Last post about Ebola for a while because 1) Im tired of talking about it, 2) Im tired of hearing about it, but 3) Im mostly tired of the people freaking out about it. Here are the plain and simple facts: - Less than 10,000 people have died from Ebola since it was discovered in 1976. In fact, the number as of right now is closer to 6,000. Thats broken down to 1,548 deaths over the course of 20 outbreaks from 1976 to 2012¹, and roughly 4,500 deaths in the current outbreak². How does that compare to other diseases? - Last year alone, 1.1 million people in sub-Saharan Africa died from HIV/AIDS³. - Approximately 5,000 people world-wide die from TB every day⁴. Thats about 1.8 million people per year. - 2,200 children die every day from diarrhea induced from drinking unclean water⁵. That comes out to about 803,000 children dying annually. - In 2012, cancer was responsible for 8.2 million deaths globally⁶. - That same year, approximately 627,000 died from malaria⁷, - 1.1 million children died of pneumonia⁸, - And 122,000 people died from measles⁹. Further: - The study done in 2012 involving pigs and monkeys didnt show that Ebola can pass from person to person through the air. The first author of the paper published on that study, Hana Weingartl, stated: You cannot take the pigs and think that it will go the same way in humans. One has to consider the species. For pigs, the infection ends up as an infection of the lungs — they have high amounts of the virus in the respiratory tract and so they cough it out. Or when they sneeze or squeal, it just gets out of the lungs. So the virus is in the air directly. [For humans and primates]...the main target organ is the liver, so they have high amounts of the virus in the blood and in the feces. They will not be coughing out the virus. And that’s why indirect transmission without contact is probably not happening.¹º - Additionally, no human virus has ever changed its mode of transmission, and Ebola is unlikely to do the same. It is now pretty much exactly the same as it was when it was discovered in 1976.¹¹ - And lest we forget, there have only been 3 diagnosed cases of Ebola in the US with 1 confirmed death¹². ______________________________________________ So please, for the sake of maintaining your sanity (and dignity), stop freaking out over Ebola. Stop being ignorant. Stop spreading crackpot pseudoscience from The Mind Unleashed¹³ and other scare-mongering click-bait sites. Theyre not scientists. Youre not a scientist. Neither they nor you are qualified to claim intimate knowledge about the what and why of Ebola, nor are either qualified to tangent off into Fantasy Land with wild and colorful theories loosely based on scientific facts and state those theories as facts. That does a disservice to your credibility and exacerbates the panic. Dont be a tool. ______________________________________________ ¹vox/cards/ebola-facts-you-need-to-know/what-is-the-ebola-virus ²huffingtonpost/2014/10/15/ebola-death-toll-west-africa_n_5991198.html ³amfar.org/worldwide-aids-stats/ ⁴who.int/tb/challenges/hiv/facts/en/ ⁵cdc.gov/healthywater/global/wash_statistics.html ⁶cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/cancerstats/world/mortality/ ⁷who.int/features/factfiles/malaria/en/ ⁸worldpneumoniaday.org/learn/ ⁹who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs286/en/ ¹ºvox/2014/8/10/5980553/ebola-outbreak-virus-aerosol-airborne-pigs-monkeys ¹¹online.wsj/articles/scientists-say-ebolas-transmission-route-unlikely-to-have-changed-1413475957 ¹²vox/2014/10/16/6982447/ebola-virus-outbreak-by-the-numbers ¹³themindunleashed.org/2014/10/ebola-youre-told.html
Posted on: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 08:06:01 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015