Can we get a cure-Ebola prize please?

My usual filters failed me. I get most of my news via Twitter and RSS. And I missed this one when the story came out two days ago. Fortunately, I follow @McMahon4SH so I caught it today, albeit a bit late.

Not only has Ebola hit Lagos, which is huge, it got there by plane. That plane stopped in Togo along the way. Some passengers will have gotten off there. The Ebola patient vomited while on the plane then died at after being brought to hospital on landing at Lagos; anybody who used the airplane's toilet facilities plausibly came into contact with infectious materials. Here's ABC, from two days ago:

Sawyer reportedly did not show Ebola symptoms when he boarded the plane, Plyler said, but by the time he arrived in Nigeria he was vomiting and had diarrhea. There has not been another recently recorded case of Ebola spreading through air travel, he added. 

Nearly 50 other passengers on the flight are being monitored for signs of Ebola but are not being kept in isolation, said an employee at Nigeria's Ministry of Health, who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

The disease has a 2-21 day incubation period according to reports. So we've 19 days before we know whether those non-isolated passengers are in the clear. If one of them isn't, somebody's going to have to piece together all the people that non-isolated infectious individual came into contact with in the prior couple of days. The plane stopped in Togo on the way to Nigeria; nothing's reported on what's going there. Today's reports are not more reassuring:

The fact that a sick Liberian could board a flight to Nigeria raised new fears that other passengers could take the disease beyond Africa. Nigeria’s international airports were screening passengers arriving from foreign countries, and health officials were also working with ports and land borders to raise awareness of the disease. Togo’s government also said it was on high alert. 

An outbreak in Lagos, a megacity where many live lived in cramped conditions, could be a major public-health disaster.

There being no particular money in finding a cure for Ebola, and there being non-trivial risk from the disease, would it be too much to ask that a prize be established for whomever comes up with an effective treatment or vaccine so that the Red Death not hold illimitable dominion over all?

Emergency Powers

INTERIOR: CORUSCANT, MAIN SENATE CHAMBER - EVENINGWELLINGTON, THE BEEHIVE - AFTERNOON

JAR JAR GERRY BROWNLEE stands in his pod before the chamber, as it floats in the middle of the taking up a vast space.

JAR JAR: BROWNLEE: In response to the direct threat to the Republic Christchurch mesa propose that the Senate Parliament give immediately emergency powers to the Supreme Chancellor Governor in Council.

Uproar. JAR JAR BROWNLEE looks a little sheepish.

Brief silence, then a rolling wave of APPLAUSE. JAR JAR BROWNLEE beams and bows.

PALPATINE KEY rises.

PALPATINE KEY: It is with great reluctance that I have agreed to this calling legislation. I love democracy... I love the Republic Constitutional Monarchy. But I am mild by nature, and I do not desire to see the destruction of democracy. The power you give me I will lay down when this crisis has abated legislation expires, I promise you. And as my first act with this new authority, I will create a grand army of the Republic Earthquake Recovery Commission to counter the increasing threats of the separatists of spending an extra day drafting legislation that takes due account of our constitutional freedoms rather than commencing reconstruction immediately under emergency powers allowing me to strike down any legislation that stands in my way.

For context, see DimPost, Graeme Edgeler, NoRightTurn, Andrew Geddis, Kiwipolitico, NotPC, and Attack of the Clones.

1% chance or less that this leads to the abandoning of the Republic and the formation of the First Southern Oceanic Empire. But would the extra day's delay to craft sound legislation actually have been all that bad? My best guess is that the government actually really doesn't know what bits of legislation would get in the way of rebuilding so it's given itself the power to void all of it. Which kinda points out that it might just have been a bit too complicated for us regular folks to get building consents prior to the Quake.

The fallibility and malleability of memory

Arts & Letters Daily points to William Saletan's worrying piece on the work of Elizabeth Loftus. She began as the researcher pointing out the fallibility and malleability of memory, showing how eyewitness accounts were unreliable and how therapists could implant false memories of childhood abuse. But she's moved on a bit from there, now suggesting memory therapy as a way of planting false memories of childhood aversions to fatty foods as a useful way of achieving a healthy diet.

When Loftus saw the results, an idea came to her. What if you could produce similar aversions to fattening foods? Could false memories help people eat a healthier diet? She tried the experiment again, first with potato chips, then with chocolate chip cookies and strawberry ice cream. The potato-chip version failed, apparently because potato chips were too familiar as a tasty snack. But the ice-cream version worked. More than 40 percent of subjects were persuaded that they had gotten sick eating strawberry ice cream, and these subjects were significantly more likely to say they would avoid it.

In February 2005, Loftus and her coauthors published the egg study, concluding that "humans can be trained to avoid food." Four months later, they published the ice-cream study under the title, "False Beliefs About Fattening Foods Can Have Healthy Consequences." The diet-improvement rationale, originally an afterthought, was now central. The bottom line, they wrote, was that "we can, through suggestion, manipulate nutritional selection and possibly even improve health."

In the food experiments, all the threads of Loftus' career came together. Instead oftraining a rat, she was training people. Instead of using a reward, she was using the techniques she had learned from the recovered-memory therapists. And instead of planting bad memories, she was planting healthy ones. She was a real-life memory doctor.

But she, too, was responding to behavioral reinforcement. The fattening-food experiment was the most widely celebrated study she had ever done. It made headlines all over the world and earned her a place on the New York Times Magazine's list of the year's most innovative ideas. She was being rewarded for doing something socially useful. She reveled in the attention and acclaim. She quoted her press clippings in speeches.

In reality, the work she had done on memories of sexual abuse was more important. But that work had hurt and angered people. It had brought condemnation and contempt on her. In diet therapy, she found no such punishment. Again, she was meeting people who desperately needed her. But this time, they were fighting obesity, not deluded daughters. "I wish I could be of more immediate help to these people, but I'm forced to tell them that the line of research is at its very earliest stages," she wrote in 2007. "Still, it is refreshing to be working on a topic that could indeed be of genuine help to people and one that is not as anger inspiring and dangerous as the topic of sex abuse."

All those years, Loftus had been vilified for attacking therapy. Now she was inventing a therapy of her own. But hers was different. It was good for people, and she could make it better. She began to think of ways to magnify its power: ratcheting up the false feedback, perhaps, or showing photos or videos of people being sickened by the designated foods. Soon she was convincing students that they had loved asparagus as children. "Healthier Eating Could Be Just a False Memory Away," said the published journal article.

Loftus talked about the food experiments the same way she had talked about EPS. The concept, she explained, was to "tap into people's imagination and mental thoughts to influence their food choices." But two crucial elements had changed. First, she was now trying to influence behavior through memory, not just through imagination. In EPS, memory modification had been a kind of collateral damage. In the food experiments, memory modification was the whole idea.

...

But would freedom of choice survive therapeutic deception? Would it survive social pressure to fix unhealthy memories and habits? Loftus and her colleagues were already presenting memory therapy as an alternative to coercion. In their article on fattening food, they warned that unless behavioral scientists stemmed the obesity crisis, laws might be imposed to induce healthier eating, just as "seatbelt laws were imposed upon us when people were not using them on their own." In their article on alcohol, they offered memory doctoring as an alternative to electric shock and other "invasive" aversion therapies.

So, the next nudge then. Public service announcements that don't browbeat us about behaviours but rather try to plant false memories of childhood experiences. Remember eating asparagus with your grandma and how happy that made you when you were five? How you helped her to pick the asparagus? Weren't you happy then? And don't you remember how your father beat your mother that time he drank too much? Weren't you sad seeing that? Doesn't asparagus make you feel warm and good all over while alcohol makes you feel a little sick?

Go read the whole Saletan piece, which has excellent discussion of Chinese mass propaganda trying to implant false memories of the Tiananmen Square protesters having attacked PRA soldiers first. Didn't you remember that Greedo shot first too?