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so, what are the risks ? Is it secret ?
ETA: Apparently a new WHO recommendation for filling death certificates was introduced in 2005-2006 and this caused a significant drop in pneumonia mortality in Finland.
I'm not entirely sure if it works this way in the whole EU, but it probably does. It's more complicated than what I explain below, but it's the big picture that matters.
The most common way to record mortality statistics is that the doctor who was treating the patient fills a death certificate. There are three types of causes of death that can be recorded in a death certificate. There are immediate causes of death and there are underlying causes of death. There are also intermediate causes of death, but nobody really cares about those because recording them is optional. The statistics department in Finland is interested in recording only the underlying causes of death and that's what gets published as mortality statistics. Only one cause of death per patient gets recorded.
If someone with advanced cancer gets pneumonia and dies, a doctor fills the death certificate saying that the underlying cause of death was cancer and the immediate cause of death was pneumonia. Cancer gets recorded as the one and only cause of death by the statistics department. Depending on the patient, possible underlying causes of death could also be alcoholism, coronary heart disease or alzheimer's disease or whatever is accepted by a department that checks these certificates.
The doctor's opinion of whether it was the pneumonia or the chronic disease that killed the patient doesn't really matter. If he also fills the underlying cause of death as pneumonia, he gets a scolding letter and has to fill it again until he gets it right.
What if the patient has several chronic diseases that could have been underlying causes of death? Well, you only get to pick one, and only that one gets recorded as the cause of death. You can list the other diseases too as contributory causes of death, but this doesn't really effect any statistics. I guess it would be less biased to flip a coin or something, but I think most doctors just pick something fitting.
A colleague of mine once tried to record pneumonia as the underlying cause of death, the patient was an alcoholic (not sure how bad it was). He got a letter saying he should fix the certificate and that people in developed countries don't die of pneumonia anymore. Wonder why that is...
in USA they can fill in 20 secondary causes on the death certificates and all the anonymized death certificates since 1959 are available online from NCHS in computer-readable form to check/search for conditions. Irregularities usually appear when there is a switch from one ICD-Code to a new one, so in 1969,1979,1999. Other irregularities are often checked, compared with other states,countries,conditions and the reason discovered
In response to
Techniques for probability estimates
let me add a link (communicating uncertainty) http://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/docs/fischhoff/IST%20Communicating%20Uncertainty.pdf
and a discussion: http://psandman.com/gst2013.htm#numbers
In response to
Techniques for probability estimates
I just found this with google. I spent much time in 2005-2007 to get experts assign a subjective probability to a severe (H5N1) pandemic with >100M deaths. This was a strange experience. Experts didn't want to give probabilities but painted a somehow dark picture in interviews.Economists ignored the problem in their models (mortality bonds rating). Among the few who gave estimates were Bob Gleeson and Michael Steele with ~20% per year. The same problem occurs in other sciences : ask your surgeon for the probability that you'll die or your lawer for the probability to win the process or your teacher for the probability that you'll pass the exam or the candidate for his probability to win the election or the president for his probability of a nuclear war or global recession etc. These would be useful information, even if only subjective, informal. Yet people usually won't give them. Make a better society with people giving probability estimates !
pandemic probabilities: http://www.setbb.com/fluwiki2/viewforum.php?f=10&sid=2d1caa0fad5093a8c4291f45e0d39b67&mforum=fluwiki2
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Downvoted for mindless panic.
There are no measures to speak of to control the flu. It goes through the world every year and we just live with it because it's rarely fatal.
The Ebola curve is not exponential in the countries where appropriate measures were taken, Nigeria and Senegal: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/09/30/ebola-over-in-nigeria/16473339/ Clearly the US can do at least as well.
While Ebola might mutate to become airborne and spread like flu, and there is a real risk of that, there is little indication of it having happened. Until then the comparison with the Spanish Flu is silly. It's not nearly as contagious.
Your linked post in the underground medic is pretty bad. The patient contracted Ebola on Sep 15, most people become contagious 8-10 days later, so the flight passengers on Sep 20 are very likely OK. There is no indication that the official story is grossly misleading. There are bound to be a few more cases showing up in the next week or so, just as there were with SARS, but with the aggressive approach taken now the odds of it spreading wide are negligible, given that Nigeria managed to contain a similar incident.
My guess is that the total number of cases with the Dallas vector will be under a dozen or so, with <40% fatalities. I guess we'll see.
the numbers of ebola cases were no longer exponential since mid Sept. instead they stay almost constant with ~900 new cases per week since Sep.14 This should have been clear to WHO and researchers at least since mid-Oct. Still they publically repeated the "exponential" forecasts , based on papers using old data. Ban ki Moon (on 2014/10/09) and Chan(on 2014/10/14) and Aylward said it. WHO until now puts forward their containment plan based on 5000-10000 new cases in the first week of december. They didn't correct it yet.
according to Fukuda on 2014/10/23, the WHO-committee on 2014/10/22 on the third meeting of the International Health Regulations Emergency Committee regarding the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa stated that there continued to be exponential increase of cases in Guinea,Liberia,Sierra Leone