Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2014 October 13

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October 13

Surfactant chemistry

Why are oxygen bleach cleaners and citric acid often used together for cleaning and polishing surfaces or toilets. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.66.246.56 (talk) 01:23, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

"When life gives you lemon juice, make sodium percarbonate." 91.120.14.30 (talk) 09:03, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

What is toilet paper and paper towel glue made from?

Bones and hooves? (I found arts and crafts "animals" and stuff on vegan animal-free glue then got a bad feeling about difficulty of Googling so I stopped after two searches.) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 01:29, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Well a quick search for 'paper towel glue' found this manufacturer of adhesives [1] and if you follow the links there you end up at [2] and [3] which confirms gelatine is the major component. Another result is [4] although they didn't seem to have any real info on the composition of their adhesives there. You can get more results by using the info found there (i.e. search for adhesive not glue) although you may have a similar problem to the second result (these are B2B websites and they may not provide many details on their websites about such basic details). Since gelatine would be a concern for some groups, some more searching found [5] ([6]) which mentions at least one brand of paper towel said to be free of animal products (the second one seems more unclear since it only mention lubricants not adhesives or the general product). [7] [8] [9] are others. Nil Einne (talk) 14:05, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Wow a very thorough answer, thanks. I guess it didn't occur to me that the public might not be ingenious enough to find a way to make many arts and crafts animals out of glue and paper towel rolls. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 15:41, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

what is the slowest anything has dropped in freefall (unobstructed and unaided except by aerodynamics)

Hi,

1. What is the slowest anything has dropped in freefall (unobstructed, unaided except by aerodynamics) on Earth? I mean the way that everything falls when dropped.

2. How about for objects with various masses - i.e. I'm now thinking, if the answer to (1) is something totally uninteresting like dust and so forth, which obviously "settles" (falls) over time, then perhaps we should ask about the slowest that objects of various masses have fallen.

So, what are some interesting answers, things that have fallen much more slowly than their mass would lead you to expect, e.g. if they had a really really large parachute then what the record was for how much it slowed them down.

Also 3. does a parachute slow you down indefinitely slower depending on how large it is, or is there a minimum falling speed? what determines it? 212.96.61.236 (talk) 04:26, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

If a thermal is encountered, the slowest falling speed may well be less than zero. This has happened occasionally to paragliders. (See also cloud suck.) - Eron^Talk 06:16, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

OP here. While this is interesting I explicitly meant unassisted, i.e. just in still air. I suppose nobody might have had occasion to try to design a very slow-falling object though... 91.120.14.30 (talk) 08:02, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

I have noticed some helium balloons falling very slowly, does that count as unassisted? How far from the ground do you count as being on earth? As normally falling objects are not yet on the earth. At File:EarthGravityPREM.svg you can see that at radius 0, there is no acceleration due to gravity, and things will not fall anywhere! Graeme Bartlett (talk) 11:02, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

I find those seed pods that spin as they fall interesting. They are designed to fall slowly, and thus get blown farther from the tree as they fall. Then there's spiderlings which use a silk line to catch the wind and get blown far from home. StuRat (talk) 13:43, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

That would be samara_(fruit) and Ballooning_(spider), see also Pappus_(flower_structure). For the more general context Seed_dispersal#Wind and aerobiology have more info. Aeroplankton talks more broadly about some of the stuff Wnt mentions below. SemanticMantis (talk) 13:52, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

(ec) I would note Stratosphere#Bacteria. By the given accounts organisms like Janibacter hoylei are actually resident to the stratosphere, not being found on land and having special adaptations to handle the ultraviolet. [10][11] Wnt (talk) 13:44, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

How about heavier things, things weighing at least as much as a person. How slow do they get via large chutes? 91.120.14.30 (talk) 14:25, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Very light objects (dust, bacteria, etc) can end up being so light that Brownian motion affects them more than gravity...they typically don't fall at all. But for macroscopic objects, it's a matter of aerodynamic drag providing an upward force and gravity providing the downward force. The gravitational force is directly proportional to the object's mass. The aerodynamic force is proportional to it's area (amongst other things). So what you need for slow descent is something huge, but light. Aerogel is the lightest solid we have - so you'd think that a large, thin sheet of that stuff would work the best. But aerogel is really fragile - and a large flat sheet of the stuff would disintegrate at the first breath of wind...so you'd need to make it thicker - and therefore heavier. A heavier material, with more structural strength - like styrofoam - might well do better. But if you take a large, flat sheet of styrofoam and drop it from a high place, you'll immediately see that it'll tumble and eventually wind up edge-on to the airflow - and now that large area isn't slowing it down much. This means that our hypothetical object needs to be light, large AND have some way to avoid tumbling. A parachute is a great example of that - it's made of rip-stop nylon, which is heavy (if you made a solid cube of the stuff) - but can be formed into very thin sheets - then by shaping and curving those sheets, tying ropes to the edges, and sticking something relatively heavy at the bottom - you can stop it from tumbling and keep that large area pointed at right angles to the direction of motion.

Do any meteorite particles stay there forever? I thought they came down in several years tops. Otherwise wouldn't they greatly accumulate for billions of years? (though they only have to stop falling by the troposphere, then get circulated to a place with rain.) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 16:00, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

So in the end, we're down to structural strength, shape and aerodynamics. But if you want something dumb and passively able to fall slowly, I'd guess that a very large balloon would work the best. The air pressure inside can be only very fractionally larger than the ambient air pressure - and there isn't much of a limit on how big it could get.

But now we're into the realms of "how big could you make it?" - and that starts to get into cost, manufacturability and so forth.

I'm not sure there is necessarily a physical limit here - so probably this question doesn't have a nice, definite answer. SteveBaker (talk) 15:13, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

If the balloon is clear, the size of a city, and has the weight of a city (attached), it would likely never fall as the greenhouse effect would keep the air inside more than the 1 degree warmer needed for it to act like a hot air balloon. OP, does that count? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 16:00, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

If it's to hold up the weight of a city, the balloon would need to be much larger than a city. However, I suspect that you'd hit physical limits, like the weight of all the support cables being more than the balloon could lift. 16:13, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

You'd think so, but see Cloud Nine (tensegrity sphere) which is only 1 mile wide, though I don't know if you could get a city the same size as as the city-sized balloon before much of the downward facing projected area is above much of the atmosphere. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 20:27, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

so how slow can parachutists fall? (without using thermals, just a large chute)

So, how slow do parachutists fall, and if you wanted to could you further slow this - to what limit? I appreciate that with a large balloon (as opposed to a practical parachute) you could float indefinitely, specially if the sun heats it a bit. How about with a parachute? I'm asking in terms of m/s speed in a practical sense. 91.120.14.30 (talk) 17:00, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Perhaps a large enough parachute, painted black, might also work as a hot air balloon, so again it could stay up as long as the Sun was shining. At night, I'd think wind would be the limiting factor, as a wind faster than the falling rate would likely blow the parachute sideways, so it would no longer work as a parachute. StuRat (talk) 02:08, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Uninstall Comet Arcade

I have taken the liberty of moving this to WP:Reference desk/Computing#Uninstall Comet Arcade. Wnt (talk) 13:46, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Why do people say Ebola is as contagious as HIV?

You don't have to be quarantined if you have HIV, but you do if you have ebola. You don't have to wear a hazmat suit when dealing with an HIV patient while with Ebola you do have to wear a hazmat suit, and you can still get Ebola even though you wear a hazmat suit. So why do people say they are equally contagious? ScienceApe (talk) 16:34, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Both are blood borne viruses. However, unlike HIV, you don't need a large number of the ebola virus for it to be infectious and it can survive on dry surfaces for longer. 194.66.246.9 (talk) 17:47, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Most sources I have seen tell you that HIV is not very contagious and cannot be caught by casual contact see: [12] [13] as a couple of examples. Richerman (talk) 17:52, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Who's people? Or . I've seen people (notably the US CDC director) drawing parallels between Ebola & HIV 30 years ago or say it's the biggest new concern since HIV 30 years ago, but that's quite a different point (whether you agree with it or not). This Time article [14] doesn't say they are similarly contagious. This NPR article is also interesting [15]. Nil Einne (talk) 18:20, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

I didn't find a source but in discussion comments, I've seen people pointing out obvious differences between the two which the NPR story sort of hints at and you can get by reading Ebola virus disease and HIV even if not in comparitive form.

Plenty of people have HIV and are contagious don't know it and aren't really showing any symptoms, sometimes for years. For a variety of reasons, some people don't want to know so there are various social issues involved. Either way though, they have ample opportunity to unwittingly spread HIV, even if the risk of transmission via a lot of methods isn't that high.

Anyway, as the media, health authorities etc keep beating in to us, there's no much of a period where people are contagious with Ebola before showing symptoms and this is also within weeks of catching the virus. During this time, they may suffer from vomiting and diarrhea and may start to bleed and all 3 blood, vomit and faeces are significant routes of transmission, hence why people treating them are at high risk. The person showing symptoms also generally quickly becomes to unwell to travel far without a lot of assistance. Sadly after they start showing symptoms, a fair percentage of people will end up dead within a week or so. Their bodies have to be disposed fairly carefully (difficult when everything is overwhelmed) but of course, once this has happened, they can infect people. (I seem to recall from previous discussions there may be a period where they are contagious even though not really showing symptoms anymore afterwards, if they survive.)

Nil Einne (talk) 18:40, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

It depends on the definition. An HIV+ carrier is likely to infect more people over their lifetime (5-6) vs. Ebola (2-3). But the rate of mortality is higher for Ebola. Ebola is around the same infection rate as the Spanish Flu but triple the mortality. --DHeyward (talk) 13:35, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

People in the news/blog industry might compare them simply because readers are generally familiar with the HIV story. It's a common tactic to portray more newly discussed things as "the next _____". Evokes common emotions, makes things seem more relatable, gets clicks. InedibleHulk (talk) 13:48, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Our article on Contagious disease is pretty bare-bones and does little to help. A comparison I've heard regarding other diseases is that HIV, measles, influenza, etc. are all contagious (i.e. communicable from human to human), but of those three only measles and influenza are also catching or catchy (i.e. spread by casual contact or indirect contact). Where ebola fits on that spectrum isn't clear to me. It's clearly easier to get than HIV, but it seems unlikely that it's as easily passed as measles, which is phenomenally catchy, since if it were there would millions of cases instead of thousands. Matt Deres (talk) 14:35, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Scientific reports

When writing a scientific technical report, can you cheat and start writing the analysis before you get the results if you predict what the results might be and know the scientific theory behind it or would there be no point doing that in case it's completely different and you have to go back and change it? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.66.246.9 (talk) 17:45, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

I think you have answered the question yourself - yes you could and if you are lucky you will save some time, but you may have to scrap what you've done in the light of the results. Richerman (talk) 17:55, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Mostly the latter, no real point to it. But even if you did write up "results" before your results were in, it wouldn't be "cheating", it would just be a bad idea. It would be "cheating" or fraud if you wrote up something like "x=6.1" based on a guess, and didn't later change it when you got the actual results (e.g. "x=6.9") before submitting the manuscript. Sometimes scientists will start to write up preliminary findings while the rest of the experiment is still running, and fill in the rest as data becomes available. There's no one general writing method and order that all scientists follow. Some like to write the abstract first, some like to write it last. Same goes for figures, discussions, etc. There aren't many references for this type of thing, and the above is based on my experience as a scientist and interacting with colleagues in math and biology over the past ~10 years. For reference, here are a few guidelines for writing research papers, but they don't say much about what order to write the sections in, because it's mostly a matter of personal preference. [16] [17]. SemanticMantis (talk) 17:57, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

You can write the Introduction and Methods, but I would strongly advise against writing the Results and Discussion. The problem is that you will feel an almost irresistable temptation to slant your presentation to fit what you have already written, perhaps without even realizing it. There's no sense in subjecting yourself to that if you aren't compelled to. I myself would automatically distrust any report that was written that way. Looie496 (talk) 19:31, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

It varies by project and complexity. Some projects lend themselves to more prewriting than others. I recall hearing about a research project to obtain the best ever measurement of the magnetic moment of the electron. According to the story, they wrote 99% of the paper before making the measurement, and then simply inserted the numeric result at the very end once they had obtained it. Of course, narrowly tailored experimental papers may lend themselves to that more than others and I don't think they had much in the way of discussion about their new value at all. Other times, one will probably have no idea what direction the paper needs to take before having most of the data in hand. Dragons flight (talk) 20:01, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

I'm going to go ahead and disagree with all three respondents and strongly advise against writing guesswork, and strongly consider it cheating and misleading. My reasoning is that I simply read authors extremely closely, and can often come to a very nuanced understanding of their state of mind (similar to if a poet were writing.) As such, in judging veracity I often reason in terms of, "If he really saw this effect, he would have written..." For example, to cite an example, I do not believe the result reported here: https://dist-systems.bbn.com/projects/CRASH/news.shtml (For summary a recent huge vulnerability in most servers was claimed to be patched, on the fly, by rewriting the processes themselves, and rewriting the source code, by "introspection" in VM's - by an automated process!) Now, the reason I don't believe it is that it writes,

>A3 took around 2 minutes to automatically find a repair using virtual machine introspection to insert a system call block, preventing a sys_clone call made by Bash, and an additional 1.5 minutes to find a source code repair in the Bash code.

This would be such an amazing, phenomenal accomplishment (more like sci fi than fact, to quote a comment I read about this), that if it were true there is no way the author would have possibly written it that way. Impossible. Either it would be effusive, or it would be more precise such as writing something more precise than "1.5 minutes" and in particular describing the exact resources this happened under, since 1.5 minutes is meaningless without knowing what it was running on. Now, what if the author had only GUESSED that this would happen, and the guess happened to match both the 2 minutes, and the 1.5 minutes. When he wrote the sentence I quoted, let's imagine he was extremely doubtful that it would happen, it was basically an optimistic guess about what would be a success. He jumped and screamed when it happened. But he didn't rewrite the sentence - he left his guess. Now I'm left NOT believing him, because his guess reports something falsely. When he wrote it, the sentence he wrote (in the past tense) was false. Due to the amount of one's mental state that is left on paper (see: poetry), it is fair to say that the lie is recorded. It doesn't become "not-a-lie" if he then does the experiment and has the lie turn out to be something he technically could have written. Because he wouldn't write it that way. Therefore, I very strongly counsel against the type of cheating you suggest. Gather facts first, and write them afterward. When you write guesses, it will be plain for all the world that it is only a guess. If you don't rewrite your guesswork after the fact, it is much harder to read you than if you just wait until you have the facts, and write everything afterward. 212.96.61.236 (talk) 20:05, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

It depends on the nature of the data or measurements, and it depends a lot on what you mean by "scientific technical report". That term could cover anything from a batch of weekly quality-control tests at a steel mill to a journal article to an undergraduate lab report. For example, if you're working in a corporate environment testing products as they come off the assembly line, you probably want a fill-in-the-blanks style report so that you can easily compare results from week-to-week.

Even if we confine ourselves to peer-reviewed journal publications then, as Dragons flight notes, some experiments lend themselves better to pre-writing than others. Some papers I've written by starting with the figures (before writing any text), laying them out on a table, and determining if I could tell a coherent scientific story with them. (That technique works pretty well for identifying the gaps in your data; it also works well if you have the luxury of time and/or carried out a very open-ended experiment.) Sometimes while writing you find relevant work by other groups that prompts you to go back and repeat or modify or expand on your work. Sometimes you write most of the paper up, but leave a two-sentence space for a reference to Supplementary Figure #4, which will contain the pro forma control that you forgot (or didn't realize you needed, or got paranoid about when you decided to submit to a higher-impact journal). Sometimes an open-ended experiment or unexpected result will require you to rewrite most of a paper's introduction. (Strict journal-imposed limits on page count and number of footnotes can necessitate brutal cutting.) As a rule of thumb, the earlier you start writing, the more likely it is that you will have to a) go back to the lab to do another experiment you didn't know you needed, and b) rewrite or throw out some of the text you started with. The situation is also seldom cut and dried, data versus no data—it's more often that a researcher says "I have 95% of the data in, so I can probably draft the first half of the results section, but sometime next week I need to do that one other thing...". TenOfAllTrades(talk) 15:30, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Inductor only psu smoothing circuit

I wish to build a linear psu without using any electrolytic capacitors as they are unreliable and short lived. Are there any published circuits that use ony inductors to give a low ripple output?--86.190.199.82 (talk) 19:28, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

• An inductor will only do smoothing if there is a current, so if you have no load or light load on your power supply, the output will be rough. Perhaps you can use large non-electrolytic capacitors. Your power supply will be bigger and more expansive though. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 21:26, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Electrostatic Induction

Within the article on electrostatic induction, there is confusion about the mechanism of electrostatic induction of metal. Consider that if induction indeed added electrostatic energy itself to the brass rod within a spectroscope, the brass's high conductivity would quickly convert the electrostatic energy into thermal energy.

Moving a charged object toward the electroscope's rod is equivalent to adding (or removing) a plate from a charged capacitor. Adding and removing the plates of a capacitor does not remove energy from the capacitor (discharge or charge). A capacitor's charge remains within its dielectric material.

"Once taken apart the charge still resides in the dielectric (glass etc...)" http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/214924.html

The rod is indeed part of one of the two plates on a gold leaf electroscope's capacitor. The electroscope's glass jar is the capacitor's dielectric material. The conductive base is the other plate. The electroscope's rod seems to acquire (or concentrate) the force field coming from the electroscope's charged glass jar, (or other nearby charged object). That field can separate a pair of gold leafs. The electrostatic energy itself remains within the nearby charged object.

For example, when the electroscope's capacitor is charged, the entire rod will have a constant voltage level, with respect to the electroscope's base plate, similar to the zero voltage gradient within a long wire connected to a plate on any capacitor (within an open circuit). Neither the rod, nor the long wire will contain electrostatic energy, unless it has a voltage gradient.

A gold leaf electroscope does not detect the relative volts between any two points along a voltage gradient, because the electroscope has only one probe (the end of the rod). An electronic voltmeter must use two contact points along a voltage gradient, before detection. In other words, the electroscope's rod (a single probe) does not remove electrostatic energy from a charged object, because the rod is not in contact with two points along a voltage gradient.

In summary, moving a charged object toward an electroscope's metal rod will indeed cause the rod to gain a force field within the rod that can separate pith balls and pairs of gold leafs. The electrostatic energy that supplies the rod with the force field continues to reside within a nearby charged object. --Vze2wgsm1 (talk) 21:32, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Coral, Cucumber and Carnivorous Plants conundrum

Why are coral and sea cucumbers considered animals while carnivorous plants such as the Venus fly trap are considered plants? Could you break down the determining criteria and explain how it applies to these examples. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.181.130.231 (talk) 21:34, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Animal has some interesting information. I think a key piece of information, though, is that venus fly traps don't harvest energy/calories from their prey, just nutrients. Aaadddaaammm (talk) 22:26, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

With the rise of monophyly as a key concept in taxonomy, relatedness matters. The venus fly trap is not an animal because it's more closely related to beets (both are Caryophyllales) than it is to spiders or fish. Sea cucumbers are more closely related to mammals than to shrimp (both mammals and sea cucumbers are Deuterostomia, while shrimp are Protostomia), so that puts them squarely in the animal kingdom. Coral are quite a bit further out on the animal family tree, but if you take a detailed look at their genetics, anatomy and the development, you'll find that coral and other Cnidaria have much more in common with members of the animal kingdom than they do with any member of the plant kingdom, despite their sessile nature and plant-like appearance. Heterotrophia may be one characteristic of animals, but it's not a defining characteristic. -- 160.129.138.186 (talk) 23:10, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

• Animals and Plants are recognized as clades, groups of organisms all descended from a common ancestor which belonged to that group as well and which are more closely related to each other than to other groups. Coral, which are close relative of jellyfish, have the superficial appearance of plants to non-specialists, but the share diagnostic criteria and genetic markers that show they are more closely related to other more typical animals like various worms, arthropods (insects, etc.) and even human that they are to plants. Sponges are widely considered the most primitive group of animals due to cell structure and the fact that some reproduce with a larva-like stage. Sea cucumbers are rather obviously animals, they are closely related to starfish and even humans, and are quite advanced animals. Confusion based on the name is not possible if you've ever read about or seen them. The venus flytrap is a flowering plant with specialized leaves. It is related to various other carnivorous plants, as well as cactuses and tamarisks within the eudicot group of the flowering plants, itself only a small branch of the plant kingdom, of which certain moss-like plants are considered the most primitive members. Animals as a group turn out to be closer to Fungi as a group than either is to plants. Most of this will be covered when you take high school biology, but a trip to the library will get you endless books on the subject. μηδείς (talk) 23:19, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Animals are closer to Fungi only relatively recently, when the Opisthokont clade was named. Some hypotheses to that effect had been formed in the late 1980s, but it was only ~2005 that the systematics research gave strong support for the grouping. SemanticMantis (talk) 00:15, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

I am actually aware of this, my Mantid friend, but was trying to gear my answer toward someone who thought a seacucumber might be a vegetable. μηδείς (talk) 00:46, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Especially if it were named "Desi". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 08:08, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I indented to your response because it was relevant, but I really just wanted to add some... references :) SemanticMantis (talk) 15:18, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

how bad could ebola get in united states?

Up to how many people do you think could catch ebola in united states?Whereismylunch (talk) 21:48, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

As it says at the top of the page, we don't answer requests for predictions. --174.88.135.88 (talk) 21:53, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

At this stage, all organizations involved in this kind of thing are saying that an outbreak outside of Africa is extremely unlikely. But this outbreak has already surpassed the previous models, so there's definitely a bit of "no one really knows". Vespine (talk) 22:45, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

We don't make predictions, but reliable sources do. So for instance the BBC says, apparently referring to a recent statement by some government source, 'A "handful" of cases - thought to be fewer than 10 - are expected to reach the UK before Christmas.' One might expect the USA experience to be broadly similar, based on larger overall air traffic but slightly less direct links with west Africa. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 03:11, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

I think your question is badly worded. For example: "How rich could you get if you bought a lottery ticket and won the first prize in lottery?". You see the answer has no bearing at all because while the result is huge, the likelihood is minimal. 202.177.218.59 (talk) 23:10, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Absolutely. If one person was infected and it happened to be you, then that would be "very bad". On the other hand if half a dozen people you don't know got it in remote cities then it would be "minimal". -- Q Chris (talk) 08:05, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

See pandemic, The Black Death and the Spanish Flu. For an artistic take, read The Stand and The White Plague. μηδείς (talk) 23:22, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

I'd skip The Stand. It starts out promising, but quickly degenerates into some bizarre religious crap. Stephen King just can't seem to do decent sci-fi. StuRat (talk) 01:58, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

It seems that the problem in Africa is that people either haven't been told, or don't believe, or ignore, the advice not to have contact with infected people or their bodies after death. I don't think the culture in the US has those same problems. Communication is much better, and while aspects of science like evolution & global climate change may be disbelieved, pretty much everyone in the US believes in the existence of contagious diseases. Also, getting people in the US not to touch infected dead bodies is not a problem. And the US has the resources to finally get ZMapp produced in sufficient quantities. StuRat (talk) 01:56, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

But Sturat, there has already been one nurse who became infected even though she said she was wearing full protective clothingWhereismylunch (talk) 02:09, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

It has not been proven that the nurse was always wearing full protective clothing. It only takes one mistake. As regards Africa, many there are in denial, a la Typhoid Mary, thinking it's someone else that's causing this. Folks who are ignorant or mostly-ignorant of micro-organisms may tend to think this way. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:05, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Yea, one in the US and one in Europe, apparently both due to some unspecified breach in protocol (seemed to be lack of the right equipment in Europe). But the difference is in the US or Europe the number goes down, so if 3 people are treated only one nurse gets infected, versus in Africa where the number goes up, because when one person dies of Ebola 3 people become infected from them. You don't have to multiply that by many generations to see where it leads. StuRat (talk) 02:14, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

You seem to have bought the CDC model, Stu, as when adequate precautions were taken in Dallas and no one was infected.

The infected will hide their symptoms, not volunteer for imprisonment and euthanasia, there will be a massive influx of infected from the south if it gets a hold in Latin America, one can be infected from the barest contact and not show symptoms until one starts emitting body fluids. Sending the sick to hospitals, rather than quarantine camps, will expose our medical workers. The disease will mutate to become less immediately deadly but more transmissible (airborne, say) as it ages. Will we burn a cordon sanitaire around infected areas and firebomb cities if it comes to that? If one suicide bomber can take out a bus, how many people can a suicide sneezer riding the Acela train take out going from car to car and station to station. I hope you're right, of course, but I think you are naively optimistic in regards to both rationality and will to act. μηδείς (talk) 02:17, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

If sufficiently motivated, the US could do a Manhattan Project level effort to mass produce Zmapp. StuRat (talk) 02:22, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Compared to measles, or SARS, or smallpox, Ebola doesn't spread very rapidly. In West Africa, which is just about as bad a health system as you are going to find anywhere, the basic reproduction number is only 1.5 to 2. Meaning each active case infects about 1.5 to 2 other people before it ends, and victims are almost entirely primary care givers for the infected person (either family or health care workers). There are many documented examples where people sleeping in the same room or otherwise sharing living quarters with an Ebola victim failed to catch the disease. Though any contact with symptomatic Ebola victims could spread the disease, for reasons no one fully understands most of the people who have brief casual contact with an Ebola victim don't catch the disease. Though extremely lethal, the disease simply doesn't spread very easily. If Ebola spread like one of the major airborne diseases (e.g. measles), then we'd already have hundreds of cases by the time Mr. Duncan died. As long as Ebola continues to have a relatively slow rate of spread, it is entirely beatable by any first-world society. Basic measures of isolation, infection control, contact tracing, and quarantine will do it. Now we can never guarantee that a disease won't mutate into something else over time, but the current characteristics of the disease are very unlikely to cause widespread infection in the US. Dragons flight (talk) 03:28, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

What if it mutated and became airborne?Whereismylunch (talk) 02:25, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

The original airborne Ebola strain, Ebola Reston, actually didn't sicken any human who was exposed to it, though they generated anti-Ebola Zaire antibodies. Presumably, if people were desperate enough to eschew the usual gatekeeping and rent-seeking of the medical cartel (that'll be the day), they could sicken a bunch of monkeys with Ebola Reston, take their blood, run crowds of people through its dilute aerosol, and save most of them (learning the limits of its avirulence in the process through a few fatalities, no doubt). But actually, if you look at the literature, it seems like there are a large number of Ebola vaccine methods already far in development; there's just been no motivation to cross that last bureaucratic moat to get there. Wnt (talk) 02:49, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Sheesh, everything with this virus has to do with blood, even the post-collapse of civilization way to cure it and the West African way (voodoo chicken blood!), it's like the disease of Satan (no I don't actually believe in anthropomorphic evil). Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 11:00, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

They don't call it a hemorrhagic fever for nuthin'. Wnt (talk) 17:28, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Airborn ebola would be very bad. However, the general trend for most viral evolution is to become less lethal as they become more able to spread. The deal is that if the virus kills off its host too quickly, it's less able to spread. The best strategy for a virus is to spread as easily as possible, while causing the maximum duration of infectiousness. SteveBaker (talk) 03:08, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Right now, the statistics in Africa say that:

1. Each infectious patient passes the disease on to between 1.7 and 2.3 other people.
2. There is a roughly 3 week window between infection and showing symptoms.
3. The virus doesn't become infectious until there are symptoms.
4. The most infectious people are the ones who are dying or already dead - which is about a month after the initial infection.

From that, you can very roughly predict that the number of infected people will double every few weeks if unchecked. From one initial victim in the USA right now - and assuming the same kind of numbers that we've seen in Africa, it would take around 20 cycles of infection to reach over a million people - and at three to six weeks per cycle, that's one or two years. To reach the entire population of the USA would take 16 to 20 years.

Compare that to (for example) influenza - that can cause around 5 million infections in a matter of a few months. It manages that because it's relatively non-lethal, people are infectious before they show symptoms - and it's airborn...none of which is true for Ebola.

But even that relatively slow rate of spread for ebola assumes many things - for example, that the scale of the medical response would be comparable to Africa - and that the rates of infection would be similar. Much of the problem in Africa has been the culture of funeral preparations, with the family washing the corpse - and the desire to care for sick people at home - both of which are just the perfect situation for Ebola to spread. It doesn't help that many of the local people deny that the disease is real - or claim it's caused by witchcraft or - all sorts of bizarre things. Since none of those things would be true in the USA, and the response to a widespread problem would be so much more intense - I think it's safe to assume that the disease cannot spread anything like that quickly here.

It's hard to know for sure though. These things are quite hard to predict.

SteveBaker (talk) 03:08, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

The tendency of Ebola to be most infectious in the dying would seem to argue against it becoming less lethal by natural selection. (Though some odd information about Ebola in semen [18] or even speculations about asymptomatic carriers might offer a whole different adaptive peak for it to jump to) As for our reporting about Africans' weird beliefs, the Africans have some similar stories about us. There's actually a germ of truth, so to speak, in both that account and ours, but let's not drink the Kool-Aid. We've had just a few cases in the U.S. and already our health people seem to be just as vulnerable as the ones who have been dying in droves in Africa. Wnt (talk) 03:22, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Re: "already our health people seem to be just as vulnerable", the "already" seems to imply it would get worse. On the contrary, now that we know how easy it is for medical workers to become infected, we will take better precautions in the future. StuRat (talk) 16:45, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Yep. The social system is an adaptive immune system, too. InedibleHulk (talk) 16:49, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

By "already", I meant that I thought the U.S. system with all its resources would do somewhat better than Africa, so we wouldn't be seeing a nurse dying on the very first case. I mean, the Liberians treat thousands of people and have lost 'only' hundreds of health care people. This gives me a strong sense (albeit with a sample size of 1) that the U.S. doesn't have much of a margin of safety over Liberia at all. There could be things that are simply wrong with our assumptions, like airborne transmission, asymptomatic carriers, etc., that would explain why nobody's health care people are safe. Wnt (talk) 17:41, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

One of the differences is that in Africa each health care worker treats dozens of patients, and in the US there are dozens of health workers for a single patient (for example, 70 staff contributed to Mr. Duncan's care). As a ratio, I'm pretty sure that the (number of health workers infected)/(number of health workers treating Ebola patients) will be much lower in the US than Africa. However, just having so many people involved exposes a lot of people to risk, and only one person needs to mess up or be confused about protocol in order for bad things to happen. One of the CDC's updated guidelines after the nurse got infected was aimed at reducing the number of staff involved in treating Ebola patients, which seems like a good thing. Dragons flight (talk) 21:20, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Beginner's luck. Let's have a few more rounds before we jump to conclusions about how it fares without its vanishing rainforest and fruit bats. InedibleHulk (talk) 17:56, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

That implies that health care workers are just as likely to catch ebola on their first case as their thousandth. I don't think that's true. There's a tombstone mentality in place that prevents hospitals from getting the proper equipment and implementing the proper procedures until a few people die, or, more importantly from their POV, mult-million dollar lawsuits are filed against them because of those deaths. At that point they will act. Also, the health care workers will now refuse to enter ebola patient rooms without the proper equipment. However, if we then go for years without another health care worker infection, human nature is to let our guard down, and then they will start to be infected again. StuRat (talk) 18:10, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Well, at the rate things are going I think we're going to need to fly in some experts from Liberia to help us figure this whole biocontainment thing out. Wnt (talk) 13:50, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

Where the hell did the pictures in the article come from? I don't want to look at the rest. Okay, people will make pictures of bleeding anime girls, (I think at least the skull and maybe face might be the same as a recent rule.34.paheal,net featured "porn", don't know tried not to look and kill my boner) but where did the Ebola hoaxers find a picture of this and more framed on a nice wall? They must really be into this to shoot these photos on an African budget, or to Photoshop it this good. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 11:00, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

@Sagittarian Milky Way: Believe me, these are not good at all compared to some of the ones you can find on 4chan now! :) Just don't believe everything you see; there are occasional not so subtle hints that there is a certain amount of trolling involved. See also [19]. At any given time boards.4chan.org/pol/ will probably have such a thread going, but there's a grand gallery at encyclopediadramatica.se/Ebola-chan for you to make what you will of. (OTOH there was a very curious claim by one person at 4chan that the phenomenon was a form of chaos magic meant to develop "Ebola-chan" through a sequence of "sigil - servant - egregore - godform", which if trolling was certainly the most creative kind. And of course I can't help but find similarity with Shitala and Santa Muerte; others were suggested there) Wnt (talk) 12:21, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

@Wnt: Well in my defense I only looked a second time to see if her hair was blood too, so only saw the first two (the same one) non-peripherally, and didn't have time for thorough inspection. And instinctually thought the 3rd world would be a more likely source of the hoax and of people who'd enjoy painfully killing many thousands of people with a prank (and possibly causing the end of human civilization by one of the cases he caused mutating into a pandemic supervirus, though an extra-African epidemic is unlikely)

The pic reminds me of the Masque of the Red Death which scared the shit out of me at 6 (but I still felt compelled to finish). The one about the fog that melted townspeople's flesh to the bone. Coincidentally, I've thought for years that some of the famous New Age song Only Time (her singing 2.75 "Iiiii love you"s, playing it backwards, and putting her try at imitating it very sweetly in the final cut) would become "Ebola Day, Ebola Day, E.. bo.. Day.." with an extra "b". This should be added to the meme. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 23:07, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

@Wnt: Your right, the Nairaland production values are crap. Almost all are unframed stupid sketches or obvious printouts and not serious attempts at misleading Africans (though people still fall for obvious jokes (compare Nigerian scams) so I'd still call the Nairaland post almost equivalent to attempted homicide). For some reason the picture looked satanic on my crappy low resolution phone when at minimum brightness, made me think she her hair was bleeding instead of pink. The full set is not even scary, lol. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 02:37, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

• The obvious factor is the human one, speed and will to act, competing agendas. We could quarantine the Western Hemisphere, and it wold still take one missile or suicide sneezer to break the quarantine. And f Africa gets worse you will see more and more anger at the US because the US is the US. The biggest paper in Liberia has already said there is no disease, and that the disease is an American plot. (Presumably run by Confederate Army zombies.) We could, shut down the southern border, bomb it to destroy any tunnels, shut down transatlantic/oceanic traffic, remove all research restrictions by already licensed medical institutions on already infected patients, offer a tax free award for a 95% effective vaccine, waive all taxes on any research on finding and profit due to marketing a cure. What company running trial would not want to have to stop paying its researchers income tax and have no tax on the drug for a 25 year period? Of course there are established interests that would squeal like stuck pigs against such measures and the precedents they would set. We have a populace divided between the 6,000 year old earth, bring on the rapture, fingers in the ears, and the panem et circenses set, we have politicians who go along to get along with monied interests, we have "what difference, now, does it make?" responsibility deniers and we have federal law banning the sale of cupcakes in school fundraisers while the NSA records these keystrokes. What we need is a culture that thinks 25 years ahead, not 25 minutes. μηδείς (talk) 03:24, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

• • Unfortunately, the stated or unstated reaction to long-term planning is the old adage, "In the long-term, we're all dead." Hence the focus on the here-and-now. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:02, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

A realistic scenarios that would lead to problems in the US could be due to a terror attack. Such a terror attack could involve ISIS members who deliberately let themselves get infected in West Africa. A group of such infected ISIS members will then travel together with some non-infected ISIS members to New York where they move into an appartment. There they wait until the infected ISIS members get ill. Body fluids are then collected from them, when they die they can process the entire body. They can then use the collected body fluids to make a sort of "Ebola spray". The ISIS members then travel to different parts of the US with such sprays and then infect places such as public toilets (spraying on toilet paper, towels etc. will be effective), toilets in restaurants, hotels etc. Spraying on items for sale in grocery stores can also be effective, although that runs the risk of detection by security cameras. Some ISIS members will board cruise ships and use the Ebola spray there, others will board planes and try to get people infected there.

Within a few days a massive Ebola outbreak will then start all over the US. On the cruise ships all hell will break lose, there almost everyone will get infected due to everyone being stuck on the boat with a limited number of toilets. On the mainland, when this all starts the infected people can easily infect others, because almost no one of the infected people will have visited West Africa recently, so they will think they have a stomach flu and simply stay at home; few will seek medical attention immediately after the first symptoms. And when they do get medical attention they will end up infecting doctors and hospital staff, as they will not consider Ebola as the likely cause. It will take a few days before it will be clear that it's in fact a massive Ebola outbreak and not some virus like Norovirus. The cause will then not be clear, which then leads to panic about Ebola having mutated into an airborn variant. Count Iblis (talk) 03:54, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

@Count Iblis: it seems like this scenario would have obvious problems at border security, informers, surveillance, and the occasional over-curious mall security cop who blows the lid on the whole scheme when he sees somebody spraying goo on the merchandise. But while there are many obvious ways they could commit major terrorism with the virus, any one scenario seems much too speculative. Wnt (talk) 05:46, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Yes, but then the concern about ISIS is that there are quite a few US citizens who are ISIS members. They could just get on a plane from Brussels to New York and no one would notice anything. Count Iblis (talk) 16:10, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

@Count Iblis: I can't find any hits by Google, but there used to be some handy and truthful aphorism in the past like "whenever three people conspire together ... one of them is a government agent." Except where U.S. members of ISIS are concerned, it's probably more like two of them. I mean, apart from being a government agent, there's not a whole heck of a lot of motive I can see to join them. Anyway... I think they'd find five agents who had been secretly promised ZMapp access long before they found one member genuinely willing to die that way. Wnt (talk) 17:35, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Medeis always semms to give very different answers wikipeddians199.7.159.25 (talk) 03:56, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Before impeaching Medeis' comments, you should read Count Iblis' sci-fi scenario immediately above. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:01, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

We seem to be getting trolled repeatedly by someone from western Canada. That's of no importance. The OP here asked how bad Ebola could get, not how lucky we will be in the US. Everything I have said can be reffed, not that I will bother on a thread that I would have closed, except that some IP would immediately have re-opened it. You gotta pay the troll toll.... μηδείς (talk) 04:29, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Iblis, what would happen several years down the road in this scenario?199.7.159.25 (talk) 04:06, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

The 1918 flu pandemic killed at least 50 million people, including my grandfather's first wife, leaving him a widower with four young children. He hired a sturdy farm girl to help out, they fell in love, married, and had another three children. The youngest was my mother, born in 1930 when my grandfather was 49 years old. Life goes on, and if not for that pandemic, I would not have been born. Modern people rarely think of that horrible pandemic of 96 years ago. My guess is that this Ebola epidemic will be contained with less than 100,000 deaths. Very nasty but life will go on. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 04:40, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

There's a lot more information out there than there was in 1918, so such a pandemic is rather less likely. Flu is still a killer, though. In America, with early detection and aggressive treatment of the symptoms, it is thought the recovery rate from Ebola would be reasonably high. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 06:30, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Of course, they still can't actually do anything to the virus, just replace what you bleed out, give liquid by vein so you don't shit to death, feed you by vein, and make sure your fever doesn't rise above 106 and hope that the virus doesn't eat you alive. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 11:17, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Apart from brincidofovir and passive immunization (blood/serum transfusions/intravenous immunoglobulin/ZMapp), you mean. Wnt (talk) 12:57, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, all out of ZMapp. And as the brincidofovir article notes, the one patient it was used on died. InedibleHulk (talk) 14:33, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

If the terrorist scenario above happened (not physically impossible), I think the world supply of (non-supportive care) drugs, survivors' antibodies, and Ebola monkeys would be used up and many would die before survivor fluid got low-virus enough save them. Also ZMapp says a man died after taking it (though he was 75). Ebola virus disease should not say in the lead that treatment is supportive full stop. It should say that a small quantity of experimental anti virus medicine is available. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 00:15, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

• Back in 1994 I bought one of those scary books (you know the kind I mean) titled [The Coming Plague': Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance]. Ebola is mentioned in several places, so I conclude that the risk of an Ebola pandemic has been accepted as possible for decades. Viruses evolve, and this strain appears to have moved on from being primarily a zoonotic disease to one that finds human primates a good host to propagate Ebola's own kind. Therefore, whatever was accepted medical sciences concerning Ebola up to now, may not be applicable to day... October 14th 2014. Just as epidemiologist are puzzled as to why the plague suddenly spread though out Europe. There may be billions of us but there are Quintillions of Ebola viruses. 'Each one' may may have just that RNA mutation that allows Ebola to find humans a nice place to manufacture more of their off spring. Lastly: The public are getting confused by mixed massages. On-the-one-hand, Health Experts say Ebola is not very infectious... we have a better heath system and on TV the public see-footage-from-Africa with a poor health system but clinicians are never-the less running around in full isolation suits – and then, an a US nurse contracts Ebola and a Reverse 911 gets invoked. Having said that, we must congratulate the Pubic Health Officials from saving the world from an AID's pandemic by pointing out it was only a homosexual problem. Oh, how would we survive without the help of these heathcare Armchair generals? So, that is why you have never meet anyone with AIDs. Oh you DO know someone or some people with AID's! Then, maybe these Armchair generals fall down on the job sometimes but only 9 out of ten times. BUT It is the ten % when their right (and thier family and collage conections) that earns their saliaries. </sarcasm> Wake up America.--Aspro (talk) 16:44, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Wow. "AID's"! Now that's a blast from the past! Where does a person even pick up such a variant of AIDS? Maybe it's a mutant. :) Also, technically we're the armchair generals - anyone, regardless of competence, who actually commands the troops is just a plain general. Wnt (talk) 17:25, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

"Pubic health officials" must have an interesting job.  :) -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:12, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Nah, there all just a bunch of nit pickers. StuRat (talk) 01:40, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

Following up on an earlier comment someone made, the nurse in the Texas case is saying they did not have "proper protocol", at least not at first, and that's probably how she caught the bug. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 08:08, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

• A second nurse has developed Ebola in Dallas. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/10/15/ebola-diagnosis-for-2nd-texas-hospital-worker-raising-questions-over-virus/ So much for three->one model. μηδείς (talk) 17:12, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

According to one CDC paper dealing with estimates of the eventual spread of cases in East Africa the number of cases in the outbreak zone doubles every 20 days. So far, despite good "barrier nursing" techniques of the sort CDC's been saying should prevent spread of Ebola at all, the strain of Ebola Mr. Duncan of Liberia brought to Dallas has already "doubled" - to two of his caregivers at Texas Health Presbyterian.

Not to be unduly scary, but one of those caregivers had flown on an aircraft while feverish, before being diagnosed with Ebola. By the time you're feverish, you're shedding Ebola virus in your bodily fluids, which include your spit - which can travel through the air when you cough or sneeze. Let's say that both of that caregiver's seatmates (on the same row) breathed in some droplets from a sneeze or cough. If each of them breaks with Ebola (doubling, just like Duncan's case doubled to two of his nurses), odds are that they might infect two more folks in 20 days. Or sooner. If you're curious how this works, Stephen King's The Stand has a very easy to understand explanation of just how rapidly an airborne disease can spread, just assuming it spreads as fast as the common cold. My copy of that book's in a box somewhere, but it's just after "Captain Trips" gets to Arnette, Texas.

"Doubling" in West Africa, according to the CDC paper I cited just now, this new strain of Ebola went from 44 cases in Guinea in March of this year to an estimated 1.4 million cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone by January 20, 2015. That's assuming the number of cases doubles between every 15-20 days.

Here, we could hope for a much slower rate of doubling because we have more hospitals and COULD have even more hospitals (pre-packaged Army Medical Corps hospitals, in inflatable tents and such). That creates fewer opportunities for spread from person-to-person here as opposed to the present outbreak zones - ASSUMING all infectees and exposed people are promptly identified and treated. Let's hope that we're worrying for nothing, no one caught the new strain of Ebola on an aircraft, and those nurses come out of it all right. loupgarous (talk) 14:25, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

"Let's say that both of that caregiver's seatmates (on the same row) breathed in some droplets from a sneeze or cough." This is not a likely transmission route for the disease. Snopes has a fairly well-referenced summary of this with information from WHO and CDC. - Eron^Talk 15:04, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Reston ebolavirus (which isn't virulent in man but deadly in the crab-eating monkey, which is imported here in lots from the Philippines for laboratory work) is thought by researchers at the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Disease (USAMRIID) to possibly be droplet-transmissible. Droplet transmission was assumed to be the mode of transmission between two monkeys in a BL4 lab dedicated to Ebola and Reston. So we know some ebolaviruses do spread that way. We don't know why Reston doesn't seem to make humans ill, nor do we know why it's droplet transmissible and the other Ebola viruses studied to date don't seem to be.

But so far, quite a few health-care workers who are using the same barrier technique (gowns, masks and gloves) CDC says should stop Ebola are catching this bug. That includes the nurses at Texas Health Presbyterian who treated Duncan in Dallas and fell ill with his strain of Ebola.

Don't get me wrong, I'd be delighted to be proven utterly wrong on this. But Snopes.com tends to cover for the Democratic Party and this administration a lot. Not the most objective guys in the world; I've caught them in some awful fancy hand-waving about Al Gore's use of energy (odd that someone who thinks the polar bears are all going to drown because of global warnming has a heated pool... but I don't work for snopes.com) loupgarous (talk) 16:09, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

It's a mistake to assume the current rate of spreading will continue. The most susceptible people get diseases first, then the less susceptible are left. This includes survivors with antibodies, those with an inherent immunity, and those who either didn't engage in unsafe practices in the first place, like bathing the dead, or have learned not to. Even before modern medicine, plagues eventually ended. But with meds and better info, the hope is to end them far sooner. StuRat (talk) 14:48, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Take it up with the authors of that CDC paper I quoted earlier, Stu. Their figures, not mine. And admittedly, the 1.4 million includes a fudge factor that assumes the reported cases so far are only SOME of the total, according to the authors. I'd be happy as Hell to learn they were panicking and totally wrong. loupgarous (talk) 16:09, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

The sooner we stop sneezing on doorknobs, the sooner we can stop spending money on Don't Sneeze on Doorknobs campaigns. That goes equally for ebola and the disease that kills thousands of Americans each year, every year. But as of seven minutes ago, just try not to touch any doorknobs. InedibleHulk (talk) 15:32, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Good point about the flu. Ironically, we're all sweating over a bug that'll probably never kill more than a dozen people here, and accepting the fact that thousands of Americans will die from influenza or its late complications. If an Ebola vaccine even existed, you couldn't keep it in the pharmacies; but many people can't be bothered to roll up their sleeves at those same pharmacies to get their flu shots. Go figure. loupgarous (talk) 16:09, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

If we rolled up our sleeves, we'd have nowhere appropriate to sneeze. InedibleHulk (talk) 16:29, 17 October 2014 (UTC)