Such a bad idea

I completely understand the desperate temptation to buy the blood of Ebola survivors, to get the advantage of their antibodies.  Hospitals have been using survivor serum, with some success, since the first Ebola cases in the 1970s.  But talk about procedures that won't "scale up"!  It's one thing for a first-world hospital to do transfusions with blood that's been subjected to tests for other diseases, especially when at most one patient, already in grave danger, will be exposed.  I hardly like to think what will happen if a large third-world population starts trading blood products willy-nilly.  Despite my preference for free markets, there are a few areas where I've always felt strong central controls make sense, and epidemiology is right up there.

Ebola very probably got a foothold in Africa in the first place, way back in the 20th century, because people didn't know any better than to initiate vaccination campaigns with not-particularly-sterilized reusable needles.  The first documented Ebola outbreak, in the 70s, was hugely amplified by the same problem:  Belgian nuns doing the best they could with reusable needles, only indifferently sterilized.  Direct blood-to-blood contact on a large scale could create an amazing Ebola nightmare, to say nothing of the other diseases it might inadvertently amplify.

5 comments:

Grim said...

Good points.

james said...

Trying to buy blood from ebola survivors? That's going to go over realllly well in West Africa. They already often believe ebola handling is a plot to harvest humans for magical purposes. This would just confirm it.

Texan99 said...

This isn't (so far) Westerners trying to buy the blood, it's a spontaneous local market inspired by panicked people in the path of the disease.

Ymar Sakar said...

Like I said before, zombies will come out if the script is followed.

Ymar Sakar said...

I heard HIV was transmitted via those non fire purified needles too, via a machine injection system.

Probably one of the causes of the rumor that the CIA created HIV to get rid of black people. Why do we need that? We got abortion and malaria after defunding DDT.