Buying The Shop 1
Where is this plot going? THE SHADOW KNOWS! But not you. Heheheehe.
I’m gonna go on a tangent here, which you, as long-time readers, will find a shocking turn of events, since I never do that.
This new Ebola outbreak? Pretty fucking horrifying. I followed the last outbreaks because I’m a paranoid survivalist. These new ones? Scary shit. The prior outbreaks were easily contained because they were in tiny, rural towns the size of your average Walmart. This one? Major population centers, and spreading past national borders. Fast. Yeek. The World Health Organizations have failed to contain it.
Just saying. Watch the news wires. If this shit spreads, and crosses the Atlantic… bad juju.
I don’t normally post videos of this length, but I’m in a punk-assed mood.
any takers against my bet that Alex is going to be the one buying it?
1000 queludes?
My money is on Heidi.
I got 2 internets that says it’s someone new.
My Money’s on the Heidi. It’ll add drama and she did ask Omar how much he was selling it for at the bar
I’ll take that one – but, only because I have a short-term memory function …
The shadow?
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nJjhtQiUzRY
Let it cross the Atlantic. I’m in Australia, so, you know… :p
I think you are right, Kinnison. I thought of that immediately as well.
Heidi? It’s Heidi, right?
Alex may have the money. I’m not at all sure how well reality TV pays, especially in a comic strip. And aside from ammo and medical bills, she’s been living cheaply.
Heidi may not have the money, but given what her home costs, I’ll bet she can get it. I don’t know if borrowing, followed by lots of hard work, is her style.
I’m guessing Heidi, or her relatives.
Well, Omar didn’t sell the ship to a bunch of investors led by a certain politician named Lee from California, otherwise the comic would be taking a more interesting turn right now.
O: I’m keeping the shop.
M: Y?
O: Deal fell through.
M: Y?
O: Feds busted the buyer.
M: O!
*snerk*
Yes, I do know! For I am “The Shado!”
My wife works for a pharmaceutical company. They have a treatment for ebola Zaire, which this is related to. The project went dormant a few years ago, but with any luck, the contract for that one will get reactivated…
So let me get this straight, im not a virologist or anything so I don’t know much about the types of viruses.
But this ebola, it kills with severe bleeding in under 10 days, is an immune suppressant, very infectious and noone bothered to cure it because “its only africa”?
How stupid and short sighted are these people?!?! What if it jumps to a major capital, like dubai, london, or New york? we are talking the end of civilization as we know it.
I will never understand humans and their idiotic self serving ways.
To some, I think it because you cannot make a profit by curing the poor from diseases. That is why we still have them. There is more profit in curing the ailments then a true cure
Take that idea a step further and you get to the tuberculosis drugs conspiracy theory: with all the crap going on in West Africa, places like Niger, Liberia and Sierra Leone provide fertile breeding grounds for TB outbreaks and life there is cheap. That makes them great places to test anti-TB drugs and easy places to get rid of the evidence of problems with those drugs. The drug trials select for resistance, so if a resistant strain exists in the test area it gets a huge boost relative to susceptible strains and when the trial ends and the refugee camps are still there the resistant strain sets out to take over the world. This means that by the time the patent on the anti-TB drug runs out and rival companies can start making it and undercutting the developer’s hugely inflated prices it’s already obsolete. As long as the drug company can come up with a new drug before their current one stops working, that means they get to keep selling The New Drug That Actually Works to rich western nations’ health services. The year they run out of ideas, though, we’re going to find ourselves in the grip of a pandemic of untreatable tuberculosis, which is going to suck. Of course, it already sucks for the people in West Africa, but who cares about them? Tessa Quayle did, and she got killed for it.
Yall’s posts are starting to sound like Jude Law’s character in “Contagion”. If modern medicine hasn’t found a cure for something because our powers are so godlike, it must be because Big Pharma can’t make a buck, right? I mean there couldn’t be other legit reasons why there’s no Ebola cure? Nothing about funding, nothing about biocon safety issues (did you know biosafety disposal protocols WEREN’T taken at UTMB Galveston before Ike came through?), nothing about human trials and the approval process. It’s just about the ca$h.
Shit, look at HIV/AIDS. Huge market there. Decades of awareness, oceans of money thrown at scientific research, and there still isn’t a working vaccine, let alone a “cure”, and only 3 people worldwide recognizably cured worldwide. That bitch of a virus is full proof if there was a cure for money to be made from it, the drug companies would be raking in dough hand over fist.
There’s another reason we haven’t done much research on ebola treatments: by the time you’ve gone “Hey, that guy’s got ebola,” and your team’s flown out to the nearest airport and driven two days to the site of the outbreak, that guy is dead, along with most of the other victims, and it’s a bit late to start trying out your new drugs.
Of course, now that it’s found a way into a city it may be going quite a bit longer than that this time.
Or, alternatively (but less tinfoil hattish) no one in the entire history of mankind has ever developed a way to “cure” any virus, ever, and Ebola is no exception.
“The natural host for Ebola virus is unknown”,
This means no one knows what causes it, or where it comes from. The vector for Ebola has not been discovered yet, and it hasn’t been for lack of trying. The problem with Ebola is that it kills everybody by the time the World Health Organizations hear about the outbreak and make it to the place where the outbreak occured. Anyone that might know who the first person to get it was, or what they were doing before they contracted the virus is dead. They honestly don’t have a signle clue one where it comes from or what causes it.
“so it has not been possible to implement programs to control or eliminate viral reservoirs of transmission to human populations.”
IE, don’t know what causes it, don’t know what to do to prevent it. Again, it’s not for lack of trying.
” The rapid progression of Ebola virus infection has further complicated the control of this disease, affording little opportunity to develop acquired immunity. There is currently no antiviral therapy or vaccine that is effective against Ebola virus infection in humans”
No vaccine has ever been developed because it is impossible to develop immunity for a disease that kills the fuck out of everything that it touches. People that have survived the disease haven’t provided immunity serums like other viruses, and no one knows why.
It’s simple. THis is not a case of “white people don’t care about brown people” its a case of “we have no idea of what th hell to do about this.”
And if you want to say that we are only ignorant because we don’t care to find out, because black people, then I can’t help you, but it is absolutely not true.
Cure? No. Inhibit viral replication? Yes. I know I’m being all sorts of enthusiastic about the company my wife works for, but the sheer Coolness of Science is kind of there. Without getting too technical, because frankly I only understand the bare framework concept, their drug is capable of affecting the expression of RNA in humans, or viruses. http://www.sarepta.com/technology/rna-medicine
It’s damn nifty, I think.
“their drug is capable of affecting the expression of RNA in humans”
Yeah. So’s ricin. If I had ebola I’d take my chances with a dose of ricin supposedly modified to only target infected cells, but still …
Fair enough. This one is targeted, and can be tailored for pretty much anything. They’ve got a treatment for Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy using the platform, and they’re working on things like various influenza strains.
The fact is that research and drug development costs money, and somebody has to be willing to pay for it. Ebola, as scary as it is, has had a minor impact compared to many other diseases. It’s not an issue of “it’s only Africa,” it’s an issue of “it’s only 2000 deaths in 40 years”. You could probably save that many people in a year through firearm safety education in the US alone. Compared to things like cancer or heart disease, ebola has caused a fraction of a percent as many deaths total as those cause in a year. If you had a huge amount of money to put into research for a well-known disease outbreak, what would you choose? Ebola? (Highest deaths per year 431 in 1976.) SARS? (775 deaths between November 2002 and July 2003.) H1N1? (16,931 deaths between April 2009 and April 2010.) Even just out of those three, never mind the full spectrum of diseases known to exist, would you have chosen ebola research as the place to pour money even just a month ago?
(I’m no epidemiologist. Figures are what I found from a few quick searches on the web. YMMV.)
1) The strain of ebola that kills people actually isn’t that transmissible- it requires contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person (as they’re dying- i.e. bleeding out the eyes)
2) The CDCs have been working on it for 20 years that I’m aware of. No luck in a cure or a vaccine
3) If you want to be afraid of ebola, don’t fear the human affective strains (see 1), fear the airborne monkey strains that escaped class 4 biohazard containment at the Atlanta CDC about 20 years ago… as yet totally harmless to people, but ebola loves to mutate.
Not a virologist nor epidemiologist, but two members of my immediate family are in the field.
> The strain of ebola that kills people actually isn’t that transmissible- it requires contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person
According to the WHO, that includes sweat. Think about that for a second. A person with ebola is in a bed, at a hospital, and sweats, due to a fever. Then they get moved, and someone else is put in that bed. And touches a damp spot. Boom, infection.
That’s why the go-to method of containment is burning down the house- with the infected person inside.
It’s nasty- but it’s not airborne.
Try “You could save that many people with more rigorous driver’s ed training.” The number of people killed by unintentional or negligent firearm discharges is ~400 per year and dropping. (And firearm safety education does not prevent intentional homicide.)
But, back to your point. Yeah, Ebola (so far) has burned itself out in miniscule outbreaks. And since we haven’t studied it much, it’s anybody’s guess as to how *complicated* it would be to vaccinate against. It may be like the flu, in that you need a different vaccine every year.
At any rate, look at all past health initiatives in Africa, such as anti-AIDS measures. People blame symptoms on witchcraft. People (including a certain national president) blame the disease on the doctors trying to provide aid. People decide that the very activity that spreads the disease is actually a way to cure the disease.
If you want to improve people’s health in Africa, spend the money on grade school education.
Sorry, thought I remembered 3000ish, not 300ish, for accidental firearm deaths, and didn’t even bother to look that up to verify.
As for the rest of your point, you hit something I initially commented on but then removed for the sake of brevity. Like you noted, not only are there few heath-care resources available in many African countries, but the average person knows so little that they often don’t trust what resources there are nor have any concept of preventing the spread of disease.
Just so. *Curing* virii is HARD. Especially when you have to work ethically with a virus that’s damned fatal. Who you gunna test the vaccine on, when it comes to human trials? You’d need to be Dr. Mengele or similar…
Not ‘cured’ because the ebola virus is a slippery and damned dangerous monster… when it manages to break out into human populations. Which it very rarely does. Ebola actually kills VERY few people each year, as opposed, to say, Yellow Fever.
So, nope – knock the conspiracy theories on the head..
There’s also the fact that it keeps on reappearing from its wild vectors. You can completely eradicate it in one human population, only to have it appear elsewhere (in the human world) in an unrelated outbreak.
Smallpox was simple, because it was only carried by humans. Eradicating Ebola would require a lot of nuclear weaponry. And leave over half the African continent permanently uninhabitable. Seriously.
In my wife’s company’s case, the contract with the Department of Defense expired, so the project was put on hold. They’d worked with the CDC and USAMRIID, and held trials with primates. There was an 80% survival rate for the Ebola Zaire drug, which is something of an improvement over the 0% survival rate in the control group. They never got human trials, because they obviously needed an outbreak, and it only worked on that strain. The money ran out, but the drug still exists and the project could be restarted.
Interesting tidbit on this outbreak: incubation period. Imagine a strain of Ebola that makes you sick within 1 hour of infection, guaranteed. At first glance, that’s horrifying, but it does mean that if you’ve been all alone for 2 hours and you feel fine you haven’t got it. It’s not really that fast. According to the WHO, “The incubation period, that is, the time interval from infection with the virus to onset of symptoms, is 2 to 21 days.” That means you could have been infected over two weeks ago and still be feeling fine. Imagine a journalist being pulled off the ebola story to cover the Russian invasion of Crimea … and taking the disease with them. War zone, strife, refugees, chaos, destroyed infrastructure, unexploded ordnance, artillery and air strikes and all that, and suddenly frickin’ Ebola shows up in the middle of it? Nightmare scenario. Also from the WHO, to help you sleep at night: “Asymptomatic infection in pigs has been reported and experimental inoculations have shown that RESTV cannot cause disease in pigs.” Thought swine flu created a lot of panicky reactions? “As RESTV outbreaks in pigs and monkeys have preceded human infections, the establishment of an active animal health surveillance system to detect new cases is essential in providing early warning for veterinary and human public health authorities.”
Of course, over here in level-headed and compassionate Europe we’d never get all reactionary about something like this, would we? Certainly not in comments forum of the paper that follows, leads or gets its ideas from the same place as (never clear which) the Liberal Democrat party. They’re bound to be all sympathetic and eager to send help, aren’t they?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/panic-as-deadly-ebola-virus-spreads-across-west-africa-9241155.html
“Just shut the borders until the Ebola threat is NUKED out of existence …”
“No just slam the door in their faces sorry we are now CLOSED off you go back whence you came ..
Give brits abroad 2 weeks to get back then shut the doors tight only direction open is OUT ..once out stay out ..”
“I’d pay for a nuke to sterilise the area.”
No, none of that there. Not even in the Daily Mail, which makes FOX look compassionate and chilled, would you see …
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2593035/2-cases-deadly-Ebola-virus-confirmed-Liberia.html
“Isolate that entire area of it will reach the middle east and then hit us all! Just like last time! It’s always africa!!!”
“Now lock down our borders for god sake.”
“More reason to close our borders, and get rid of the ones who have sneaked in already. Ukip”
… that. Ehhhh.
I’m liking working from home right now, that’s for sure….
Yeah I thought Heidi and Omar already met over this..
And Mick, $1.7 mil ain’t that much any more. Plenty of folks could scrounge that up if they were willing to invest in a business. For them, it might not be easy, it might be a huge investment, but easily possible. Oil barons and Saudi royalty call $1.7 mil “pocket change”, and wouldn’t invest in a gun shop because the rate of returns on their investment wouldn’t be worth their time.
An obscure factoid about Ebola – it doesn’t handle liquor well. One doctor who was badly exposed to Ebola (blood in eye) decided it was time to get stinking drunk… and didn’t get sick. Others in the same situation have found likewise. This doesn’t work if you’re already showing symptoms, btw.
So… if you think you’ve been exposed to Ebola, drink up!
Many of the really fatal, rarely-breaking-out-into-human-population virii are actually pretty fragile. If they weren’t fragile, they’d kill a LOT more people every time they broke out.
There are also the examples that kill faster than they spread.
Which, if you’re a virus, is a REALLY bad idea.
Ebola: Suicidal dim-wit of the virii community.
Corona Virus: Fucking genius king master of the human-infections virii.
I would’ve gone with rhinoviruses. Generally only slightly troublesome to the host (but not so much that they don’t go out in public), cause the host to spread infected mucus everywhere, remain contagious for a fairly long period of time, and mutate frequently enough to make an effective vaccine nearly impossible? That’s a recipe for viral success right there. (…which is why I keep a healthy stock of pseudoephedrine on hand.)
BTW, “virii” is incorrect; there’s no known historical use of a plural of “virus” (because it predates the discovery of actual individual viruses but instead referred to a venom-like concept, it was a mass noun, which don’t get pluralized often) but if there was one, it would probably be “vira”.
Eh. I like Virii better than Viruses, ’cause frankly, viruses sounds more stupid – and gums up spoken sentence flow more. Vira works even better – thanks!
I didn’t choose Rhinoviruses because the Coronavirus CAN cause serious threat, at the same time it runs around pretending to be a common cold. SARS, my friend. Proof that a ‘mostly harmless’ virus can reach out and kick you in the ass.
Fair enough.
I avoided food poisoning once that way, but I figured not everyone has a bottle of everclear to “lesser of two evils” away the other poison.
Not tried it with alcohol. My response to food poisoning on holiday is to eat nothing for 24 hours then rinse internally with Coca Cola …
… or vice versa or both. That stuff’s lethal.
The diet variety makes a fine substitute degreaser.
It also removes limescale.
Now I’m trying to figure out the logistics of getting and keeping the whole of Conakry blind drunk for ten days.
I wouldn’t be worried about Ebola. I’d worry about someone getting a hold of some of the former S.U.’s supply of smallpox. Infect a dozen people, send them on different multi-leg international flights…
Small Pox is some horrifying shit. Fuck Ebola – It’s a pussy. Sure, it makes scary faces, but it’s all bluff, no carry-though. Small Pox, on the other hand, can deliver. People are scared of Ebola? They’e got no fucking idea where the real monster lurks.
And let’s just not think about something like an analogue of the Spanish Flu coming ’round. 120-odd dead? How about scores of millions..? People need to get their heads screwed on straight.
I’m sure very few people have a favorite virus, but Ebola is mine with Smallpox pulling a close second. Ugly. Nasty. Frightening on a very primal level. Ebola is one mutation away from being a slate-wiper for humanity. The only thing that keeps Ebola in check is that you have to make direct body fluid contact with an infected person. That’s very hard to do. If it ever went airborne, we’d be done. The Reston virus appeared to be airborne, but it only infected monkeys.
Richard Preston’s “The Hot Zone” was required reading while I was attending the Biological Integrated Detection System course at Fort Leonard Wood. Scary stuff. It covers the Reston incident and the history of Ebloa.
My favourite’s bacteriophage mu. It’s a tiny little bundle of overdone code compression. It manages to use the same part of its chromosome in [i]four different genes[/i]. That’s ridiculous. Never mind how well bananas fit in the hand or how pretty hummingbirds are. Never mind that the duck-billed platypus hunts using [i]passive radar[/i] or that humpback whales can sing to each other from opposite sides of the planet. That virus has four genes sharing one bit of DNA. How the [i]fuck[/i] did that evolve?!?
It’s also got a rather odd habit of spending most of its time as a plasmid and only occasionally turning into a virus for a few generations, which makes it really, really good at taking genes from one bacterium and introducing them into the chromosome of another bacterium. Possible consequences include changes in colour, acquisition of antibiotic resistance, increased motility and expression of toxin genes. Your harmless little while native flora just turned into antibiotic-resistant yellow pathogens. Thanks, virus.
It’d help if I used html mark-up instead of forum mark-up, wouldn’t it? Oops.
Umm… I hate to say it, but… there’s a suspected case on this side of the Atlantic. I seem to recall it’s in Saskatchewan. Thanks to the airlines…
Do you mean this?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/26/health/ebola-like-symptoms-in-canada-may-be-a-false-alarm.html?_r=0
This said the patient tested negative for ebola, unless there is a more recent, updated news story I missed.