I ran across an op-ed piece on how we might be making Ebola worse. Yes, worse. That's a startling thought since most people want to minimize the spread of Ebola and have it burn out while preventing as many deaths as possible. Yet the author, a physician, author and epidemiologist, points out some things we may be doing that could hamper achieving the above goals.
This is a quick read, well worth the few minutes it will take. It's great to find the occasional article that is calm, makes sense and doesn't hype the Ebolaphobia hysteria.
Come on below the sinuous shepherd's crook virus for more.
The author of the article is Bill Foege. Some of you may be familiar with him. He was a former head of the CDC. Dr. Foege got an MD and later received his MPH from Harvard. He was a member of the CDC's Epidemiology Intelligence Service where he received two years of post-grad training. He's a noted epidemiologist and is credited with being one of the leaders who helped to stamp out smallpox. Foege developed the concept of "ring vaccination" that made the fight against this disease easier. He wrote a book about the global effort to eliminate this plague: House on Fire: The Fight to Eradicate Smallpox. Among several other awards, President Obama gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.
Foege says:
It’s important to realize Ebola is a living creature. Control of infectious diseases is a continuous evolutionary contest between microorganisms and humans fighting for turf. Science inches ahead as it gains more understanding of those organisms, which often leads to new medications and vaccines. Then we may find those very organisms evolving in response.
He points out that dealing with any infectious disease, tuberculosis, gonorrhea, staphylococcal infections and others is a learning experience for both the humans and the microorganisms.
But gonorrhea defied penicillin; staph overcame many antibiotics; and tuberculosis learned to live with multiple drugs. All these organisms are too small to have a brain. Yet they figured out how to beat us.
And we're fighting back against those diseases just as we are against Ebola.
He suggests that being critical of science's efforts is fine, criticism can lead the way to new ideas. But excessive criticism can act to hamper science. He also mentions that making political decisions and calling them necessary public health measures, is dangerous.
http://www.humanosphere.org/...