logic of climate change: With immediate, concerted action at global scale, we have a slim chance to halt climate change at the extremely dangerous level of 2 degrees C. If we delay even a decade waiting for better technology or a more amenable political situation or whatever we will have no chance.
5. Jeez, 2 degrees C looks hard. Can we just do 4 degrees C [7.2 degrees F] instead?
It might seem that, given the extraordinary difficulty of hitting 2 degrees C, we ought to lower our sights a bit and accept that were going to hit 4 degrees C. It wont be ideal, but hitting anything lower than that is just too difficult and expensive.
Its seductive logic. After all, to hit 4 degrees C we would only have to peak global emissions in 2020 and decline thereafter at the relatively leisurely rate (ha ha) of around 3.5 percent per year.
Sadly, even that cold comfort is not available to us. The thing is, if 2 degrees C is extremely dangerous, 4 degrees C is absolutely catastrophic. In fact, according to the latest science, says Anderson, a 4 degrees C future is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond adaptation, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable.
Obviously, incompatible with an organized global community is what jumps out, but the last bit, high probability of not being stable, is equally if not more important. One of the most uncertain areas of climate science today has to do with feedbacks processes caused by climate change that in turn accelerate (or decelerate) climate change. For instance, heat can melt the Arctic permafrost, which releases methane, which accelerates climate change, which melts more permafrost, etc.
Based on current scientific understanding, positive climate feedbacks the ones that accelerate the process considerably outweigh negative feedbacks. At some level of temperature rise, some of those positive feedbacks are likely to become self-reinforcing and effectively unstoppable, no matter how much emissions are cut. These are the tipping points you hear so much about.
But at what level? Will hitting 2 degrees C trigger runaway positive feedbacks? Its difficult to know; this is one of the most uncertain areas of climate science. James Hansen thinks 2 degrees C will do it. Others disagree.
But the situation becomes considerably clearer around 4 degrees C. At that level, theres good reason to believe that some positive feedbacks will become self-reinforcing. In other words, 4 degrees C would very likely be a way station on the road to much higher temperatures.
Eh, people seem quite taken by disaster voyeurism.I assume he's just being sarcastic.
I live in Toronto and went through the SARS scare. My wife is a nurse and worked in hospitals with SARS patients ... It was an unfun time.
I'm not too worried about this, but I do honestly wonder if it could mutate and go airborne (serious question).
It's not very reasonable to compare this Ebola "scare" with the swine flu scare.
Pharma industry gains nothing from ebola as there's no vaccine or treatment.
Stop posting articles from the fucking Daily Mirror.Posted already??
OMFGGGGGGGGG
Stop posting articles from the fucking Daily Mirror.
Hong Kong case was already debunked.
One of the deadliest viruses on this planet is (confirmed to be) completely out of control(no Ebola outbreak before was "out of control"), spreading for the first time ever across 4 countries and organizations pulling out their personal left to right.
The virus was transmitted by monkey- or fruitbat meat which still can be bought everywhere in african countries. although it was banned by the goverments.
Apparently the people there do not care about the virus at all.
It seems rather pointless to endanger medical staff to fight the virus if you can't get rid of the source of the problem: the widespread consumption of bushmeat
I'm not calling for panic mode at all but it's getting really a bit out of hand. don't you think?
That isn't going to happen.
Canadian scientists have shown that the deadliest form of the ebola virus could be transmitted by air between species.
In experiments, they demonstrated that the virus was transmitted from pigs to monkeys without any direct contact between them.
The researchers say they believe that limited airborne transmission might be contributing to the spread of the disease in some parts of Africa.
They are concerned that pigs might be a natural host for the lethal infection.
Yeah. Even though I am sceptical by heart, I cannot believe all the "it isn´t gonna happen"-posts.
It IS a plausible scenario, that an infected person infects others and it starts to spread through parts of the world.
It has happened times before. Will probably happen again. Maybe this time. Maybe not.
But to just state that "it´s impossible" is just stupid. Even healthcare workers and doctors are legit worried about it spreading to Europe.
Almost 700 dead. That´s the size of the town that I live in.
Fair enough, we should never discount the possibility that something could happen, right?
Better be sure to protect yourself from malaria, black plague, H1N1 influenza, cholera, yellow fever, radiation poisoning, and mutated strains of HIV transmitted through the air too.
I want zombies mutate and reanimate the corpses