| Online: | |
| Visits: | |
| Stories: |
| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
Rapidly Mutating Ebola Virus Would Kill 1.2 Million People If It Goes Airborne, Expert Predicts
Jonathan Benson
(NaturalNews) There’s a chance that the currently circulating Ebola virus could go rogue and become airborne, and a scientist from Michigan State University warns that more than one million people could die as a result.
If Francis Smart’s econometric simulation model is accurate, as many as 1.2 million people could lose their lives from an airborne mutation of the disease, the latest in the ongoing outbreak saga sweeping west Africa.
According to Smart, the World Health Organization (WHO) failed to take into account that Ebola could turn airborne when it came up with a prediction of 20,000 infections in six months. The United Nations organization also assumed that massive international aid would arrive in the region back in early August, which never occurred.
Today, the rate of disease spread is escalating rapidly, and a number of different predictive models say Ebola has reached exponential growth. It is anyone’s guess, in other words, how many people will become infected, especially if anything should change in terms of how the disease is spreading.
“This [estimate of 20,000] assumes full international backing for an intervention to control the deadly outbreak,” wrote Smart in a paper he recently published in the journal Econometrics by Simulation.
“At first a figure as high as 20,000 seems exaggerated especially when looking just at the number of 3,000 cases reported the same day as the announcement. However, I believe that this estimate is vastly too small and is entirely based on an effective and well funded international relief mission.”
