WHO Declares Ebola Outbreak a Global Health Emergency

This is the WHO announcement: https://www.who.int/news/item/17-05-2026-epidemic-of-ebola-d...

And yes, this is a big deal. Public health emergencies of international concern are a short list consisting of, in their entirety: swine flu ('09 to '10), polio ('14 on), ebola ('13 to '16), Zika ('16), ebola ('19 to '20), Covid ('20 to '23), monkeypox ('22 to '25) and now this [1]. It's one step down from a pandemic emergency (which, to be clear, has not been declared).

(Helpful explainer: https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2....)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_health_emergency_of_int...

I read elsewhere that this strain is less deadly than previous strains. I'm no epidemiologist but being less deadly could allow it to spread further, which is obviously concerning.

Also, the article says surveillance picked up the spread late. I wonder if the US's pulling back from the WHO and other international functions had anything to do with this, it used to make up a big chunk of its resources and staff.

Notably (from NPR):

>However WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stressed in a statement it "does not meet the criteria of pandemic emergency" and advised countries against closing their borders.

The headline from the WHO reads:

Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern

https://www.who.int/news/item/17-07-2019-ebola-outbreak-in-t...

seems like an abuse of the word "global"

Non-paywalled link: https://apnews.com/article/congo-ebola-uganda-who-africa-eme...

Multiple articles mention a vaccine for the Zaire strain but not this one. Is it possible to use one for the other? Does the existence of one make it easier to develop another?

adding it to my list of apocalypses to prepare for

First hantavirus now this. Look, there's valid reason to be concerned here but people who are fearing a repeat of the Covid-19 pandemic are seemingly missing why Covid was a pandemic. Covid spread so much for four main reasons:

1. It could spread airborne;

2. It spread relatively easily. Not quite measles-level of contagiousness but still, pretty good;

3. Unlike something like the flu, there really wasn't any kind of natural resistance. What we now call the modern flu is a descendant of the Spanish flu that killed tends of millions in 1919-1920 in its first outbreak and it becamse less lethal for a variety of reasons; and

4. (This is the big one) It would spread when the carrier was asymptomatic. The flu can also spread asymptomatically but AFAIK it's less common. People with the flu tend to self-isolate showing symptoms.

Still, what's probably most concerning about Covid is the number of people who truly believe it was and is fake. The public health implications of that as well as the societal and psychological impacts is something we're going to be studying for decades to come.

The exact contagion mechanism for hantavirus isn't confirmed. Previously it's been from, say, rat to human. It's believed there was human-to-human transmission with the plague cruise ship of doom but whatever the case, it's simply not as contagious.

Ebola generally requires contact to spread. How it's spread in a lot of these African regions has historically been from funeral rites. Family of the deceased would touch the body and this contact would spread the disease. So while it was quite contagious, it didn't spread airborne (as far as we know). It's also quite lethal, which naturally tends to limit spread. The king of long-dormant viruses is of course HIV.

But at least we aren't dealing with cordyceps [1] so we've got that going for us at least.

[1]: https://thelastofus.fandom.com/wiki/Cordyceps_brain_infectio...