Interview

Interview with Dr. Cooper

Informed her that our project is over Ebola and grid computing

Are you aware of grid computing?

·      Dr. Cooper was aware of grid computing.  She informed us that her brother and his colleagues had discovered 3 prime numbers with the help of it.   Dr. Coopers brother was recognized for finding one of them himself and was featured in news segments because of it. 

Do you believe that grid computing has a future in helping understand science?

·      Dr. Cooper responded with a yes, it has a lot of potential

Background with Ebola?

·      One of the courses Dr. Cooper teaches is Microbiology and that helps her keep up with all the breaking news related to Ebola.  She gets updates about Ebola and shares it with her students at the beginning of every class. 

History of Ebola?

·      Dr. Cooper said that Ebola wasn’t recognized until 1976.  In 1976 there was an outbreak in Zaire, which killed 200 people.  She said this is what first caught the eye of the scientific community.   There were two big outbreaks, the one in Zaire, which had a 90% fatality rate, and one in Sudan, with a 50% fatality rate.  Dr. Cooper also informed me of another outbreak in 1967.  She told us about a cousin of Ebola, named Marburg that spread in Germany.  There is no current vaccine for Marburg.

Why should we study Ebola?

·      Dr. Cooper said that the threat of Ebola has the potential to affect the Global world.  An important point that Dr. Cooper brought up is that since it has caused outbreaks in Africa and it’s being dealt with there, we have to be prepared to know how to deal with it here.  The few cases that we had here showed us how unprepared we were at first.

How is Ebola spread?

·      Ebola is a blood borne pathogen and therefore exposure to an infected individuals blood would result in Ebola being spread.

Does Ebola Mutate?

·      Ebola does mutate.  It is a –ssRNA and the polymerase has high error rates.  It doesn’t have a good proofreading function.  Dr. Cooper informed us that the mutations in Ebola are not as fast as the mutations in HIV and Influenza, which are both RNA viruses.  HIV mutates 65 times faster than influenza.

Misconceptions?

·      This intense fear of Ebola because people describe it as bleeding out.  People misunderstand how it’s spread.  We discussed the movie And the Played On which is about HIV in the early stages and talked about how these misconceptions form a stigma about the people with the infection.

Why is Ebola considered an epidemic?

·      Ebola is considered an epidemic because of the large number of cases in a given area.

Will Ebola become a pandemic?

·      It has the potential to spread to underdeveloped countries because of the lack of infrastructure and lack of medical facilities they have.  Ebola spread quickly in the African countries because they all went to the hospitals and the hospitals didn’t have the resources to treat all of these people so a lot of contamination occurred.

·      Dr. Cooper believed that the developed countries would not have outbreaks of Ebola. She believed this because of how well structured our medical facilities are and how effectively we can isolate individuals with the symptoms of it.

·      Dr. Cooper, in conclusion, stated that even though Ebola might not affect us directly, it will spread, and because of that we need to be ready for it.  People have valued scientific research in the past with these diseases and scientific research could help potentially create a vaccine for it.