Encouraging that the percentage is better than average this time. In '76 the world thought it might be looking at the next pandemic virus but unless we get very unlucky it looks like that won't happen.
This doesn't leave me feeling particularly heartened. It's also pretty shocking that, although this latest Zaire outbreak tracks historically as one of the least fatal, its fatality rate is still double that of the most common strain of smallpox. But I suppose it's not quite as virulent?Ebola is relatively hard to catch[...] In order to get Ebola, someone must touch the blood or bodily fluids (including sweat, urine, and semen) of a person or animal who's infected (alive or dead). People can also catch it through indirect contact with victims' fluids, such as via bedding or medical equipment.
Richard Preston made the point that Ebola is a failure of a virus: a good pathogen lets its hosts live long enough to spread contagion far and wide. A long incubation is prime. There's also no advantage to lethality - the more of your hosts you kill, the less likely the disease is to spread. Ebola hits like lightning, looks freaky as fuck, and kills you very dead. The 1990 outbreak had a fatality rate of 90%. Smallpox, on the other hand, spreads easily, incapacitates, scars and kills. Humans lived with Smallpox for millenia. It's well-adapted to preying on us. You'd have to be crazy to weaponize Ebola. Smallpox? Been there, done that. Anthrax? Anthrax is the gold standard of area denial bioweapons because it's stable as hell, incubates forever, spreads easily and the only way to kill it is to bake the dirt it lives in to 400 degrees. The holy grail of apocalyptic bioagents is airborne rabies, though. Pull that one off and you've got 28 days later.
There's a weird comfort in the idea that the more immediately violent/deadly a virus is, the less likely it is to succeed in the long term. On the other hand, what still gives me the creeping willies about ebola is that for the first week or two it presents as something akin to the flu, at which point it's communicable. You want a fun laundry list of scary stuff that could be used against anybody by just about anybody, pick up this book: Actually, don't. Larry Wayne Harris is totally crackerjacks, a white supremacist/separatist, a conspiracy theorist, and has been arrested on occasion for stockpiling anthrax (later revealed to be a harmless strain) and attempting to procure plague bacteria. Ostensibly the book was published as a kind of doomsday prepper handbook, but it reads more like a how-to guide re. well-poisoning and general mayhem-wreaking. Case in point, it starts off with a careful diagram of how to build a grenade launcher (plus grenade) out of hardware store items. You know, because that helps you protect against potential BW attacks, I guess? Got my hands on this for my final project in college in order to make a point about how easy it is to find how-to literature re. homemade WMD. Flashy move, helped get me an A, but I'm pretty sure that purchase alone put me on all sorts of watchlists. And if that didn't, uploading a pic of it onto a messageboard and then executing back-to-back Google searches on "Larry Wayne Harris," "Anthrax communicability," and "Yersinia Pestis" probably will. Dear NSA: I'm not a terrorist. But you already know that, don't you?Anthrax is the gold standard of area denial bioweapons because it's stable as hell, incubates forever, spreads easily and the only way to kill it is to bake the dirt it lives in to 400 degrees.
It's also pretty non-communicable from person to person which strikes me as pretty damn important when you're dealing with BW. Seems like a hell of a gamble to dump something terrible on a population without controlling for blowback.
Keep meaning to study up on Israel/Palestine- feel increasingly guilty that I know close to jack about regional history/geopolitics, esp. in light of recent developments. Commenting on the situation with only a passing familiarity with the last 20+ years situation feels pretty fraught...
More likely than not, we're all labeled terrorists here