Medical facility in Kailahun, Sierra Leone image courtesy of EC/ECHO/Cyprien Fabre under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License
The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) projected that in the worst case scenario if more isn’t done to stop the spread of Ebola, there could be 1.4 million cases by the end of January 2015. Maia Majumder estimated that around 80% of people who contract this strain of Ebola eventually die. There is currently no proven effective treatment or vaccine for Ebola, although two American aid workers recovered after being given an experimental drug.
In an open letter to the governments of Europe in The Lancet, 44 public health experts said that “the Ebola epidemic in West Africa has now spiralled utterly out of control”. Richard Besser wrote in The Washington Post that the response to the Ebola outbreak so far has been “totally inadequate”:
We need to establish large field hospitals staffed by Americans to treat the sick. We need to implement infection-control practices to save the lives of health-care providers. We need to staff burial teams to curb disease transmission at funerals. We need to implement systems to detect new flare-ups that can be quickly extinguished.
In a New England Journal of Medicine editorial, Jeremy J. Farrar and Peter Piot wrote that “without an all-out effort, Ebola could become endemic in West Africa, which could, in turn, become a reservoir for the virus’ spread to other parts of Africa and beyond”.
The United Nations (UN) Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution declaring the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa a “threat to international peace and security” and creating a special mission to manage the global attempts to contain the disease. David Nabarro, the senior UN system coordinator for Ebola said that right now the outbreak is growing exponentially, with the number of infections doubling roughly every three weeks. Nabarro said the UN would need a $1 billion to stop the spread of the disease. Because of the strain the Ebola outbreak is putting on local medical infrastructures, deaths from malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia are expected to rise. “This is likely the greatest challenge that the United Nations and its agencies have ever faced,” World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Margaret Chan told the Security Council. “None of us experienced in containing outbreaks has ever seen, in our lifetimes, an emergency on this scale, with the degree of suffering, and with this magnitude of cascading consequences.”
President Obama announced that the US would send around 3,000 troops to set up treatment centers in West Africa, the largest deployment of troops against an infectious disease in US history. US National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins announced “extraordinary measures to accelerate the pace of vaccine clinical trials.” The US had its first diagnosed case of Ebola after a man in Dallas who had recently come from Liberia was confirmed to have the disease. The man had contact with a number of people after developing symptoms, but CDC Director Tom Friedman said that he had “no doubt” that they would be able to prevent the disease from spreading widely in the US.
Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) Director Michael Osterholm wrote in The New York Times that the unprecedented scale of the Ebola outbreak increases the chance that the virus could develop a mutation that would allow it to spread through the air. In 2012, a Canadian team showed that the same strain of Ebola could be transmitted from pigs to monkeys—both of which have respiratory systems similar to humans’—through the air. Osterholm wrote that if the virus became airborne it could spread rapidly around the globe the way the H1N1 swine flu did in 2009. Laurie Garrett wrote in Foreign Policy that if the disease begins to spread in the Nigerian city of Lagos—which has a population of 22 million—it “would instantly transform the situation into a worldwide crisis”.
Russia President Vladimir Putin said at a conference in Yalta that he planned to “surprise the West with [Russia’s] new developments in offensive nuclear weapons”. In July, the US State Department reported that Russia had violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) by testing a new ground-launched cruise missile. Russian analyst Andrei Piontovsky suggested that Putin believes NATO wouldn’t retaliate against a tactical nuclear strike on smaller member state like Estonia or Latvia. The New York Times reported that US plans to spend $355 billion over the next 10 years modernizing and expanding its nuclear forces. Steve Andreasen wrote for the European Leadership Network that “any hope of deepening existing cooperation or defining new cooperative approaches to what were already contentious security issues prior to the Ukraine crisis—e.g., missile defense, tactical nuclear weapons, cyber security—has been greatly diminished”.
The World Meteorological Organization reported that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased “at the fastest rate for nearly 30 years” in 2013. Several hundred thousand people marched in New York City ahead of the UN climate summit to demand that more be done to address climate change. Both UN Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon and former US Vice President Al Gore took part in the march. Countries that are party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are preparing to propose carbon emissions targets before the 2015 UNFCCC conference in Paris. President Obama said at the UN summit that, as the two largest economies and the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases, the US and China “have a special responsibility to lead”. Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli promised that China would announce “the peaking of total carbon dioxide emissions as early as possible”. But Graça Machel, humanitarian and widow of former South African President Nelson Mandela, said in her closing remarks that “there is a huge mismatch between the magnitude of the challenge and the response we heard here”.
After reading Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk said on Twitter that artificial intelligence (AI) is “potentially more dangerous than nukes”. Bostrom warned in his book that we cannot assume that a superintelligent machine
will necessarily share any of the final values associated with wisdom and intellectual development in humans—scientific curiosity, benevolent concern for others, spiritual enlightenment and contemplation, renunciation of material acquisitiveness, a taste for refined culture of for the simple pleasures in life, humility and selflessness, and so forth.
To a machine intelligence, humans may simply be in the way of fulfilling its programmed goals. As Musk put it, there is reason to worry that humans may be “just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence”.
This news summary was put together in collaboration with Anthropocene. Thanks to Tony Barrett, Seth Baum, Kaitlin Butler, and Grant Wilson for help compiling the news.
For last month’s news summary, please see GCR News Summary July 2014.
You can help us compile future news posts by putting any GCR news you see in the comment thread of this blog post, or send it via email to Grant Wilson (grant [at] gcrinstitute.org).
