As I was struggling with a topic to write today I thought of
recent news in the United States. What about Ebola and the exposure risk?
The fear that is put into us with mention of the possibility of the
disease spread and that we all might end up exposed and sick if everything
continues at this rate? It’ll probably be like a plague, right?
If you ever get the chance to take Epidemiology, you will be
fascinated by this topic. There is so much to learn about disease - risk,
exposure, spread. So I will start with a basic epidemiologic term for
this topic - R0.
This values, R0 is representative of the rate of spread for a
disease, based on exposure. It’s the “reproductive rate” based on
infectious time.. how many people will develop the disease? So, for an
example Measles is very infections - R0=18 for this disease which tells us it
will spread very easily (without vaccination)! On the contrary, Ebola has
an R0 between 1.5 and 2.0...not as crazy as the news makes i t.
This is still an issue, because in general any R0 with a
rate/value over 1 means this infection will keep spreading, rather than die
down (R0<1), The problem, in our society, is that no one understands
how low that R0 is! No one understands until they learn epidemiology :)
A few other sources to check out:
