Takeaways from this very comprehensive analysis of Ebola: 1. The essential control problem is that protection guidance has been based on 95% confidence intervals about how the virus spreads, but its the 5% of variant cases that may account for most actual spread of the virus beyond the clusters in Africa. 2. Viruses have an ecology all their own about which we know relatively little, very different from organismic ecology because species boundaries between different viruses and between viruses and hosts do not exist. 3. The big problem is not Ebola per se but the global reengineering involved in such things as warfare, wildlife poaching, and urbanization that is creating ideal transmission and incubation conditions for viral life in general -- hence, the apparent profusion of new human infections like HIV and Ebola, with many variations and cross-strains to come. 4. Not only is Darwinian natural selection not limited to organismic life but it operates with even more ferocity as one crosses the boundary between living and non-living systems, revealing natural selection as a fundamental principle of inorganic nature (memo to creationists). This is the beauty in Ebola. theatlantic/health/archive/2014/10/21-days/381901/
Posted on: Mon, 27 Oct 2014 13:40:01 +0000
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