Brandon Wegner
Mrs. Straub
Economics A3
7th October 2014
Ebola; The Outbreak
Ebola, is today's worldwide current event issue being lectured to the public.It is a virus that begins as a fever and will eventually lead to internal bleeding. This virus is spread through bodily fluids such as: saliva, blood, feces, and urination. The host species is still unknown. With this being the “talk of the town”, what does it have to do with economics? Since Ebola is a very severe and deadly disease, a treatment and or a cure needs to be formulated to safe the patients that have been infected, inevitably these cures and or treatments come from the labs of researches and scientist. Their ability to research a cure costs money. So the question is how is, how is Ebola going to affect the economy?
Not only is this disease costing money it is costing lives. In this case the marginal cost are the people who have lost the fight. About over 1,100 lives have been taken by this death sentence and just over 2,000 lives have been impacted dramatically. Although the cost of this tragedy is the deaths of many, there is a “benefit”, may not be a great benefit, but there is one.
The “cure” has not yet been finalized. A “cure” called “ZMapp” has been released earlier in past years. This pill is for the use on animals to cure them so that it is not “safe” for human use. Some with the disease are willing to take the chance and try the pill just to take the chance of surviving. It had taken several months to produce the final product. This so called final product was one pill. ONE. If the U.S. would have contributed the money to the research of ZMapp and created multiple pills in that time frame they could of prevented toe spread if not destroy it all together. The scarcity for implementing a cure this malignant disease is impeccable.
Ebola as caused an uncompromising supply and demand issue. The ratio of supply to demand is skewed quite dramatically. In the fact that there is not nearly enough supply to skim the surface of the demand. Although the need for supply is the source in which this virus is a marginal benefit gathering money for research to finalize a cure to save the many lives being damaged by this 21st century plague.
Overall, this bloodthirsty virus is spreading throughout the world, it may be the considerably the vital shift in the world as we know it. If the “cures” do not become accessible in mass quantities, there will be close to no chance of it ever coming to a halt. The U.S. had the opportunity to essentially destroy or at least put a great dent in the outbreak before it had the opportunity to spread. Although the U.S. did not believe that Ebola would become a widespread threat, resulting in money being spent somewhere else. The U.S. should have funded a cure months ago, now it is much too late and the virus has became a vicious killer, out for the lives of many innocent people. Anybody could conclude that Ebola is a critical problem that needs to be dealt before it kills off 1,100 more people. We need to fund and find a cure.
Bibliography-
Last, Ikono. "Ebola - My Visual Charts & Projections Based on WHO Data, Page 1." AboveTopSecret.com. Above Top Secret, 07 July 2014. Web. 07 Oct. 2014.
CNN, News. "Spain Has Outbreak's 1st Known Case of Contracting Ebola Outside of Africa." Early Start with John Berman Christine Romans RSS. CNN News, 06 Oct. 2014. Web. 07 Oct. 2014.
Frieden, Tom. "Why U.S. Can Stop Ebola in Its Tracks." CNN. Cable News Network, 01 Jan. 1970. Web. 07 Oct. 2014.
It's a pretty huge opportunity cost in this situation as thousands of people are dying, and its weird that this pill hasn't gotten much more attention if it truly can help people with this disease. But clearly the marginal benefits of this medicine outweigh the costs of producing it, and the profit level of whatever company would produce this good would skyrocket because they would have a monopoly on producing it. It would seem like a good idea for every pharmaceutical company who has the resources to allocate to try and get it on finding the cure, not just for profit but for the benefit of the human race.
ReplyDeleteWas this pill for this strain of ebola? Because there are 5 major strains. While there could have been a pill to cure animals, it for one could be the wrong strain, and two it could be incompatible on humans. A lot of cures are transferable but a lot just don't work because of the huge differences in the immune systems.
ReplyDeleteAlso ebola is very treatable. You ave to keep in mind this 60%-90% mortality rate is in 3rd world countries without proper medical care. In the USA the mortality is 0%. And one of them was in critical condition. Also ebola is very easy to contain, but it is hard to quarantine things in 3rd world countries. A lot of the damage is caused by where the disease is, not what the disease is.
While a cure could be found, it may be hard as viruses are hard to cure, and it means injecting Ebola into humans, which many people will not be a fan of.
Only time will tell the fate of all this. There are plenty resources going for this. the WHO is doing a lot of putting in a ton of money towards this.
The world leaders should be subsidizing helping the third world countries that tend to have problems with sanitation and keeping people quarantined, so that instead of having people die a lot of it could be prevented, however there is no "world government" so this cannot be reasonably achieved. Also curing viruses is very hard and the US Government has ALREADY subsidized the production of cures for these viruses. In fact the government made the CDC to help control the outbreaks of diseases and help to cure them.
ReplyDeleteI am confused to as why there was only one pill made to try and cure this virus? There are so many people becoming affected by it that there should be more than one pill being produced in order to test out the effects of the pill on the infected. There was no reason that someone with ebola should have been brought back into the United States. I understand that they were trying to treat him for it, but now it's just risking the rest of the country. They need to fund more to find a cure for this virus, before the whole country becomes affected by Ebola.
ReplyDeleteDisregard this completely if I am wrong, but isn’t the Zmapp drug a cure that has been proved successful in killing the ebola virus in humans? I may be wrong but I think the article we read in class a while ago said that it was shown that the Zmapp drug helped cure ebola. Also, I don’t really think that ebola killing people would be considered a marginal benefit no matter how much money it is bringing in to help try and find the cure. Since when is human death considered a benefit? Although I disagree with points that you have made, you bring up some interesting topics that are worth debating.
ReplyDeleteThe U.S. should have taken the opportunity to solve or even put a major dent in this major issue. Even though they thought it wasn't a disease that would spread, a disease that if a person gets they have no chance of surviving they should be willing to helped just because you don't want people to suffer just because of the area that they live in. Like I bet if this disease would have started in the U.S. the government would be putting everything they have into solving this crisis. Just because it started in a poor country doesn't mean these people deserve to die from this disease.
ReplyDeleteBrandon, tackling such a popular and debatable topic is tough, stating your views and expecting people to have open minds to your thoughts is even harder. Despite the numerous spelling and grammar mistakes sprinkled throughout the entry, I appreciate you bringing up this topic. Ebola is an epidemic, and is not a plague (yet, possibly) , there actually was a Chinese man that died of Pneumonic plague(or also known as the Black Death) during the week of July 16th 2014. I agree with others in where there is no marginal benefit in people dying, although an resulting action is people funding to find a cure. The time is takes to develop ZMapp and resources to produce a product that will save lives will not be produced any faster than the developers can produce it, no matter how much pressure is put on them. I do agree that we need to find a cure, and I do hope that this outbreak can be taken care of faster than other diseases such as cancer.
ReplyDeleteIt is ridiculous that before, because this was only an African issue, no one cared about the virus, and now that it reached the wealthier countries it turned into a big problem, that everyone is trying to end. How selfish can nations be? And how didn't they put as an a hypothesis the fact that this could have reached one day other continents. If other countries had spend money earlier to help Africa against this disease it would had never spread out as it is now, but of course they preferred using the money in unnecessary things. I get what you mean by the marginal benefit but at the same time it is a really severe issue to be considered a benefit no matter what.
ReplyDelete