Am I taking the contrarian view in saying Ebola is a tempest in a teapot? Compared with what I call major league infectious diseases, like TB, measles, malaria even dengue, it’s a drop in the ocean. By that I mean history is littered with  thousands of infectious mini-demics dead of their own accord. That is the likely course for Ebola too unless we can avoid converting it into a major thing by stupid hyperinterventions. A news media frenzy I don’t mind. Personally I think it may represent an opportunity to redirect our fickle ADHD attention to significant public health issues such as avoidance of carbohydrates, one significant example.  But that discussion is for another time.

In my last post I talked about smart bugs and fascinating phenomenon of how both invader and host adapt to each other by  evolving over time, into decreased virulence.  Initial encounters with infectious agents tend to be fatal. But that isn’t efficacious for spread of disease. From the bug’s point of view, you want to leave your hosts alive, and your best strategy is stealth. You should smartly cause as mild an inconvenience as possible while being silently passed from victim to victim. Leaving everybody dead over a short time, gives less opportunity for transmission. That is what we see right now for Ebola virus. This indicates the virus is relatively new to humans, over recent encounters transmitted from an animal such as a bat with which humans have had some unnatural contact, maybe oral consumption.

But given time, both invader and host, will “learn” about each other. The dumb bug becomes a smart bug and the dumb host a smart host. The bug has genetic variants that cause less lethal or serious disease leaving infected persons who survive and are likely to transmit the organism. That means decreased lethality is selected for. On the other hand, surviving humans who last onger, are more likely to spread the disease but are also selected for. Those persons, perhaps with more competent immune systems or for some other reason less sick than their compadres, are  able to reproduce more. Hence invader and host over time, adapt to each other, and in general, more prolonged contact with an infectious agent tends towards less virulent disease. I would emphasize my clinical suspicion that most highly virulent or lethal encounters with infectious agents have died out on their own accord, like acute epidemics with Black Death rarely seen  anymore (we only recently have developed antibiotics for this.)  At the other end of this spectrum are organisms with which humankind has a long relationship like Herpes viruses which are mostly asymptomatic. As I’ve said, these bugs may even serve some unknown healthful purpose, since in many populations, nearly everyone seems is infected perhaps aiding neural transmission. This last statement is pure speculation but I like to speculate.

This is nature. It is reasonable to ask what happens when, in trying to do good, we intervene.I have argued our response to EVD is too vigorous.  As Americans we act in a big way. Meaning to help we send thousands into the fray.  With modern medicine’s miracles we may save lives and that is good. We should consider that in so doing, we convert a dumb bug into a smart bug. All of a sudden more people are living to transmit the disease, Not only that, living persons transport the virus to far off places to reproduce more than in its wildest dreams.   A mini-demic that might have lasted a short time converts to an epidemic.