Ebola Quiz in Three Questions. Doctor Ron Paul's DDT Elixir. Plus, "Scared Enough...."

-- Ebola Expert on Ron Paul: "He Really Fxcked Up" in Foreign Policy

The Pauls' job -- father and son -- is to gather up CT addicts and broadband kooks to vote Republican. They pander to nuts. You want a full dose of their scams, have a go at Voices for Liberty and their various newsletters. And yeah, that goes to echoing the fantastic claim that the poisonous Doctor Paul's DDT Elixir can stamp out Ebola:

Once-and-future libertarian champion, self-declared "former" physician, and former veteran lawmaker Ron Paul has weighed in on Ebola. The good news: the virus poses no risk to America, as he announced in a video on voicesofliberty.com (or his "digital bully pulpit," as the Texan calls it). Then again, "governments deceive us and sometimes they hype things," Paul warns. Fair enough.

So Paul proposes his own "viable alternative for treatment": the controversial insecticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, more commonly known as DDT, regarded as a legitimate means of controlling mosquito-born diseases such as malaria. But for decades there's also been a heated debate over just how bad DDT is for humans and the environment, sparked by the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. The U.S. banned DDT for agricultural use in 1972; in 2004, the Stockholm Convention restricted its use to disease control.  

Dr. Paul pooh-poohs such science. "The absolute proof of the danger of DDT was never -- as far as I'm concerned -- proven," the father of Sen. Rand Paul says. Instead, our treatment of choice for Ebola is "very expensive organic phosphates," that kill people, he claims. "If DDT isn't quite as dangerous as they said, and if you could save a million people from this illness ... then we could think about it."

Poison them. All of them. And don't bother to bury the dead -- abandon Africa while you're at it.

Efforts are made in GOPland to differentiate the Pauls from their publications. Ron and Rand aren't racist freaks, you see.... No one should be fooled.

EBOLA QUIZ:

1. If you're in a hot area and you brush arms with someone carrying the EBOV virus, what are the odds on some of these Zaire Ebola virus bodies being transferred to you?

2. How many EBOV virus bodies does it take to generate the disease Ebola hemorrhagic fever?

3. What is the latency period between entry of the virus and development of disease symptoms?

-- 1. Virtually 100%. EBOV passes in sweat. See the WHO Africa FAQ page. From getting on your skin to getting inside your body is the major unknown. Much depends on details of your personal hygiene and social interaction practices.
-- 2. From 1 to 9 individual virus bodies. This is not micrograms per cc or some such. It is individual macroprotein molecules. But they do have to move inside your body as through your mouth, eyes, or an open wound. Getting in through healthy skin is thought not to be an access point; you wouldn't want to bet your life on it.
-- 3. Book says 2 to 21 days. However, semen has tested positive 63 days after "recovery" and release from hospital. That male individual remained latent and asymptomatic, as defined for other infectious diseases. Both relapse and transmission are possible for unknown periods -- the 21 day rule is a practical guide, not a tested scientific fact.

WHERE WE ARE

Here's some of the best of independent analysis.

From Laurie Garret, Pulitzer Prize winner:

Last week, my brilliant Council on Foreign Relations colleague John Campbell, former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria, warned that spread of the virus inside Lagos -- which has a population of 22 million -- would instantly transform this situation into a worldwide crisis, thanks to the chaos, size, density, and mobility of not only that city but dozens of others in the enormous, oil-rich nation. Add to the Nigerian scenario civil war, national elections, Boko Haram terrorists, and a countrywide doctors' strike -- all of which are real and current -- and you have a scenario so overwrought and frightening that I could not have concocted it even when I advised screenwriter Scott Burns on his Contagion script....

Let's be clear: Absolutely no drug or vaccine has been proven effective against the Ebola virus in human beings. To date, only one person -- Dr. Kent Brantly -- has apparently recovered after receiving one of the three prominent putative drugs, and there is no proof that the drug was key to his improvement. None of the potential vaccines has even undergone Phase One safety trials in humans, though at least two are scheduled to enter that stage before December of this year. And Phase One is the swiftest, easiest part of new vaccine trials -- the two stages of clinical trials aimed at proving that vaccines actually work will be difficult, if not impossible, to ethically and safely execute. If one of the vaccines is ready to be used in Africa sometime in 2015, the measure will be executed without prior evidence that it can work, which in turn will require massive public education to ensure that people who receive the vaccination do not change their behaviors in ways that might put them in contact with Ebola -- because they mistakenly believe they are immune to the virus.

We are in for a very long haul... Nigeria is struggling to ensure that no secondary spread of Ebola comes from one of the people already infected by Liberian traveler Patrick Sawyer -- two of whom have died so far. That effort was expanded on Wednesday, when Nigerian health authorities announced that a nurse who had treated Sawyer had escaped her quarantine confinement in Lagos and traveled to Enugu, (in) a state that, as of 2006, has a population of about 3 million. Though the nurse has not shown symptoms of the disease, the incubation time for infection, which is up to 21 days, hasn't elapsed....

That nurse died. The virus went on from Lagos to Port Harcourt, well to the south.

And the nurse got as far as the city of Enugu which is in Eastern Nigeria. We have no real idea on the maximum possible latency for Ebola. The 63 day after-hospitalization presence in semen suggests both relapses and much delayed onset in unusual situations.

Mean for latency could be 7 or 8 days. And it could be a Bell curve phenomenon, statistically.

We are seeing 45 documented deaths a day for the last two weeks. Together with an estimate for three or four times that many undocumented deaths. That is well more than twice the documented death rate from a month ago.

Fact is, any high-density slum can turn into an Ebola petri dish. If you would wish that it can kill onlys 50% of the slum dwellers, that's optimism. Multiple exposures and no medical care -- not reasons for optimism.

The Google World Map update page for Ebola

When the page gets fully loaded, click the "+" sign three times to zoom in and you can see the cities individually along with the event tags. As it loads originally, it's a bit of a mess.

GOING FORWARD:

I do not see the U.S. government throwing $5,000,000,000 at this problem. I see nickel-and-dime silliness. And that after the WHO budget was cut a couple years back.

This inaction is not caution. It is something. I'm not sure there's a word for it, but I'm not a whiz with the NY Times crossword puzzle, either.

Please enlighten me.

If you be a dkos-atheist, please pray for a god to appear. A new super-duper-deity would fit the bill. Because West Africa and then all the equatorial nations, and then every low-investment slum in the world are going to need Divine Intervention.

If this disease "runs its course" and "burns out," the statistical projections and simulations run from 5,000,000 dead to 50,000,000 dead in equatorial African nations and the large African urban slums.  The combination of sweat transmission and the 1-to-9-virus-bodies generation efficiency is unprecedented for contagious diseases. Traditional quarantine measures are not designed to meet this level of threat.

"Going airborne" is irrelevant.

Yeah, Divine Intervention.