VIDEO : Mathematical Model Shows How Ebola Will Spread: “Worse Case Scenario… An Extinction Event”

Posted September 9, 2014 2:49 pm by PatriotRising with 2 comments

Health officials around the world are scrambling to contain the Ebola virus with many, including the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization, now preparing for its eventual escape out of West Africa.

According to CDC director Tom Frieden, the ‘window of opportunity’ for stopping the spread of Ebola is closing rapidly. In July, as the virus surged across west African borders, its potential to reach U.S. shores. “It is not a potential of Ebola spreading widely in the U.S.,” claimed Frieden in a preemptive effort to prevent panic. “That is not in the cards.”

The cards, apparently, have been reshuffled, as Frieden now joins a growing chorus of concerned officials around the world. “This is not just a problem for West Africa, it’s not just a problem for Africa,” Frieden . “It’s a problem for the world, and the world needs to respond.”

In the United States, Ebola infection wards and procedures for what many believe is the inevitable arrival of the virus on U.S. shores.

Mathematical models performed by numerous researchers suggest that anywhere from could contract the virus by December of this year.

Researcher Yaneer Bar-Yam, whose the rise of the Arab Spring just weeks before it actually happened, has been modeling viral outbreaks since 2006. In a  published in conjunction with MIT and the New England Complex Systems Institute, Bar-Yam and colleagues developed a host-pathogen model to predict the spread of emergent diseases, including Ebola, in evolving ecosystems.

The results are nothing short of terrifying as depicted in the video produced by the NECSI showing how the Ebola virus originating in West Africa might spread:

The most relevant features of NECSI’s model to the current crisis is the critical threshold of connectedness at which a virulent strain can spread out of control.

 

Even if a system seems stable, it may only take a few more routes of travel to trigger secondary outbreaks.

 

“It wouldn’t take much for the current Ebola outbreak to spread to more countries or continents,” says NECSI president Yaneer Bar-Yam. “It only takes one infected individual making it through an airport checkpoint.”

 

When it comes to pandemics, it only takes a little global connectedness to trigger a cascade of infections. The outbreak of Ebola raging in West Africa— labeled a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the World Health Organization—echoes a scenario mapped out by NECSI in 2006.

 

In a computer simulation of pathogens and hosts, long-range routes of transmission — most prominently, international air routes — can allow the deadliest viral strains to outrun their own extinction, and in the process kill vastly more victims than they would have otherwise.

 

In an evolutionary model accounting for spatial distribution, a pathogen like the Ebola virus can cause its own demise by killing all the hosts in its immediate vicinity. If there is no one left alive to infect, a viral strain will die off. Successful pathogens leave their hosts alive long enough to spread infection. Typically, the most virulent mutations burn themselves out, and a stable balance is achieved between host and pathogen. But avenues of long-range dispersal break this pattern.

 

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