"Grim Ebola Prediction: Outbreak Is Unstoppable for Now, MD Says"
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A doctor who just returned from treating Ebola patients in West Africa predicts the current Ebola outbreak will go on for more than a year, and will continue to spread unless a vaccine or other drugs that prevent or treat the disease are developed.
Zero chance of that. Vaccines take a long time to develop, and then you have to grow, produce, test and distribute them. Not going to happen within a year even with massive investment.
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"I don't believe that our traditional methods of being able to control and stop outbreaks in rural areas … is going to be effective in most of the cities," Lucey said yesterday (Sept. 3) in a discussion held at Georgetown University Law Center that was streamed online. While the World Health Organization has released a plan to stop Ebola transmission within six to nine months, "I think that this outbreak is going to go on even longer than a year," Lucey said.
Yes, longer than a year, and it is likely that it will spread. There is a lot of misplaced anger. People think that America is in control of everything and should have "done something". Others will blame EU or China (they are heavily invested in Africa) or whomever is getting the natural resources. There will be angry infected people who need serious help but are not going to get it.
The medical resources are already stretched thinly, this is going to break them. It kills doctors and nurses more than anyone.
Those with the capability to do something and are thinking that this is "someone else's problem" are wrong. If you are in a city, it will be your problem sooner or later.
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This large Ebola outbreak could have been prevented with an effective public health response at the beginning, said Lawrence Gostin, director of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University. But the weak health systems of the affected countries left them unprepared to respond to the outbreak, Gostin said.
The international community should have been more generous in supporting poorer countries so they could develop the response capacities needed to contain the outbreak, Gostin and colleagues wrote in a recent briefing for the O'Neill Institute.
To help with the current outbreak, and prevent future ones, Gostin called for the establishment of an international "health systems fund," which would be supported by high-resource countries. The money would be used to strengthen the health systems in those countries, he said.
The international community should have been more generous in supporting poorer countries so they could develop the response capacities needed to contain the outbreak, Gostin and colleagues wrote in a recent briefing for the O'Neill Institute.
To help with the current outbreak, and prevent future ones, Gostin called for the establishment of an international "health systems fund," which would be supported by high-resource countries. The money would be used to strengthen the health systems in those countries, he said.
Oh yeah, give governments your money. As if they need it and don't have as much as they can print already, as well as the ability to take it from everyone they want to. If you are going to make a difference, you are going to have to do something yourself. If you have the will and a way to do that, then "Government" may throw some of that money at you and give you the responsibility to choose who lives and who dies. This is already deeply into triage due to resource constraints (mainly human resource). Waiting for "government" to solve it isn't going to help until too late. Not until their voters care and an election is looming and by then it will be far too late.
That's why Zidovudine and Lamivudine are frequently used for combined therapy. Incompatibility of resistance mutations prevents virus from achieving resistency to both drugs at the same time.
