Now then. I am no epidemiologist, but as I understand it

Ebola, nasty as f**k as it is, and with a very high mortality rate, is actually a lot harder to catch than you might think.

Chap on the radio a couple of weeks ago, one of the world experts on Ebola compared it to influenza like this: take a long-haul passenger flight, and put on it one person ill with flu, and send it off to the other side of the world. When it gets there you'll have a plane half full of people with flu. Very contagious, flu.

Same plane, but instead of a flu case, stick an Ebola case on there. When it gets to where it's going, the chances, very very high chances are that you'll still only have one case of Ebola. Very very ill he'll be, if still alive, but it's incredibly unlikely that anyone else will have caught it.

It's because Ebola isn't airborne like flu. You actually have to have direct contact with bodily fluids to stand a chance of catching it.

That means that while Ebola is very very bad news indeed in countries with no well functioning healthcare systems that know about disease-control and quarantine, etc, it's really not such a massive concern in rich countries that do have all that s**t. And if you do hear a news org ringing the panic alarm about "African Ebola Cases Could Come Here!" (sideways glance at the Daily Express) then it's probably a good idea not to take that news org too seriously again, given how they favour whipping up fear over actually telling the news.

All thanks to evolution by natural selection really: a virus can't evolve that's both incredibly deadly (like Ebola) and incredibly contagious (like flu). It's either one or the other.

Posted By: Arizona Bay, Sep 16, 14:25:20