So What, Who Cares (vol 1, issue 20) How a faith healer's funeral triggered an epidemic
Steven Soderbergh's Contagion is a fun movie -- a buffet of "Look! It's an A-List Actor!" seasoned with "Look! A downer ending reminding us that the questing human mind will never divine all the secrets of the world!"
A lot less fun is knowing that here in the real world, the Ebola virus may become endemic to the African continent.
What that means: In some cases, a viral infection will rip through a population, but its lethality is eventually curbed because a greater percentage of the (surviving) population in a given area becomes immune. In this case, the Ebola virus is prone to mutation and it's spreading across Western Africa very rapidly thanks to a large, highly mobile population that easily mixes between rural and urban areas plus a near-total disintegration of Sierra Leone and Liberia's healthcare infrastructures (which have led to other public health problems as people with routine health problems are turned away from hospitals).
So what? The spread of Ebola demonstrates how perilously delicate public health is on every level -- from the on-the-street people trying to educate people (and getting killed for their efforts) to larger institutional and governmental levels. The epidemic is going to require extraordinary international cooperation and resources if it's to be contained at any level. (So far, that has not been happening.) The CDC estimates that there could be as many as 1.4 million cases of Ebola by January 2015. The current official case count is 5,843, including 2,803 deaths so far.
Who cares? It's easy to shrug about an epidemic happening on a continent far away, but if a country is devastated by an epidemic, it's susceptible to political destabilization. Western African nations are already struggling to contain the havoc caused by Boko Harum and other militant terrorist groups. The chaos of a post-epidemic society won't help this effort.
Another reason to care: The researchers who study ebola are giving their lives for the sake of knowledge. Viral investigator Mohamed Fullah discovered a mutation in the current Ebola strain that helped unravel the source of the current epidemic: All of the known cases in Sierra Leone stem from one group of women who attended the funeral of a traditional healer in Guinea in May.
The paper detailing his findings was published in Science nearly a month ago; prior to its publication, Fullah succumbed to Ebola, along with four of his co-authors: Mbalu Fonnie, Sheik Humarr Khan, Alice Kovoma and Alex Moigbo. Their deaths greatly reduce the scope of the epidemiological community of Sierra Leone.
*
After that brief, I feel like now might be a good time to mention that it's Sea Otter Awareness Week. In the past 100 years, the population of southern sea otters (Enhydra lutris nereis) has crept up from 50 otters to 2800 of the adorable critters -- but it's still a fraction of the pre-hunted population of 20,000 otters stretching along the California coastline.
So what? Oh, they have little hands! They're clapping their little hands!
Who cares? Who could not use a dose of cute after contemplating the radiating circles of chaos and death that the Ebola epidemic has ushered in?
(And now that the otters have made you feel better, please consider contributing to Doctors Without Borders, which has been valiantly battling the Ebola epidemic and trying to get an indifferent world's attention on this issue for nearly a year.)
*
And a final bit of consumer news: Did you know people are willing to pay more for small household appliances when buying them online?
A recent study conducted by the HookLogic Retail Search Exchange Network found that the small appliance category is booming in online retail -- growth is up 20% from last year (AKA "year over year"), compared to a 1% rise in overall spending on small household appliances across all retail outlets. When commenting on this, an analyst at The NPD Group noted consumers spend an average of 34% more when they buy products online compared to offline, which runs counter to other categories where consumers typically shop online because they want to pay less.
So what? If you're bargain-hunting for a KitchenAid stand mixer online, your quest is going to get a bit tougher once retailers realize that you -- and countless young adults registering for wedding gifts -- are willing to pay a premium on a product you'd comparison-shop for in Kohl's.
Who cares? Old-school vendors who believe in the power of touching a product before you buy it.
Among the reasons more people are buying small household appliances online? Analysts pin it on the decline of department stores like Sears and J.C. Penney, both of which have been closing stores this year. (On the discount end, Kmart has been closing stores too -- it's owned by Sears.) Even Target's not immune, although its store count is only expected to drop by two stores total this year. It's also possible that people are now thinking of "online" as their first stop, not their last: an enduring source of frustration for Walmart is how its online traffic just won't grow, and for a retailer struggling with flat same-store sales and negative foot traffic growth in its physical outlets, not being able to tap an online market is a problem.
*
Okay! We have otters playing in pools and we have ways to make sure everything's okay with So What, Who Cares? Tell me what's up via email or Twitter. If you really like this newsletter, tell a friend to subscribe.