OT: Ebola

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Nightjar

[JimK]

/What can be done though? Remove victims from their homes to slightly reduce the spread would be good, isolate people in their homes who have been in contact with a victim for 7days./q

Believe its 3 weeks incubation for Ebola...

Jim K

[Nightjar]

Travel has always spread disease. The Black Death swept through Europe in the 14th century on the back of international trade.

[Nightjar]

There was a great deal more mobility in the past than generally realised. In Elizabethan England, only one in four people in Sussex remained in the parish of their birth for life. In Nottinghamshire, families stayed in one place for an average of two generations before moving somewhere else. In the town of Faversham, 80% of the population were born elsewhere.

London, with a population of 200,000, was a melting pot of people from around the country and abroad, who would return to their home town if they still had family there; William Shakespeare is a good example. Nobility would regularly travel between Court and their various holdings. The Queen would sometimes take her entire Court on a progress, taking along hundreds of servants, retainers and courtiers.

Even those who only travelled a few miles from their home would probably be going to market, where they would meet not only other people from the market catchment area, but also merchants who travelled from other towns. A great fair could bring in people from across the country, to mix with the inhabitants from many miles around. The government in London would be sending messengers to every sheriff or Lord Lieutenant. Bishops would send officials around their diocese. Actors, minstrels and moorish (aka morris) dancers would follow regular routes around large areas.

There might not have been the mass movements of people that we see today, but there were still many points of contact between people in different areas.

...

Historically, with the odd notable exception, if bubonic plague, sweating sickness, malaria or influenza* struck a place, a common reaction was to get out of the area and go somewhere else if you could. There was no understanding of how diseases were spread, so nobody saw anything wrong with moving away. In the case of malaria, it was probably a good idea, assuming you didn't move to another marshy area, but it could spread the other diseases.

• As a percentage of the population of England killed, the outbreak of

1557-1559 was about ten time worse than the 1918 pandemic.

[Nightjar]

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

There IS something odd about this. ISIS, for example, are not short of brainwashed nutters who would give up their lives for a cause, such as spreading this shit, especially to the West, particularly N.America.

[polygonum]

On 03/10/2014 16:36, "Nightjar

[harryagain]

[Nightjar]

On 03/10/2014 19:04, polygonum wrote: ...

Particularly in mainland Europe, part of the training for several trades was to spend time as a wandering Journeyman. It is still the practice for German carpenters and many still wear a traditional Journeyman uniform.

[Dave Liquorice]

I didn't say there wasn't mobility, there where goods from Asia available in the UK from the beging of trade but it took a long time for those goods to get from the source. As for general movement you are talking days for a hundred miles, not a couple of hours.

At an individual level if you have some nasty disease it's likely to have got you before you've got very far.

[Windmill]

If the number of cases in Africa reaches 4 million, as it is likely to do in April (based on current figures), the number of cases in "developed" contries is bound to start to increase. Perhaps dramatically.

[Richard]

Those people who make house calls?

[Nightjar]

Surely that depends upon the incubation period and mode of travel? Bubonic plague and influenza would get you fairly quickly. However, the incubation period for malaria is in the range 7-30 days. Hantavirus, which seems to be a good candidate for the cause of English sweating sickness, has a median incubation period of 18 days, although incubation periods of more than a month have been recorded. Even in Elizabethan times, you could go a long way in a month, particularly if travelling by ship or by river boat.

[tony sayer]

Have a Google for the 1918 flu pandemic that makes very scary reading around 30 to 50 million dead world-wide;!...

[Dave Liquorice]

Until very recently the general publics "mode of travel" was walking or horse and cart.

I'm pretty sure Malaria is not transmissable human to human by normal contact or exposure. It's caused by a parasite that is transfered via mosquitoes and effectively direct blood transfusion.

Not by modern standards when you can get half way round the world in not a great deal over 12 hours. SARS ...

[Nightjar]

In medieval times, waterways were far more important as a means of transport than roads. I doubt anybody would build a town the size of Ipswich where it is today, but in Elizabethan times it was England's second city, because of its water connections.

Indeed, but if an infected person moves to a marshy area that is not already infected, they could introduce the disease to the area. It is a hazard even today; we still have the right species of the Anopheles mosquito in Britain, but they don't currently carry the disease.

Nevertheless, it only took ten months for the Black Death to reach England from its first appearance in Europe and that killed most of its hosts very quickly, which is not a good strategy for a disease.

[Nightjar]

On 05/10/2014 11:16, Nightjar wrote: ...

...

That should have read Norwich, not Ipswich, which was 15th, not second.

[Dave Liquorice]

walking

Did you go signifcantly faster than walking or horse and cart on a river particularly in the upstream direction?

This is true. I'd have to go an look at the life cycle of the parasite at how easy it is for human/human transfer of the parasite via a mosquito is. I have sneaky feeling that what is transfered has to be a particular stage in the parasites life cycle. ie mature parasites don't do it. If it took just one malarial person to visit the fens and get bitten to reintroduce malaria to the UK it would have happened by now.

Exactly, ten months for a easy to catch disease to spread with poor transport. If something like SARS or other airbourne, contagious before symptoms, relatively long incubation period disease appeared it could well be in almost every country of the world within a week. Maybe before the first infected are showing up as "odd", the dieing.

Yes, killing your host quickly is not a good stratergy and may actually help us fight Ebola.

[Richard]

Less than the population of the UK. Won't make much of a dent in the overall scheme of things with >7 billion on the planet. Remember that evolution thing - survival of the fittest.

[Adrian]

At the time, there were about 45m in the UK.

And therein lies the problem.

There were less than a billion people on Earth until the start of the

19th century. Two billion was hit for the first time in 1923 - shortly after both WW1 and the flu pandemic had taken up to 100m out... Three billion was first hit in 1959. From there until now, it's been about 12-15 years between each additional billion - but it's actually slowing slightly. The sixth took 12 years, but the seventh 13, and the estimates are that eight will take 14 and nine 16.

Population growth in the UK has been WAAAAAY behind that of the world as a whole. If it'd kept pace, there'd be about twice as many people here.