Re:Ebola Is Now Curable
by HeadsUpHigh on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @02:05AM
(#20683193)
Joking aside that's not what syndrome means. Things that have no known cause as of today are usually called idiopathic.
Re:Ebola Is Now Curable
by lonelappde on Monday August 12, 2019 @07:01PM
(#20681023)
The comparison is to show that even in technologically advanced societies, there are diseases with 30% survival rates.
A doctor once told me that so much of our higher survival rate is based on a few key drugs and supportive care to keep us alive while the body heals itself. We seem to possess remarkably few cures for the majority of diseases out there, we are mostly able to treat symptoms to buy time for our bodies to self-repair.
To add, the reason it has such a high mortality rate is TEN/SJS are almost isomorphic to 2nd and 3rd degree burns over a high percentage of your body, which is also very commonly fatal. The "30%" mortality rate is greatly dependent on how bad the SJS/TEN manifests.
Is syndrome = "no known cause" a common definition?
Re:Ebola Is Now Curable
by dwohnitmok on Monday August 12, 2019 @10:35PM
(#20682283)
I imagine parent is being a bit tongue in cheek. A syndrome is any group of symptoms that seem to occur together. Often something is called a syndrome before its cause is determined. However, even after a cause is found or if it was known, the name often persists. E.g. AIDS was named before it was traced back to HIV. It persists as the name for the late stages of an HIV infection.
So while it is often the case that when a syndrome is initially named its cause is unknown, the two are really referring to different levels of abstraction of a disease. The syndrome is its effects, irrespective of whether we know its cause.
Re:Ebola Is Now Curable
by Godel_unicode on Monday August 12, 2019 @10:38PM
(#20682293)
Nope.
Edit: one usage is for a set of commonly concurrent symptoms, possibly with no known cause. Another common usage is a set of concurrent symptoms with multiple known causes (e.g. toxic shock syndrome).
"necro" -- "death"
"lysis" -- "busting open"
"epidermal" -- "skin"
"syndrome" -- "no known cause"
However, it's a little unclear why TEN is a point of comparison to Ebola, as one is a transmissible disease and one is something that happens to unlucky people typically in response to common small-molecule drugs. I guess TEN sounds like a probable side effect of antiviral immune therapy, but it's not mentioned in the article. And it seems a little tricky to separate the side effects from the disease when dealing with hemorrhagic diseases in particular