Watching "Hot Zone", a National Geographic dramatization of the history of the last Ebola outbreak, and it's making me paranoid.
One thing I did not know, we first found out about the outbreak when 6 monkeys died in DC, and we tracked it back to Africa.
Does that make you paranoid? Ebola Zaire (90% fatality rate), spreads through bodily fluids. No cure, no effective treatment.
@Lulz4l1f3 No, because things like ebola are scary, but burn out fast because people just die. They don't run around quietly infecting people for a long time before they show symptoms.
I'd sure hate an ebola or marburg virus with a 2-week incubation time where you're infectious though.
@AskTheDevil People die an average of 8 days after showing symptoms.
Quarantine and testing is 21 days.
It's not airborne, thankfully.
I'm at the point where international disease control goes to an infected village only to find that the village has been burned down and the bodies burned to contain the virus.
Everbody in the Army and at the company that provides monkeys is starting to think about all the people and things they touched before they knew something might be wrong.
@Lulz4l1f3 The incubation period, especially when it has an infectious/contagious period, is the dangerous part as far as wide transmission.
When someone starts spewing blood, it makes people not want to touch them, and they die without spreading it to people unknowingly.
It's when someone's wandering around looking normal for weeks, infecting others that you get pandemics.
@AskTheDevil Or when they present with flu sumptoms and spread their sweaty fluid all over at doctors' offices, among their families, or mass transit, planes, etc.
We've been lucky to contain outbreaks in the US before they killed thousands.
@Lulz4l1f3 @AskTheDevil From what I remember of The Hot Zone book, one of the big concerns from the Reston lab, was the fear that the virus might mutate and become airborne. The book, at least, certainly hyped that possibility.