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medpundit |
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Saturday, July 27, 2002He’s right about the reasons for not immunizing for anthrax. We don’t have enough anthrax vaccine to immunize everyone, the vaccine is unpleasant, and the disease isn’t passed from person to person. The damage would be limited to the scene of the attack. Those who advocate widespread immunization do so in the hopes of protecting cities from a weaponized anthrax attack. Anthrax, however, can be treated with antibiotics if recognized early. It can also be prevented by giving antibiotics to those exposed. It does make sense to immunize selected populations, however, such as military personnel, who can’t afford to be sick in the battlefield. Anthrax just isn’t the public health disaster that smallpox has the potential to be. Ebola virus, on the other hand, is infectious, and it has been weaponized by the Soviet Union and the United States. Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese terrorist cult, also tried to obtain weaponized versions of it, but fortunately didn’t succeed. The mechanism of transmission of Ebola isn’t completely understood. Most cases, as Fairhaven points out, occur from direct contact with body fluids, but there is some evidence that it has the potential to be spread by airborne droplets, and the outbreaks that have occurred have ultimately been stopped by exercising airborne precautions. Ebola doesn’t appear to be infectious until the person has symptoms of the disease, unlike smallpox which has a two day window of infectivity before manifesting symptoms. That means it exhausts its supply of hosts quickly and dies out before it can be transmitted far and wide. An outbreak of Ebola, therefore, would be easier to contain, and not carry the same threat as smallpox. CORRECTION: The Ebola outbreaks in Africa were stopped without using airborne precautions. My mistake. I misread my source. There were, however, a few cases in recent outbreaks where the method of transmission wasn't clear, raising the possibility that it could be spread by air-borne droplets. posted by Sydney on 7/27/2002 08:45:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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