Steven Hatfill on Emerging Infectious Disease, and Government Responses

If you examine the bullet points, you see how the approach of a resource shortage (perhaps associated with changing solar output) aids the emergence of disease.

…numerous risks that contributed to this large Ebola outbreak across three countries:

•The expanding global human population (doubled in southern Africa in the last 20 years)
•Breakup and destruction of animal habitat
•Scarcer food sources forcing animals to move closer to human populations
•Intensive domesticated animal breeding causing viral mixing from “wild cousins”
•Changes in animal migration and viral reservoirs (Ebola has 3-4 mutated virus strains)
•New contact with humans
•Consumption of bush meat since protein is scarce; contact with wild animals exposes human microscopic skin abrasions to fresh animal blood
•Funeral attendance of victims
•Contact with patients

In another section:

Why is the Ebola virus more widespread than we thought before? Possible causes include:

•Population has doubled in the last 27 years in Africa but the infrastructure has not matched the growth, causing extreme overcrowding in African cities
•poor public health
•dysfunctional government at all levels and chaos (doctors ran away)
•slow and improper response to a crisis

Want more apocalypse with that?

“a year later, the doctor who recovered, still has Ebola virus in the humor of his eye.”

Did this strain manage to find a genetic path to persist asymptomatically, post infection, at least in the humor of this doctor’s eye? Is the humor of the eye throwing viral particles, some with novel mutations, out into his body, which are being culled by his immune system for those best able to elude immunity? Is it actively searching for unique mutations to bypass the broader human immune system in that doctor as we speak? In how many Africans is that occurring, right now? Will what comes out of those human petri dishes one day be a sort of cross between Ebola and AIDS, for the gay population – capable of persisting in asymptomatic individuals, until it periodically sheds during sex with an immunologically naive host and then wipes out a few thousand other immunologically naive people unpredictably through casual contact? It has been shown to persist in semen for some period post-infection.

Then there was this little ditty:

•353 Orangutans in Philippines were serum-positive for Ebola Zaire and six of those were serum-positive for Marburg virus…

As a general rule it is probably best if you don’t have two similarly-structured deadly hemorrhagic viruses running at the same time in the same host. I am not an expert on RNA viral replication and recombination, but I’d wonder just how easily two RNA viruses might see RNA fragments within co-infected cells combine to exchange genes, possibly producing something newer, more virulent, and maybe more adaptable on the fly.

You can see how as the apocalypse approaches, and multiple different pathogens begin working together on a massively overpopulated, poorly structured civilization, Africa could certainly throw out a curveball that would alter the course of humanity, in a moment. In this case, gays, the poor, the sex-addicted, the less intelligent, those with reduced disgust, and crowded city dwellers would be disproportionately affected.

Imagine something emerging and wiping out most of the amygdala-deficient and risk-blind in those groups, all with reduced disgust. That is what took the Dark Ages, and turned it into the Renaissance.

Other interesting stuff at the link, including just how full of shit the authorities can be when the choice is between being honest, and avoiding panic. They will always choose millions of deaths, but less panic. If you want to survive, assume the authorities are lying, prepare for the worst, and don’t believe a fucking word out of the machine. At some point in our civilization’s history, the idiots who believe authority are going to get culled, big time. Don’t be one.

Apocalypse cometh™