What happened? How did it happen? Why did it happen? What’s next?

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How did it happen?, Playing with the Big Boys., What happened?, What's next?, Why did it happen?

It would appear that before we can predict future events with any hope of success we must ask and answer things that we can observe and relate to. That quest begins with the simple question — What happened? That requires our observing some phenomena and defining the limits of what is within a definition and what is outside of the definition. As this entity is defined it will be helpful to give the resultant thing a name, even a simple name for that unknown like happened with X-rays. Those people didn’t know what the phenomena were that they were observing but they knew it radiated like light so they named it X … rays. Usually, things get more descriptive names, except in mathematics where they seem to prefer single letters.

As soon as a phenomenon is observed to be existing the next fundamental question would be — How did it happen? How did this thing come into existence? If the event has familiar precursors it may be easy to explain the event as dependent upon the precursors. But, when the event is new to the observer or totally unique to everyone, it may require a subset of observations and definitions similar to those needed to define the original question, what happened? If enough satisfactory precursors can be determined then we can claim we know how it happened. If that claim is made and we know the precursors, then we can often do a simple repetition of those conditions and expect to get the same result. However, there may be unknown necessary precursors that have been affecting the outcomes but which only occur randomly but with a statistical probability, like radioactive particle decay. Or earthquakes. These things are known to happen, but the only way to cope is to prepare for Black Swan events and wait, or to construct situations where antifragile defenses function to make even the unknowable frequency be survivable and tolerable, even advantageous. Both of those strategies are a form of pre-thinking and preparing by antifragile preadaptation.

If those conditions are met, then the preadapted strategist will win in games of strategy against all but the most sophisticated of players. For those special situations, it is necessary to have inside information. Why did it happen? may be unknowable when there are sophisticated players involved in the situation and What’s next? will be unknowable. The situation may appear to be perfectly within the predictions based on the experience defined above but at the critical moment when you are most exposed, things fail to behave as expected. Therefore:

You must be very careful when playing with the Big Boys, but as my father told me when I was very young, “You never know who the Big Boys are.”

 

 

Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) logarithmic chart update – 07 December 2015

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Coping with infectious disease, Creating vaccines, Ebola, Outbreak ends, Physical separation from disease, Storing and supplying vaccines, What's next?

[Click here] for all of Probaway’s EBOLA posts arranged by date. The recent posts will be at the top, and there is good information covered earlier and not repeated.

This logarithmic chart updates the cases and deaths from the West Africa Ebola outbreak to November 29, 2015, and compares them to major historical wars and epidemics. – Click for bigger image.

The recent data used for this chart is from WHO Ebola Situation Report – 2 December 2015. “No confirmed cases were reported in the week to 29 November.” The numbers used in this chart each month were always from the current data, but the information WHO used in their data charts were updated as more accurate information came in from outlying areas. Because of that my graphs could be bumped around a bit from the most recently updated information, but probably any differences would be within the error bars of the original data.

The media has blathered their guilt toward the various authorities that were slow to respond to the Ebola outbreak, but if you look at this chart for March 20, 2014 you will see that there were about one hundred cases of Ebola. That is significant and a clear warning, but all other outbreaks of Ebola had been self-limiting because they were confined to rural areas. This outbreak quickly made it to more populous areas and thus could spread more easily. Another factor for WHO being slow to respond was that there were currently some 70 million AIDS/HIV victims that needed help. That is, there were approximately a million AIDS victims at that time for every Ebola victim, and those people were infectious too, and dying.

Here is what can be done and should be done soon.

1. Create vaccines for all potential diseases. They need not be distributed, but if a few thousand doses were available they could reach outbreak victims within days.
2. Create digital response packages for all potential diseases. This would be instantly available information such as handout flyers, posters, radio and TV announcements, doctor’s information packets on how to identify and treat the emergent disease. Public administrator packets could be created on what has worked in previous outbreaks.
3. Make free medical care available to all people who have symptoms similar to the outbreak disease.
4. Give free cell phones to people who have been exposed to contagious diseases. These phones could be worn on a necklace and be contacted every day, and the person checked for symptoms. It could have built-in symptom monitors.
5. Search the world for disease-spreading behaviors, and promote safer methods for accomplishing the same thing. Create similar but safer funeral practices.

The lesson the CDC and WHO should have learned is that it is much cheaper in money spent and lives lost to kill a disease before it becomes epidemic. Now is the time to attack future disease outbreaks, while there is still the political interest needed for action. Kill diseases before they appear!!! That would have sounded impossible a year ago, but the development of vaccines to fight Ebola using modern CRISPR techniques proved it could be done in less than a year. It would now be possible to create vaccines for known diseases that haven’t yet moved from their wild sources to humans. When it becomes routine to create vaccines for these known human diseases it would make sense to search out and vaccinate animal reservoirs of probable disease vectors that would attack humans. If we can presently give animals routine antibiotics in their food to fatten them up, it would seem simple enough to add some vaccine that would prevent them from getting sick.

Until a vaccine is available – the only absolute prevention of an infectious disease is the physical separation of the virus from people.