The Ebola Thread: Ebola is an economic black swan - outbreak is out of control.; What if Ebola hits Australian shores? Race to notify 131 passengers on flight that carried second infected nurse
Tweet Topic Started: 11 Aug 2014, 01:48 PM (5,775 Views)
The economic impact of Ebola on Liberia will be truly one of the most devastating and, I predict, lasting consequences of the virus. Over a decade since the end of conflict, Liberia and the government have made great strides towards renewing their image. The government has renewed many concessions, driving foreign direct investment into the country’s most abundant resource sectors. Additionally, a variety of very strong organizations, such as the BSC (Business Start-up Center), have made large investments to develop human capital capacity and to support small businesses and entrepreneurs.
But now, the momentum and growth which had been achieved across the Liberian economy is virtually driving to a halt. Large concessions will continue to operate, but the prospect of attracting new investments in natural resources will be slim as long as Ebola ravages the country. More damaging will be the effects on people already living at the bottom of the income scale. The suspension of small business support services and entrepreneurial development will drastically reduce the earning potential and employment generation which occurs at that level of society.
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Australian mining firm Tawana Resources has suspended all non-essential field activities at its iron ore project in Liberia because of the risk from the Ebola virus outbreak.
The company’s Mofe Creek project, with first phase output of 2mn t of iron ore, will suspend its drilling programme temporarily but continue all other activities associated with its pre-feasibility study not requiring direct field work.
Steel and mining company ArcelorMittal on Friday announced force majeure on a project that is planned to triple its iron ore production in Liberia because of the Ebola epidemic sweeping West Africa.
Toronto-based Aureus Mining Inc granted leave to non-essential staff at its New Liberty gold deposit in Liberia.
…Canadian Overseas Petroleum Ltd, ExxonMobil Corp’s partner in a venture to explore the Block LB-13 project off the coast of Liberia, has said that drilling will be delayed due to the “reduced presence of expatriates”.
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Researchers have devoted lots of time to building a vaccine that could stop the disease altogether — and according to Daniel Bausch, a Tulane professor who researches Ebola and other infectious diseases, they’re making really significant progress.
Bausch says that the obstacle to developing an Ebola vaccine isn’t the science; researchers have actually made really great strides in figuring out how to fight back against Ebola and the Marburg virus, a similar disease.
“We now have a couple of different vaccine platforms that have shown to be protective with non-human primates,” says Bausch, who has received awards for his work containing disease outbreaks in Uganda. He is currently stationed in Lima, Peru, as the director of the emerging infections department of Naval Medical Research Unit 6.
The problem, instead, is the economics of drug development. Pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to pour research and development dollars into curing a disease that surfaces sporadically in low-income, African countries. They aren’t likely to see a large pay-off at the end — and could stand to lose money.
Bausch and I spoke Wednesday afternoon about where things stand with developing an Ebola vaccine, what hurdles remain, and how you test a drug that only shows up in infrequent outbreaks. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and length.
Sarah Kliff: Can we start with where things are on the science of Ebola vaccines, and how much we know about the best way to prevent the disease?
Daniel Bausch: There have been some significant developments for both vaccines and treatments for Ebola and its sister virus, Marburg virus. We now have a couple of different vaccine platforms that have shown to be protective with non-human primates. The most notable development are monoclonal antibodies that are engineered to bind with the ebola virus. There have been breakthroughs in the past few years and, not only are they protective when given right after exposure, but they also work a few days after the illness starts.
That’s the good news, but we’ve had a real break in trying to move forward to get these into human trials and get them out there as a real tool we can use for people infected with these viruses.
SK: So what stands between that science and getting these drugs to Ebola patients?
DB: Part of that is economics. These outbreaks affect the poorest communities on the planet. Although they do create incredible upheaval, they are relatively rare events. So if you look at the interest of pharmaceutical companies, there is not huge enthusiasm to take an Ebola drug through phase one, two, and three of a trial and make an Ebola vaccine that maybe a few tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people will use.
There’s not a huge demand for this, but there could be other ways to move forward. There are concerns, for example, about Ebola being used as bioterrorism, and that drives a lot of the funding for this. The Department of Defense might be interested in a vaccine if they thought the disease could be used as a weapon.
We need to find the mechanism to get to the next step, and get them out there for actual use.
SK: As you mention there are multiple phases of drug testing, starting with phase one tests for safety and then moving into later phases to test if the drug actually works. How far have the Ebola vaccine candidates you mention made it in that process?
DB: There is one vaccine that has gone through phase one testing [where the drug is tested on a small number of humans for safety]. Now the challenge is how do we get into phase two trials, which test efficacy. How do you plan a prospective trial of something that we don’t know where it will be seen next, in outbreak form?
The drugs are out there. It’s much more of a situation with economic and logistical challenges.
SK: Where does most the funding for research on the Ebola vaccine come from now?
DB: The research has been almost exclusively through the National Institutes of Health. I think a lot of that has been driven by our country’s concern over bioterrorism, and the use of some viruses as weapons. I’m not saying that’s not one legitimate reason to do research, but just that its a different driving force.
The way our whole medical-industrial research system works, and this is not unique to Ebola, is the basic research gets done with NIH funding and, after that, research and development happens through private investment. For many different diseases, they get stalled and prevented from going beyond the basic research side, before they can be a real world treatment.
SK: How would you envision an Ebola vaccine working in practice? Is this something you would give to everybody, or try and provide to people at high risk?
DB: There could be a case for limited widespread use, if that doesn’t sound too contradictory. I wouldn’t anticipate it would be cost-effective or really practical to take the approach of widespread vaccination. It would work more like how we currently handle Yellow Fever: when you have an outbreak, you go in and really rapidly vaccinate the 100,000 or so people who are in the area that is at risk. I would see it more like that, but with an Ebola vaccine. We would go in right away and say, the next day, we have 100,000 doses with our teams and start protecting people.
SK: Have any humans ever used any of the Ebola vaccines that aren’t yet approved for market? I’ve seen a bit of chatter about the idea of giving patients experimental treatments, which might be better than nothing.
DB: So far its been more tossed around but not really acted on yet. There is one exception, but it wasn’t an outbreak. There was a needle-stick injury in a lab, and that person was able to get a post-exposure Ebola vaccine. The person didn’t get sick, but we don’t know if the vaccine was what protected him. We can’t even be sure the accident infected him. The only conclusion we can make is that, with this sample size of one, is that person did not have severe side effects from taking it.
Some concern, about using these non-approved drugs, is that we would be giving the impression of experimenting on people. That creates a lot of reticence — if someone is treated and dies — that you could have causality attributed.
That being said, they do seem to be safe in non-human primates and we don’t see adverse effects in the ones that have gone through limited phase-one trials. Most of us in the field, if we were laying in bed with Ebola and asked whether to take it, I think all of us would say, “Bring it on.” Safety trials be damned; I would want to give it a shot.
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“A coordinated international response is deemed essential to stop and reverse the international spread of Ebola,” the WHO said in a statement after a two-day meeting of its emergency committee on Ebola.
The declaration of an international emergency will have the effect of raising the level of vigilance on the virus.
“The outbreak is moving faster than we can control it,” the WHO’s director-general Margaret Chan told reporters on a telephone briefing from the WHO’s Geneva headquarters.
“The declaration … will galvanize the attention of leaders of all countries at the top level. It cannot be done by the ministries of health alone.”
Ebola is not a black swan event. No chance. Even if it wiped out half of Africa it would have little if any effect on us. The Europeans closing flight routes from Africa is possible but still wont affect us. Its a local problem. And Ebola will not make it to Europe. Deaths from Ebola are too quick for it to spread to civilised countries in a major way.
Its kinda sad how some people on this forum are so keen for dropping house prices that they actually hope for an Ebola outbreak to cause it. If not owning a house is such a big deal for you I would suggest you save up some money instead and get started on the property ladder. Imagine all the time you will save from not having to spend your nights trying to will down property prices by arguing on the internets.
"Patient zero" in the Ebola outbreak was a two-year-old boy who died on December 6, just a few days after falling ill in a village in Gueckedou, in south-eastern Guinea, researchers suspect. Bordering Sierra Leone and Liberia, Gueckedou is at the intersection of three nations, where the disease found an easy entry point to the region.
A week later, it killed the boy's mother, then his three-year-old sister, then his grandmother. All had fever, vomiting and diarrhoea, but no one knew what had sickened them.
Two mourners at the grandmother's funeral took the virus home to their village. A health worker carried it to still another, where he died, as did his doctor. They both infected relatives from other towns. By the time Ebola was recognised, in March, dozens of people had died in eight Guinean communities, and suspected cases were popping up in Liberia and Sierra Leone - three of the world's poorest countries, recovering from years of political dysfunction and civil war.
In Gueckedou, where it all began, "the feeling was fright," said Dr Kalissa N'fansoumane, the local hospital director. He had to persuade his employees to come to work. Advertisement
On March 31, Doctors Without Borders, which has intervened in many Ebola outbreaks, called this one "unprecedented," and warned that the disease had erupted in so many locations that fighting it would be enormously difficult.
Now, with 1779 cases, including 961 deaths and a small cluster in Nigeria, the outbreak is out of control and still getting worse. Not only is it the largest ever, but it also seems likely to surpass all two dozen previous known Ebola outbreaks combined. Epidemiologists predict it will take months to control, perhaps many months, and a spokesman for the World Health Organisation said thousands more health workers were needed to fight it.
Some experts warn that the outbreak could destabilise governments in the region. It is already causing widespread panic and disruption. On Saturday, Guinea announced that it had closed its borders with Sierra Leone and Liberia in a bid to halt the virus's spread. Doctors worry that deaths from malaria, dysentery and other diseases could shoot up as Ebola drains resources from weak health systems. Health care workers, already in short supply, have been hit hard by the outbreak: 145 have been infected and 80 of them have died.
The West African Ebola outbreak, centred on Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, is the worst in history. The World Health Organisation on Friday declared it an international health emergency.
Past Ebola outbreaks have been snuffed out, often within a few months. How, then, did this one spin so far out of control? It is partly a consequence of modernisation in Africa, and perhaps a warning that future outbreaks - which are inevitable - will pose tougher challenges. Unlike most previous outbreaks, which occurred in remote, localised spots, this one began in a border region where roads have been improved and people travel a lot. In this case, the disease was on the move before health officials even knew it had struck.
In some areas, frightened and angry people have attacked health workers and even accused them of bringing in disease.
"Early on in the outbreak, we had at least 26 villages or little towns that would not cooperate with responders in terms of letting people into the village, even," said Gregory Hartl, a spokesman for the World Health Organisation.
The outbreak has occurred in three waves: The first two were relatively small, and the third, starting about a month ago, was much larger, Mr Hartl said. "That third wave was a clarion call," he said.
Ebola is not a black swan event. No chance. Even if it wiped out half of Africa it would have little if any effect on us. The Europeans closing flight routes from Africa is possible but still wont affect us. Its a local problem. And Ebola will not make it to Europe. Deaths from Ebola are too quick for it to spread to civilised countries in a major way.
Its kinda sad how some people on this forum are so keen for dropping house prices that they actually hope for an Ebola outbreak to cause it. If not owning a house is such a big deal for you I would suggest you save up some money instead and get started on the property ladder. Imagine all the time you will save from not having to spend your nights trying to will down property prices by arguing on the internets.
Well said.
And while we're at it let's quit with the 'black swan' announcements.
A black swan is something that completely fucks with our minds because we never thought it would be possible.
"It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races." - Mark Twain on why he avoids discussing house prices over at MacroBusiness. "Buy land, they're not making any more of it." - Georgist Land Tax proponent Mark Twain laughing in his grave at humourless idiots like skamy that continually use this quip to justify housing bubbles.
The Ebola crisis in west Africa is outstripping the ability of aid organisations to stem the epidemic, the head of international medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said Friday, likening it to a war.
"It is deteriorating faster, and moving faster, than we can respond to," Joanne Liu told reporters a day after returning from a 10-day mission to the hard-hit region.
"It is like war time. There is fear," she said.
"It's moving, and advancing, but we have no clue how it's going. Like in a war time, we have a total collapse of infrastructure," she added.
The outbreak started at the beginning of this year in the forested border zone between Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, and has also spread to Nigeria.
While Guinea had initially been the hotbed, the pace of the outbreak there has slowed, with concerns now focused on the other countries, notably Liberia.
"If we don't stabilise Liberia, we'll never stabilise the region," said Liu.
Ebola is not a black swan event. No chance. And Ebola will not make it to Europe. Deaths from Ebola are too quick for it to spread to civilised countries in a major way. Its kinda sad how some people on this forum are so keen for dropping house prices that they actually hope for an Ebola outbreak to cause it.
Ebola has an incubation period of up to 21 days between exposure and first symptoms. African illegals have been crossing into Europe forever. The big risk with Ebola is that it will spread its way around the African continent and become endemic within some populations.
It could become an economic black swan event but speaking for myself, I am not sitting around waiting for bad shit to happen in the world so that I can gain some kind of advantage.
Matthew, 30 Jan 2016, 09:21 AM Your simplistic view is so flawed it is not worth debating. The current oversupply will be swallowed in 12 months. By the time dumb shits like you realise this prices will already be rising.
It could become an economic black swan event but speaking for myself, I am not sitting around waiting for bad shit to happen in the world so that I can gain some kind of advantage.
Unlike those people who haven't bought a house
where do you bulls get this shit from that people hope for ebola to buy a house cheap?
Anything to prop up the bubble right!
WHAT WOULD EDDIE DO? MAAAATE! Share a cot with Milton?
where do you bulls get this shit from that people hope for ebola to buy a house cheap?
I didn't say that. I think it was being implied by the person I responded to.
It is standard thinking that if you believe there will be a downturn in the property market you are a doomster, whingeing renter, loser, left wing conspiracy theorist and now it would seem an Ebola pandemic advocate.
John Frum
13 Aug 2014, 10:23 AM
Well said.
And while we're at it let's quit with the 'black swan' announcements.
A black swan is something that completely fucks with our minds because we never thought it would be possible.
Which appears to be the consensus when it comes to Ebola (that it is not possible for it to get into the wider world).
Well, Aids managed it without too much trouble and it has a very low transmission rate that relies on a specific conditions to get from one person to another. Ebola jumps around a bit more easily.
Matthew, 30 Jan 2016, 09:21 AM Your simplistic view is so flawed it is not worth debating. The current oversupply will be swallowed in 12 months. By the time dumb shits like you realise this prices will already be rising.
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