“There’s nothing to be optimistic about,” warns the professor who developed the Global Epidemic and Mobility Model to assess outbreaks, “if the number of cases increases and we are not able to start taming the epidemic, then it will be too late. And then it requires an effort that will be impossible to bring on the ground.” As FredHutch reports, the deadly Ebola epidemic raging across West Africa will likely get far worse before it gets better, more than doubling the number of known cases by the end of this month, predicting as many as 10,000 cases of Ebola virus disease could be detected by Sept. 24 – and thousands more after that. “The cat’s already out of the box – way, way out,” as the analysis of global mobility and epidemic patterns shows a rougly 25% chance of Ebola detection in the UK by the end of September and 18% it will turn up in the USA. “I hope to be wrong, he concludes, but “the data points are still aligned with the worst-case scenario.”
The next three weeks will be crucial to determining whether the Ebola outbreak is tamed or rages out of control, the experts agreed.
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WHO officials have predicted as many as 20,000 cases of Ebola and laid out a “road map” for the outbreak response that calls for stopping the outbreak within six to nine months. But that’s only if a “massive” global response is implemented.
The scenario modeled in the new paper suggests that the actual number of cases could far exceed the WHO estimate – and far sooner. Vespignani said he and his colleagues are calibrating the model every couple of weeks to see whether there’s any change. So far, the answer is no.
“The data points are still aligned with the worst-case scenario,” Vespignani said. “It’s a bad feeling. I hope to be wrong.”
That’s a sentiment echoed by Longini, who said that he and other disease modelers are dismayed by what they see.
“There’s nothing to be optimistic about,” he said. “It’s frustrating. It feels like there should be a more concentrated international effort to help these countries.”
The latest counts Monday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which include WHO and Ministry of Health reports, put the total at 4,061 cases and 2,107 deaths.
The deadly Ebola epidemic raging across West Africa will likely get far worse before it gets better, more than doubling the number of known cases by the end of this month.
That’s the word from disease modelers at Northeastern University and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, who predict as many as 10,000 cases of Ebola virus disease could be detected by Sept. 24 – and thousands more after that.
“The epidemic just continues to spread without any end in sight,” said Dr. Ira Longini, a biostatistician at the the University of Florida and an affiliated member of Fred Hutch’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease and Public Health Sciences divisions. “The cat’s already out of the box – way, way out.”
It’s only a matter of time, they add, before the virus could start spreading to other places, including previously unaffected countries in Africa and developed nations like the United Kingdom — and the U.S., according to a paper published Sept. 2 in the journal PLOS Currents Outbreaks.
There’s a roughly 25 percent chance Ebola will be detected in the United Kingdom– and as much as an 18 percent chance it will turn up in the U.S. – by the end of September, the analysis of global mobility and epidemic patterns shows. The new paper includes the top 16 countries where Ebola is most likely to spread.
Though concerning, a spread to Western nations is not the biggest threat. At most, there would be a cluster of a few cases imported to the U.S., probably through air travel.
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“We are at a crucial point,” Vespiginani said. “If the number of cases increases and we are not able to start taming the epidemic, then it will be too late. And then it requires an effort that will be impossible to bring on the ground.”
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As we noted previously, this is anything but “contained”
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As another epidemiolgist (and federal advisor) – Dr. Michael T. Osterholm of the University of Minnesotta – warns:
I’ve spent enough time around public health people, in the US and in the field, to understand that they prefer to express themselves conservatively. So when they indulge in apocalyptic language, it is unusual, and notable.
When one of the most senior disease detectives in the US begins talking about “plague,” knowing how emotive that word can be, and another suggests calling out the military, it is time to start paying attention.
There are two possible future chapters to this story that should keep us up at night.
The first possibility is that the Ebola virus spreads from West Africa to megacities in other regions of the developing world. This outbreak is very different from the 19 that have occurred in Africa over the past 40 years. It is much easier to control Ebola infections in isolated villages. But there has been a 300 percent increase in Africa’s population over the last four decades, much of it in large city slums…
The second possibility is one that virologists are loath to discuss openly but are definitely considering in private: that an Ebola virus could mutate to become transmissible through the air… viruses like Ebola are notoriously sloppy in replicating, meaning the virus entering one person may be genetically different from the virus entering the next. The current Ebola virus’s hyper-evolution is unprecedented; there has been more human-to-human transmission in the past four months than most likely occurred in the last 500 to 1,000 years. Each new infection represents trillions of throws of the genetic dice.
And finally, as Wired reports, the professor extrapolates:
In a worst-case hypothetical scenario, should the outbreak continue with recent trends, the case burden could gain an additional 77,181 to 277,124 cases by the end of 2014.
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1uP8GHi Tyler Durden