COVID-19 and Other Pandemics | Anarchy in the USA

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COVID-19 and Other Pandemics | Anarchy in the USA

Post by Doc »

Mod note and disclaimer. This quarantined thread is now for those who prefer to base their public health decisions on polarized parochial politics, tribalism, and histrionic mainstream and social media posts by charlatans and opportunists.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

But first a message from our POTUS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQD8TWPSDyA#t=110s

Hmmm Looks like Obama is going to have to appear on 60 minutes again this coming Sunday.... "I think our head of the CDC has admitted he underestimated Ebola... "

Officials investigate possible Ebola cases in Hawaii, Utah
Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu / KGMB-TV

Health officials in at least two states worked Thursday to determine whether patients other than a man being treated in Texas are infected with the Ebola virus.

Primary Children's Hospital in Salt Lake City forwarded specimens from a male patient to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for additional tests, CBS affiliate KUTV reported.

The unidentified patient recently traveled to an African country where Ebola has not yet been reported, but showed symptoms similar to the virus.

"Ebola is extraordinarily unlikely," says Dr. Andrew Pavia said at a press conference Thursday afternoon, adding that the results could be available Friday.

The hospital has been working on an emergency plan for months to provide protection to staff, patients, families and the community in the event they have a patient with an Ebola infection in the future.

"We are ready," says Dr. Dagmar Vitek, deputy director and medical officer at the Salt Lake County Health Department. "There would be really very minimal danger."

Elsewhere, the Hawaii state Department of Health said Thursday that it has ruled out the possibility that a patient isolated at a Honolulu hospital has the Ebola virus, CBS affiliate KGMB reports.

The patient, an unidentified man, was admitted to Queen's Medical Center Wednesday after experiencing what hospital officials called "possible symptoms that may be consistent with Ebola."

"The hospital acted in the best interests of the community, with an abundance of caution," said Hawaii Department of Health Director Dr. Linda Rosen. "We commend the facility for being prepared and remaining vigilant regarding the risk of Ebola. After investigation by the health department, it was determined that the individual did not meet the clinical or travel exposure criteria for an Ebola infection."

The determination to test a patient for Ebola is a joint decision made by the patient's health care provider, the state Department of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control, officials said.

In a statement on Wednesday, Queen's Medical Center officials said the hospital was "evaluating a patient for possible symptoms that may be consistent with Ebola."

The patient, who was placed in isolation Wednesday, was done so out of an abundance of caution, officials said. Hospitals across the state have been briefed by the Department of Health about standing operating procedures in the event of a possible Ebola case, the Department of Health said Wednesday.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ebola-virus ... -criteria/
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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Re: Potential new ebola cases in Hawaii Utah

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/03/us/da ... tacts.html

Delay in Dallas Ebola Cleanup as Workers Balk at Task


By KEVIN SACK and MARC SANTORAOCT. 2, 2014


DALLAS — More than a week after a Liberian man fell ill with Ebola and four days after he was placed in isolation at a hospital in Dallas, the apartment where he was staying with four other people had not been cleaned and the sheets and dirty towels he used while sick remained in the home, health officials acknowledged on Thursday afternoon.

Even as the authorities were reaching out to at least 80 people who may have had contact — either directly or indirectly — with the patient, Thomas E. Duncan, while he was contagious, they were scrambling to find medical workers to safely clean the apartment


Health officials visited the Dallas apartment on Thursday where Thomas E. Duncan, the Ebola patient, had been staying.

The four family members who are living there are among a handful who have been directed by the authorities to remain in isolation, following what officials said was a failure to comply with an order to stay home. Texas health officials hand-delivered orders to residents of the apartment requiring them not to leave their home and not to allow any visitors inside until their roughly three-week incubation periods have passed.


Retracing the Steps of the Dallas Ebola Patient

Health officials are tracking down people who may have been in contact with the man in Dallas who has been found to have Ebola.

The orders – known as communicable disease control orders – are permitted under the state’s health code. Violations could result in either criminal prosecution or civil court proceedings.

But even as the orders were being issued, there were concerns about the conditions in the home where they were being ordered to stay.

The woman who was hosting Mr. Duncan told CNN that she had been with him the first time he sought treatment at the hospital and that she had twice told workers there he had been in Liberia. Still they sent him back with only some antibiotics to the apartment, where the woman was staying with one of her children and two nephews.

Over the next two days, Mr. Duncan began sweating profusely and had diarrhea. His sweaty sheets were still on the bed on Thursday morning, the woman said. She put the towels he used in a bag but said she did not know what to do with them.

The woman, whom CNN did not identify by name, said she had no symptoms of the disease.

The Texas health commissioner, Dr. David Lakey, told reporters during an afternoon news conference that health workers should have moved more swiftly to clean the apartment but that they had had trouble finding an outside medical team to do the work. They encountered “a little bit of hesitancy,” he said.

“We are arranging for that apartment to be cleaned,” he said. “The house conditions need to be improved.”

The Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, where Thomas E. Duncan first sought treatment last week but was sent home. Credit Richard Rodriguez/European Pressphoto Agency

The authorities would not go into detail about how or where the people they are reaching out to might have come into contact with Mr. Duncan, but many were there simply because they had contact with people who had had contact with him.

A spokeswoman for the Dallas County health and human services department, Erikka Neroes, said the initial list of 12 to 18 people thought to have direct contact with Mr. Duncan had been expanded to people who had either direct or secondary contact.

“None are symptomatic,” Ms. Neroes said.

“It’s a constant process of interviews and locating as many contacts as are out there,” she said. “We expect daily that there could be more people added.” Others could fall off the list as time passes and they show no symptoms. “It’s constantly evolving,” she said.

Even as health officials scrambled to find and monitor those people, a group that includes five school-age children, they sought to ease concerns among Dallas residents.

“We have tried-and-true protocols to protect the public and stop the spread of this disease,” Dr. Lakey said. “This order gives us the ability to monitor the situation in the most meticulous way.”

The five children who came in contact with Mr. Duncan were being kept home from school, and local officials tried to reassure parents at the four different schools they attended that the facilities were thoroughly cleaned and that children are safe. There were reports that some parents were keeping their children home.


At the same time, there were more questions about how the case was handled by local doctors and health officials as the timeline on Mr. Duncan’s activities shifted.

Initially, federal authorities announced at a news conference on Tuesday that Mr. Duncan first sought treatment at the hospital last Friday, Sept. 26, but that account has since been changed. The hospital issued a statement saying that the patient went there after 10 p.m. Sept. 25, when he was examined and sent home. Neither the hospital nor the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explained how officials had gotten the date wrong and what effect it may have had on the investigation.

On Thursday, Mr. Duncan’s nephew said that even after his uncle was rushed to the hospital three days after his initial visit, vomiting and gravely ill, he did not feel they were acting with enough urgency and called federal authorities himself to alert them to the situation.

“I called C.D.C. to get some actions taken because I was concerned for his life and he was not getting the appropriate care,” the nephew, Josephus Weeks, told the NBC program “Today.” “And I feared that other people might get infected if he was not taken care of.”

Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said that they were looking into the report by the nephew but he did not know whether or not there was any record of the call.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, acknowledged that things could have been handled better, but said he was confident the measures being taken would prevent any outbreak of the disease.

“It is regrettable that there wasn’t the connecting of the dots,” Dr. Fauci told CNN on Thursday. “Because of the attention that has been paid to the situation in Dallas, people will be very much aware of paying attention to the travel history.”

The immediate priority of health officials is contacting all those who might have come into contact with Mr. Duncan after he became symptomatic, which is when the disease can spread.

Health officials said to think of the contact tracing as moving in concentric circles. Health officials focused first on those who had the closest and most intimate contact with Mr. Duncan after he became symptomatic because they are at the greatest risk of infection. That group includes at least four family members and three medics who are being isolated.

The next group includes those who had more casual contact with Mr. Duncan after he grew sick. More than a dozen people in this category will monitored by the authorities for 21 days, which is the longest documented time it has taken for this strain of Ebola to begin to cause illness.

These people will have their temperatures checked daily but are free to go about their daily routines unless they begin to show symptoms.

The final group includes the secondary contacts — those who came into contact with people who came into contact with Mr. Duncan. Since the risk of infection in this group is minimal, they are not monitored daily. But their names are put in a database in case any one of them unexpectedly becomes ill and so authorities know how to reach them quickly if needed.

“The people who were in the emergency response as well as the family, who had very close contact, even with bodily fluids, they are at a higher risk than others who came in contact,” Dr. Fauci said. “As you monitor them for fever and symptoms, you want them in a place that is confined.”

Mr. Duncan remained in isolation at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital on Thursday, in stable but serious condition. Mr. Duncan probably became infected in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, on Sept 15, when he helped carry his landlord’s convulsing pregnant daughter to a clinic to be treated for Ebola.

The woman, 19-year-old Marthalene Williams, was turned away from the overcrowded clinic because it did not have room for her and died the next day. The landlord’s son and three neighbors who came in contact with the woman also died soon afterward.

Mr. Duncan went to the airport in Monrovia on Sept. 19 to board a flight to Brussels and then on to the United States. From Brussels, Mr. Duncan flew to Dulles International Airport, near Washington, on Sept. 20 on United Flight 951, and then on to Dallas-Fort Worth on Flight 822, the airline confirmed.

Four days later, on Sept. 24, Mr. Duncan told doctors, he started to get sick. On Sept. 25, he went the emergency room with a fever and nausea.

He was sent home under the mistaken belief that he had only a mild fever, a hospital administrator said; the information that he had traveled from Liberia, one of the nations at the heart of the Ebola epidemic, was overlooked.

He returned to the hospital on Sept. 28, this time sped there in an ambulance and gravely ill.

Containing the spread of Ebola in Dallas now depends on the effectiveness of contact tracing, the federal disease centers’ core strategy. Having patient zero — the first one infected — in hand is a rare luxury in the world of contact tracing and should help ensure that the authorities cast a wide enough net to find anyone at risk.

Ten C.D.C. members are in Texas assisting local officials. They include three senior scientists with expertise in public health investigations and infection control, a communications officer, five Epidemic Intelligence Service officers — the centers’ disease detectives — and a public health adviser

“Every health department has an unsung hero who tracks down people,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist with the UPMC Center for Health Security in Baltimore. “They are generally really low paid jobs, but people tend to stay at them for a long time. It’s a labor of love.”


Correction: October 2, 2014

An earlier version of this article misstated the organization associated with Dr. ​​Anthony S. Fauci. He is head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, not the National Institutes of Health.
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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Re: Potential new ebola cases in Hawaii Utah

Post by Mr. Perfect »

I think we just don't believe in government enough.
Censorship isn't necessary
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Re: Potential new ebola cases in Hawaii Utah

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Mr. Perfect wrote:I think we just don't believe in government enough.
Hey Obama has got this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQD8TWPSDyA#t=110s

Resign, go away today, I don't feel much like dancing
Some man's come he's trying to run my life, don't know what he's asking
When he tells me I better get in line, can't hear what he's saying
When I grow up, I'm gonna make him mine, these ain't dues I been paying

How much does it cost?
I'll buy it!
The time is all we've lost
I'll try it!
He can't even protect his own house ,
I'll be damned if he'll protect mine--Resign !!

Resign, go away today, I don't feel much like dancing
Some man's come he's trying to run my life, don't know what he's asking
Working starts to make me wonder where fruits of what I do are going
When he says in love and war all is fair, he's got cards he ain't showing

How much does it cost?
I'll buy it!
The time is all we've lost--I'll try it!
He can't even Protect his own house,
I'll be damned if he'll protect mine--Resign !!

Resign, come on back another day,
I promise you I'll be singing
This old world, she's gonna turn around,
brand new bells will be ringing
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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Re: Relative risk

Post by Typhoon »

The faith of some in the power of the POTUS is a nothing if not a wonder to behold.

_____

Compared to more common viruses such as influenza, the ebola virus is not particulary infective, requiring direct contact with the blood and/or bodily fluids of an infected individual.

Which is very fortunate.
May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
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Re: Relative risk

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Typhoon wrote:The faith of some in the power of the POTUS is a nothing if not a wonder to behold.
Especially Obama's faith in Obama and the manipulators of the chief
I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. . . . He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. . . . So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. . . . He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.
-- Valerie Jarrett

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/3 ... d/page/0/1
_____

Compared to more common viruses such as influenza, the ebola virus is not particulary infective, requiring direct contact with the blood and/or bodily fluids of an infected individual.

Which is very fortunate.
Indeed but telling that to the citizens of Monrovia might not be received all that well

Also from your link:
Spread

The close quarters and massive troop movements of World War I hastened the pandemic and probably both increased transmission and augmented mutation; the war may also have increased the lethality of the virus. Some speculate the soldiers' immune systems were weakened by malnourishment, as well as the stresses of combat and chemical attacks, increasing their susceptibility.[22]

A large factor in the worldwide occurrence of this flu was increased travel. Modern transportation systems made it easier for soldiers, sailors, and civilian travelers to spread the disease.[23]

In the United States, the disease was first observed in Haskell County, Kansas, in January 1918, prompting local doctor Loring Miner to warn the U.S. Public Health Service's academic journal. On 4 March 1918, company cook Albert Gitchell reported sick at Fort Riley, Kansas. By noon on 11 March 1918, over 100 soldiers were in the hospital.[24] Within days, 522 men at the camp had reported sick.[25] By 11 March 1918 the virus had reached Queens, New York.[26]

In August 1918, a more virulent strain appeared simultaneously in Brest, France, in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and in the U.S. in Boston, Massachusetts. The Allies of World War I came to call it the Spanish flu, primarily because the pandemic received greater press attention after it moved from France to Spain in November 1918. Spain was not involved in the war and had not imposed wartime censorship.[27]
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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Re: Potential new ebola cases in Hawaii Utah

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Don't worry, everyone, the private sector will pick up all the money that the government is leaving on the floor with this. Ebola: you may have outwitted the CDC but nothing, nothing, can withstand the awesome competence of Wharton MBAs!
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Re: Potential new ebola cases in Hawaii Utah

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Zack Morris wrote:Don't worry, everyone, the private sector will pick up all the money that the government is leaving on the floor with this. Ebola: you may have outwitted the CDC but nothing, nothing, can withstand the awesome competence of Wharton MBAs!

Like I said no worries Obama has got this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQD8TWPSDyA#t=110s
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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Re: Potential new ebola cases in Hawaii Utah

Post by Zack Morris »

This crisis would be much more manageable with less centralization and more privatization. In fact, if we could return the government to its early 19th century scale, the private sector would have already crushed Ebola and HIV.
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Re: Potential new ebola cases in Hawaii Utah

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Zack Morris wrote:This crisis would be much more manageable with less centralization and more privatization. In fact, if we could return the government to its early 19th century scale, the private sector would have already crushed Ebola and HIV.
If we push things back to the 19th century Ebola would not be a airplane flight away. But the fact is that Obama and big government failed on Ebola Failed on protecting the white house and failed at a lot of other things.

I mean really Look at the secret service it has turned from the elite law enforcement agency of the US into a PC bureaucracy. I am not a anarchist. I have never argued that we do not need government. I just think we don't need big bloated out of control government And that is what it currently is.

Let me tell you a story last summer my sister came to visit. We took her to DC to see the sites. At the white house a plain cloths secret service officer told her to stop taking pictures of the White house. In hind sight I suppose they were worried about he getting a picture of a streaker running across the White House lawn. IE their priorities seem to be pretty screwed up. Ever since the Secret Service was changed from a semi independent agency of the treasury to the DHS is has been just getting worse. But Obama is getting hit pretty hard by all sides on this and his sixty minutes interview as well. HIs attitude as POTUS really is not up to standard:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/3 ... -john-fund
Obama’s Éminence Grise
As the Obama administration crashes and burns, insiders begin to blame Valerie Jarrett.
By John Fund

Are significant chunks of the mainstream media in despair over Barack Obama? This past week, Obama used 60 Minutes to attempt to shift blame for the failure to anticipate the rise of ISIS, endured a cover-up of White House security disasters by the Secret Service, and saw a government-agency report that he had skipped nearly 60 percent of his intelligence briefings.

The reaction from some longtime Obama defenders was swift and harsh. “President Obama this week committed professional suicide,” wrote former CNN host Piers Morgan, now an editor-at-large for Britain’s Daily Mail.

He called Obama’s throwing of the intelligence community under the bus a “shameless, reprehensible display of buck-passing” that will result in some analysts’ exacting “cold-blooded revenge on Obama by drip-feeding negative stories about him until he’s gone.” As for the Secret Service fiasco, Morgan said it was “no wonder the Secret Service gets complacent when The Boss exudes complacency from every pore.”

Chris Matthews of MSNBC, the former White House speechwriter who once rapturously recounted that he “felt this thrill going up my leg” as Obama spoke, didn’t hold back on Wednesday’s Hardball. “Let’s get tough here,” Matthews began, as he lambasted Obama for being “intellectually lazy” and “listening to the same voices all the time.” He even named names, saying that Obama had become “atrophied into that little world of people like Valerie Jarrett and Mrs. Obama.”

Jonathan Alter, a columnist for Bloomberg News and the author of a sympathetic book on Obama’s first term, reported that Jarrett is an unusual presence in the White House: “Staffers feared her, but didn’t like or trust her. At meetings she said little or nothing, instead lingering afterwards to express her views directly to the President, creating anxiety for her underlings and insulting them by saying, ‘I don’t talk just to hear myself talking.’”

Everyone expects a presidential spouse to weigh in on issues, but the reference to Valerie Jarrett, the White House senior adviser who mentored both the president and the first lady at the start of their careers in Chicago, is telling. Her outsize role in many presidential decisions is known to insiders, but she remains resolutely behind the scenes. So when Jarrett does enter the news, it’s significant, because it may provide a window into how the Obama White House really works.

This week, Greg Hinz of Crain’s Chicago Business noted that President Obama was back visiting Chicago but “having to share headlines with Valerie Jarrett.” She began the week with a cameo appearance on CBS’s highly rated show The Good Wife. Then a column by Michael Sneed in the Chicago Sun-Times reported that Jarrett “may be the worst abuser” of any executive-branch official with a Secret Service detail, using guards “round the clock” even while she was shopping, at the gym, or visiting friends in Chicago.

At a time when a government report shows the Secret Service is more than 550 agents below its optimal strength, Sneed bluntly asked, “Is this expense justifiable or is it an abuse of power?” Sneed quoted a source close to the White House: “Jarrett is treated as a member of the Obama family, but she’s had no real death threats requiring the constant use of the Secret Service that I know of.”

When Mark Leibovich of the New York Times tried to trace how Jarrett obtained Secret Service protection, he was told by someone close to her that she found such questions “ridiculous and offensive.”

Hinz of Chicago Business has covered Jarrett for years and has decided to offer her some quick advice: “Do whatever it takes to get your name out of the papers. And just watch TV for a while. OK?” He then joked that if Jarrett really wanted “to have some fun, try to figure out who dropped the dime on you.”

I wouldn’t bet against Jarrett finding out. As I wrote last year, White House aides “went to extraordinary lengths to uncover the identity of a senior official who was using Twitter to make snarky comments about Jarrett and other White House staffers. . . . The official had gone so far as to tweet ‘I’m a fan of Obama, but his continuing reliance and dependence upon a vacuous cipher like Valerie Jarrett concerns me.’”

When the bloodhounds uncovered Jofi Joseph, the point man on nuclear nonproliferation at the National Security Council, as the offending official, he was fired — not for revealing any secrets but for making disparaging comments about thin-skinned administration players such as Jarrett.

On Capitol Hill, members of both parties are more and more mystified at Obama’s apparent disengagement from parts of his job. Months before he dropped the ball on ISIS, he failed to keep himself properly apprised of the problems with Obamacare’s website. Jarrett appears to exercise such extraordinary influence that in some quarters on Capitol Hill she is known as “Rasputin,” a reference to the mystical monk who held sway over Russia’s Czar Nicholas as he increasingly lost touch with reality during World War I.

No one suggests that Jarrett is solely responsible for the administration’s slow response to the crises, contradictory communication, and labored political calculation that have become its hallmarks. But many do think that she has failed to encourage the president to bring in new people with fresh ideas.

So how has she survived? Not only has she been close to the first couple for nearly a quarter-century, but she clearly makes the president feel even better about himself than he would anyway. Consider this quote from her interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick for his book The Bridge (2010):

I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. . . . He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. . . . So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. . . . He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.
Journalists who contacted the White House this week and asked to speak with Jarrett didn’t get very far. Maybe she’s decided to follow the advice of Greg Hinz and lie low for a while. But if journalists really want a fuller explanation for how the Obama administration has reached its current low ebb, perhaps they should continue to follow the threads of the Jarrett string that were revealed this week and see where those lead.

— John Fund is national-affairs correspondent for NRO.
Hat tip to Book lady's ghost.
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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Typhoon
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Re: Ebola fears

Post by Typhoon »

What does this have to do with Ebola in Africa or the one case in the US?

Stay on topic.
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Re: Relative risk

Post by Typhoon »

Doc wrote:
Spread

The close quarters and massive troop movements of World War I hastened the pandemic and probably both increased transmission and augmented mutation; the war may also have increased the lethality of the virus. Some speculate the soldiers' immune systems were weakened by malnourishment, as well as the stresses of combat and chemical attacks, increasing their susceptibility.[22]

A large factor in the worldwide occurrence of this flu was increased travel. Modern transportation systems made it easier for soldiers, sailors, and civilian travelers to spread the disease.[23]

In the United States, the disease was first observed in Haskell County, Kansas, in January 1918, prompting local doctor Loring Miner to warn the U.S. Public Health Service's academic journal. On 4 March 1918, company cook Albert Gitchell reported sick at Fort Riley, Kansas. By noon on 11 March 1918, over 100 soldiers were in the hospital.[24] Within days, 522 men at the camp had reported sick.[25] By 11 March 1918 the virus had reached Queens, New York.[26]

In August 1918, a more virulent strain appeared simultaneously in Brest, France, in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and in the U.S. in Boston, Massachusetts. The Allies of World War I came to call it the Spanish flu, primarily because the pandemic received greater press attention after it moved from France to Spain in November 1918. Spain was not involved in the war and had not imposed wartime censorship.[27]
Well, the US has a choice. It can try to block all contact with the affected regions of Africa or it can try to help given that it has the resources to do so.
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Re: Relative risk

Post by Typhoon »

Typhoon wrote:
Doc wrote:
Compared to more common viruses such as influenza, the ebola virus is not particulary infective, requiring direct contact with the blood and/or bodily fluids of an infected individual.

Which is very fortunate.
Indeed but telling that to the citizens of Monrovia might not be received all that well
So POTUS Obama is not only responsible for the one case of Ebola in the US, but is also responsible for the Ebola outbreak in Monrovia and elsewhere in Africa?

The problem in Africa is a lack of knowledge about the Ebola virus along with a lack of resources to deal with it.
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Re: Potential new ebola cases in Hawaii Utah

Post by Typhoon »

Zack Morris wrote:This crisis would be much more manageable with less centralization and more privatization. In fact, if we could return the government to its early 19th century scale, the private sector would have already crushed Ebola and HIV.
Indeed.

Image
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Re: Relative risk

Post by Doc »

Typhoon wrote:
Typhoon wrote:
Doc wrote:
Compared to more common viruses such as influenza, the ebola virus is not particulary infective, requiring direct contact with the blood and/or bodily fluids of an infected individual.

Which is very fortunate.
Indeed but telling that to the citizens of Monrovia might not be received all that well
So POTUS Obama is not only responsible for the one case of Ebola in the US, but is also responsible for the Ebola outbreak in Monrovia and elsewhere in Africa?
Now where exactly did I say that?
The problem in Africa is a lack of knowledge about the Ebola virus along with a lack of resources to deal with it.

What you are missing in my point is that there is a huge human factor in the spread of Ebola. EVEN IN THE DEVELOPED WORLD It is hard to identify as was made extremely clear in the fact that the hospital in Dallas sent the Ebola victim home. A mistake that will likely cause the death of several people That the people exposed set their exposed children to school. That they did not heed the quarantine order and left the apartment An apartment that was not cleaned until yesterday because nobody wanted to take the chance on being exposed. The guy vomited all over the ground outside of the apartment. Which presumably was left there for some time. All of this is FACT not speculation. Ebola can be carried by other mammals What if the local rats dogs whatever get infected? It is pure arrogance for the CDC to tell people there is only an extremely small chance of being infected. The CDC isn't God. They cannot control everything. It is highly irresponsible for Obama to stand before the cameras and tell the public that there is no chance of infections in the US.

There is in effect no cure for this absolutely horrible way to die disease since the only possible drug is limited to zero doses at this time and a total of only 7 doses can be made ready by the end of the year.

France and Briton have banned flights from the effected countries. The land borders of the effected countries have been closed. It makes no sense to continue commercial flights from those countries. The more widespread Ebola gets the greater chance for it to mutate. Including the possibility of it mutating into an airborne virus. IF that happens 100's of millions of people world wide will be at risk of dying. Maybe more. Ebola is the biggest threat to the human race at this very moment. Arrogance just increases the chances of that happening.
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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Re: Relative risk

Post by Typhoon »

Doc wrote:
Typhoon wrote:
Typhoon wrote:
Doc wrote:
Compared to more common viruses such as influenza, the ebola virus is not particulary infective, requiring direct contact with the blood and/or bodily fluids of an infected individual.

Which is very fortunate.
Indeed but telling that to the citizens of Monrovia might not be received all that well
So POTUS Obama is not only responsible for the one case of Ebola in the US, but is also responsible for the Ebola outbreak in Monrovia and elsewhere in Africa?
Now where exactly did I say that?
The problem in Africa is a lack of knowledge about the Ebola virus along with a lack of resources to deal with it.

What you are missing in my point is that there is a huge human factor in the spread of Ebola. EVEN IN THE DEVELOPED WORLD It is hard to identify as was made extremely clear in the fact that the hospital in Dallas sent the Ebola victim home. A mistake that will likely cause the death of several people That the people exposed set their exposed children to school. That they did not heed the quarantine order and left the apartment An apartment that was not cleaned until yesterday because nobody wanted to take the chance on being exposed. The guy vomited all over the ground outside of the apartment. Which presumably was left there for some time. All of this is FACT not speculation. Ebola can be carried by other mammals What if the local rats dogs whatever get infected? It is pure arrogance for the CDC to tell people there is only an extremely small chance of being infected. The CDC isn't God. They cannot control everything. It is highly irresponsible for Obama to stand before the cameras and tell the public that there is no chance of infections in the US.

There is in effect no cure for this absolutely horrible way to die disease since the only possible drug is limited to zero doses at this time and a total of only 7 doses can be made ready by the end of the year.

France and Briton have banned flights from the effected countries. The land borders of the effected countries have been closed. It makes no sense to continue commercial flights from those countries. The more widespread Ebola gets the greater chance for it to mutate. Including the possibility of it mutating into an airborne virus. IF that happens 100's of millions of people world wide will be at risk of dying. Maybe more. Ebola is the biggest threat to the human race at this very moment. Arrogance just increases the chances of that happening.
The reproduction rate, R, of the Ebola virus is very low.

Guess I'm too jaded from having not only survived, but thrived, despite all the speculative predictions of imminent doom I've read in the media during my lifetime.

For me, life is too short to spend it being scared by the speculative.

In a year, Ebola will be all but forgotten and the media and internet will be hyperventilating about some other so-called crisis.
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Re: Relative risk

Post by Doc »

Typhoon wrote:
Doc wrote:
Typhoon wrote:
Typhoon wrote:
Doc wrote:
Compared to more common viruses such as influenza, the ebola virus is not particulary infective, requiring direct contact with the blood and/or bodily fluids of an infected individual.

Which is very fortunate.
Indeed but telling that to the citizens of Monrovia might not be received all that well
So POTUS Obama is not only responsible for the one case of Ebola in the US, but is also responsible for the Ebola outbreak in Monrovia and elsewhere in Africa?
Now where exactly did I say that?
The problem in Africa is a lack of knowledge about the Ebola virus along with a lack of resources to deal with it.

What you are missing in my point is that there is a huge human factor in the spread of Ebola. EVEN IN THE DEVELOPED WORLD It is hard to identify as was made extremely clear in the fact that the hospital in Dallas sent the Ebola victim home. A mistake that will likely cause the death of several people That the people exposed set their exposed children to school. That they did not heed the quarantine order and left the apartment An apartment that was not cleaned until yesterday because nobody wanted to take the chance on being exposed. The guy vomited all over the ground outside of the apartment. Which presumably was left there for some time. All of this is FACT not speculation. Ebola can be carried by other mammals What if the local rats dogs whatever get infected? It is pure arrogance for the CDC to tell people there is only an extremely small chance of being infected. The CDC isn't God. They cannot control everything. It is highly irresponsible for Obama to stand before the cameras and tell the public that there is no chance of infections in the US.

There is in effect no cure for this absolutely horrible way to die disease since the only possible drug is limited to zero doses at this time and a total of only 7 doses can be made ready by the end of the year.

France and Briton have banned flights from the effected countries. The land borders of the effected countries have been closed. It makes no sense to continue commercial flights from those countries. The more widespread Ebola gets the greater chance for it to mutate. Including the possibility of it mutating into an airborne virus. IF that happens 100's of millions of people world wide will be at risk of dying. Maybe more. Ebola is the biggest threat to the human race at this very moment. Arrogance just increases the chances of that happening.
The reproduction rate, R, of the Ebola virus is very low.

Guess I'm too jaded from having not only survived, but thrived, despite all the speculative predictions of imminent doom I've read in the media during my lifetime.

For me, life is too short to spend it being scared by the speculative.

In a year, Ebola will be all but forgotten and the media and internet will be hyperventilating about some other so-called crisis.
This is not about being scared. It is about leadership being responsible.
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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Re: Ebola fears

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Extremely hard to catch, deadly virus, infects 75 million people world wide

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014 ... asa-africa
HIV pandemic originated in Kinshasa in the 1920s, say scientists


Thriving city with multiple transport links and influx of male labourers made it perfect incubator for pandemic strain of HI


Ian Sample, science editor


The Guardian, Thursday 2 October 2014 14.00 EDT

An HIV-positive Congolese woman is carried to hospital on a stretcher
An HIV-positive Congolese woman is carried to hospital. The virus spread rapidly from Kinshasa via rail and river from the 1920s onwards. Photograph: EPA


A “perfect storm” of urban change that began in 1920s Kinshasa led to the catastrophic spread of HIV across Africa and into the wider world, according to scientists who used genetic sequencing and historical records to trace the origins of the pandemic.

Though the virus probably crossed from chimpanzees to humans in southern Cameroon years earlier, HIV remained a regional infection until it entered the capital of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

From the 1920s until 1960, the pandemic HIV strain – there were others that fizzled out – spread from Kinshasa, crossed borders to other nations, and ultimately landed on distant continents. It has infected nearly 75 million people worldwide to date.

When the virus arrived, Kinshasa was bustling. It was the largest and fastest growing city in the region with transport links reaching up and down the country. The busy Congo river curved north and east to Kisangani more than 600 miles away. The railway carried scores of workers southeast to Katanga, a mining province reliant on immigrant labour, and on to Lubumbashi more than 900 miles away.

Records show that by the 1940s, more than a million people a year passed through Kinshasa on the railways alone. By 1960, the rate of new pandemic HIV infections outpaced the growth of the regional population, according to research published in Science.

While boats and trains spread the virus far, other factors played their part. Records suggest Kinshasa had a relatively high proportion of men and a consequent demand for sex workers. Some doctors may have unwittingly spread the virus further, through unsterilised jabs at sexual health clinics.

An international team of scientists led by the universities of Oxford in Britain and Leuven in Belgium reconstructed the history of the HIV pandemic using historical records and DNA samples of the virus dating back to the late 1950s. The DNA allowed them to draw up a family tree of the virus that traced its ancestry through time and space. Using statistical models they could push farther back than the 1950s and locate the origin of the pandemic in 1920s Kinshasa.

People with HIV in central Africa at the time did not have specific symptoms that would have been written down in their medical records. The virus causes the immune system to collapse, leaving people open to all manner of infections. “For an epidemic like HIV where we’re trying to track back to before it was even discovered, genetics is the only source of information we have,” said Oliver Pybus, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University and senior author on the study.

The genetic data suggests that pandemic HIV spread rapidly through the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country the size of western Europe. From the late 1930s to the early 1950s, the virus spread by rail and river to Mbuji-Mayi and Lubumbashi in the south and Kisangani in the north. There the virus took hold and formed secondary reservoirs from where it spread to countries in southern and eastern Africa.

At first, HIV was an infection confined to specific groups of people. But the virus seemed to break out into the general population and spread around the world after what was then known as the Republic of the Congo achieved independence in 1960.

“Parts of the story can only be suggestive. Without a time machine it’s very difficult to prove causality. But we can be fairly sure we have the time and place where this happened,” Pybus said. “It seems a combination of factors in Kinshasa in the early 20th century created a perfect storm for the emergence of HIV, leading to a generalised epidemic with unstoppable momentum that unrolled across sub-Saharan Africa.”

Different strains of HIV have almost certainly jumped from apes to humans – through hunting or handling bushmeat – scores of times throughout history. Only a dozen or so incidents have left their traces in the DNA of HIV strains around today. Some outbreaks infected hundreds of thousands of people in Africa but went no further. Only one, known as HIV-1 group M, went pandemic.

“We all want to know how this happened, how we got here,” said Pybus. “We wanted to answer the question: why did this one turn into a pandemic?”
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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Re: Ebola fears

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http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2014/1004/ ... r-closings
Ebola in the US: More quarantines or border closings?

Ebola cases in the United States are raising questions about whether travelers from the stricken West Africa region should be quarantined until it’s clear they’re symptom-free.

By Patrik Jonsson, Staff writer October 4, 2014

ATLANTA — Is America ready for “Ebola tourism?” the conservative Daily Caller wants to know. Sen. Rand Paul says the US should shut down flights from Ebola-stricken nations. Rush Limbaugh proclaims “Ebola is political.”

Understandable concerns about an Ebola epidemic have morphed into a vigorous, if at times less-than-helpful, debate about whether the US, and the Obama administration in particular, is doing enough to protect Americans from the viral fever that is ravaging parts of Africa.

A Liberian traveler, Thomas Eric Duncan, is being treated for the illness at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital. His immediate family has been put under full quarantine and 10 others with whom he made contact are being closely observed for signs of the illness. A Kentucky family was put under precautionary quarantine on Friday as medical authorities tested a potential Ebola case.

Recommended: Think you know Africa? Take our geography quiz.

The specter of Ebola in the US is testing the readiness of American public health officials, and at the same time taking on politically loaded meaning around whether the US should quarantine travelers from the stricken West Africa region until it’s clear they’re symptom-free.

Photos of the Day| Photos of the Day 10/03

As the crisis unfolded this week, a GOP Senate aide called the decision not to limit travel from Africa “a powder keg,” according to Fox News.

To be sure, invoking worst-case scenarios in the midst of a crisis may be less than helpful in containing any sense of panic in the US. But others note such questions are nevertheless important, because they’re at the forefront of many Americans’ consciousness as they follow developments in Dallas.

“I think we should be talking about these things [like travel bans]. It doesn’t mean we have to do them, but taking them off the table is not helpful,” Tevi Troy, a former deputy Health and Human Services secretary, told Politico.

One backdrop to the criticism is the Obama administration’s 2010 decision to scrap stricter quarantine rules first proposed by the George W. Bush administration in 2005, amid avian flu concerns. While it’s not clear those regulations would have been helpful now, they would have given US authorities more power to control potential passengers’ itineraries into the US. In rejecting the standards, the White House and civil libertarians called the proposed rules too onerous.

Moreover, the response in Dallas has been bumpy. Mr. Duncan was not diagnosed on his first visit to the hospital, and it was unclear as to whether his travels from Liberia had been flagged by hospital personnel. What is known is that he was sent home until he returned in an ambulance two days later, after being exposed to the public.

The Dallas apartment where Duncan was staying remained unsanitized for days as officials debated how best to quarantine the family and monitor others who may have had second-hand exposure. After a jittery week where cleaning company employees balked at sanitizing the apartment, the apartment was finally cleaned and the family was moved to a more comfortable four-bedroom home in a Dallas suburb.

Another simmering question is whether Duncan exposed weaknesses in airport screening by lying about not having contact with Ebola, perhaps in order to get to the US for medical care. (He had helped a stricken pregnant woman.) Whether others will try the same kind of “Ebola tourism” for American healthcare plies a poignant human dilemma, writes Dallas Morning News columnist James Ragland: “Do I want to lie and live – or do I want to be an honest dead man?”

For now, the US continues to expand its presence in West Africa, led by Centers for Disease Control airport testing and arriving US troops who will be put to work building much-needed treatment facilities for victims.

Shutting down air traffic from the region would be counterproductive, argued White House homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco, at a press briefing. She said CDC screening has already stopped dozens of potentially infected people from traveling to the US, and a ban would just make it harder to get medical personnel into the region to stop the outbreak at its source.

“I wish we could get to zero risk by sealing off the border, but we can’t,” CDC Director Tom Frieden told Fox News.
Britain and France have stopped commercial flights from the countries in question. Why can't Obama do the same? Claiming it would make it harder to get personal to the effected country is pure bull. Banning commercial air service does not mean that no flights can go there.
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Re: Ebola fears

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Government Incompetence piled on incompetence.

Yeah Obama has got this


http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Texa ... -Ambulance
Dallas Paramedic: We Weren’t Contacted After Working in Ebola Exposed Ambulance

by Bob Price 2 Oct 2014 238 post a comment

Congressman Burgess on Dallas Ebola Case: ‘All Hands on Deck’

by Bob Price

by Kristin Tate

HOUSTON, Texas -- A Dallas paramedic claimed he drove the ambulance that the US Ebola patient was transported in and that he was not contacted by anyone about the potential exposure. He claims he drove the ambulance sometime after the patient was transported. The Dallas Fire Department left the ambulance that transported Ebola patient Thomas Duncan to the hospital in service for at least 48 hours before putting it in quarantine on Wednesday. The ambulance was exposed to the Ebola virus when Duncan was transported on September 28th.

“All the people in the back of the ambulance 48 hours later before they finally took the ambulance out of service,” said Dallas Paramedic Geoffrey Aklinski in a discussion on Facebook, “none of them have been contacted. None of the paramedics that were on that shift and went in the ambulance were contacted. I’ve been off three days now. No one contacted me and I was in and drove that ambulance after it was infected.


Aklinski said he was going to a doctor on his own initiative to be tested for the Ebola virus. “This is definitely a concern and exposed workers have not been contacted or tested… like me,” he explained. “I had to call into control in Dallas at 8 pm and complain to get evaluated.”

“Three days after the fact,” an exasperated Aklinski stated, “I had to demand exposure testing and they are reporting following up with all the people in the ambulance??? Bull crap!!! They haven’t even followed up with the ten firefighters that were on duty Sunday.”

Aklinski went further in explaining the frustration he and most likely, other firefighters, are feeling. “How do you not test and contact the firefighters at the station on Sunday!!! Only the two medics and the intern on the ambulance? I was freaking in that ambulance hours later driving it!!! No one bothered to contact me about it?!!!”

He went on to say he has contacted other news outlets and they won’t report his side of the story. “They just go with the official reports,” Aklinski stated.

Aklinski said he is going in for testing today and then will go into a 21 day home evaluation period.

Breitbart Texas contacted the Dallas Fire and Rescue Department and the Dallas Firefighters’ Association for comment. No response was immediately available.
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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Re: Ebola fears

Post by Typhoon »

Doc wrote:Government Incompetence piled on incompetence.

Yeah Obama has got this


http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Texa ... -Ambulance
Dallas Paramedic: We Weren’t Contacted After Working in Ebola Exposed Ambulance

by Bob Price 2 Oct 2014 238 post a comment

Congressman Burgess on Dallas Ebola Case: ‘All Hands on Deck’

by Bob Price

by Kristin Tate

HOUSTON, Texas -- A Dallas paramedic claimed he drove the ambulance that the US Ebola patient was transported in and that he was not contacted by anyone about the potential exposure. He claims he drove the ambulance sometime after the patient was transported. The Dallas Fire Department left the ambulance that transported Ebola patient Thomas Duncan to the hospital in service for at least 48 hours before putting it in quarantine on Wednesday. The ambulance was exposed to the Ebola virus when Duncan was transported on September 28th.

“All the people in the back of the ambulance 48 hours later before they finally took the ambulance out of service,” said Dallas Paramedic Geoffrey Aklinski in a discussion on Facebook, “none of them have been contacted. None of the paramedics that were on that shift and went in the ambulance were contacted. I’ve been off three days now. No one contacted me and I was in and drove that ambulance after it was infected.


Aklinski said he was going to a doctor on his own initiative to be tested for the Ebola virus. “This is definitely a concern and exposed workers have not been contacted or tested… like me,” he explained. “I had to call into control in Dallas at 8 pm and complain to get evaluated.”

“Three days after the fact,” an exasperated Aklinski stated, “I had to demand exposure testing and they are reporting following up with all the people in the ambulance??? Bull crap!!! They haven’t even followed up with the ten firefighters that were on duty Sunday.”

Aklinski went further in explaining the frustration he and most likely, other firefighters, are feeling. “How do you not test and contact the firefighters at the station on Sunday!!! Only the two medics and the intern on the ambulance? I was freaking in that ambulance hours later driving it!!! No one bothered to contact me about it?!!!”

He went on to say he has contacted other news outlets and they won’t report his side of the story. “They just go with the official reports,” Aklinski stated.

Aklinski said he is going in for testing today and then will go into a 21 day home evaluation period.

Breitbart Texas contacted the Dallas Fire and Rescue Department and the Dallas Firefighters’ Association for comment. No response was immediately available.
I had no idea that Obama was Fireman-in-Chief of the Dallas Fire Department.
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Re: Ebola fears

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May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
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Re: Ebola fears

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How does HIV spread? 75 million infected world wide and it is harder to transmit than Ebola.

Let me put it to you this way. I believe you have been to Brasil in the past. What would you think would happen if someone with Ebola entered the slums of Rio? DO you think the Brasiliian government, like the governments of Britain and France, should ban flights and recent travers from West Africa?
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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Re: Ebola fears

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Doc wrote:
How does HIV spread? 75 million infected world wide and it is harder to transmit than Ebola.

Let me put it to you this way. I believe you have been to Brasil in the past. What would you think would happen if someone with Ebola entered the slums of Rio? DO you think the Brasiliian government, like the governments of Britain and France, should ban flights and recent travers from West Africa?

What's more even many of the medical personael on the ground in West Africa who have been thoroughly trained how to avoid infection do not know how they got infected.

http://news.sciencemag.org/africa/2014/ ... t-happened
Ebola survivor II, Nancy Writebol: 'We just don't even have a clue what happened'


Jon is a staff writer for Science.

By Jon Cohen 2 October 2014 4:00 pm 10 Comments

Ebola nearly killed Nancy Writebol in July—and it also made her famous, which helped broadcast to the world that it needed to respond more aggressively to what had grown from a small outbreak into an out-of-control epidemic.

Writebol, a clinical nurse associate, became ill with the disease while working for the missionary group SIM in Monrovia. She and her husband David spoke with Science on 24 September about a topic that has yet to receive much attention: How do health care workers who are trained to protect themselves nevertheless become infected with the Ebola virus? The Writebols also discuss how the outbreak grew into an epidemic, as well as the treatment she received both in Liberia and then at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. Questions and answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Q: Any idea how you became infected?

N.W.: I don’t know how I became infected and how I contracted it. There are some thoughts about how I might have gotten it. Nobody is really sure, least of all me. I never felt like I was unsafe and I never felt like I walked into a situation where I was being exposed. I was on the low-risk side of things. I never was in the crisis or the Ebola center. I was always on the outside. I made sure doctors and nurses were dressed properly before they went in, and I decontaminated them before they went out. We kept a close check on each other about whether people felt safe.



We had an employee who was doing the same job that I was doing. He got sick and I didn’t know he was sick. He didn’t tell anybody. He actually thought he had typhoid. The day that I started having symptoms, at least a fever, was the last day I saw him. He did have Ebola. He did not survive.

I never remember touching him, although it’s possible he could have picked up a sprayer to decontaminate someone, and I could have picked up the sprayer. Or we touched the same thing. I never touched him.

Q: You were educated about Ebola transmission?


N.W.: Oh my goodness, yes.


Q: Did you have sufficient personal protective equipment (PPE)?

N.W.: Yes, we did. It was my responsibility to make sure they were dressed properly in PPEs before they ever went into the isolation. I didn’t want any of our doctors or nurses getting infected. I mean, I saw people dying of Ebola. We had PPEs and followed every single protocol that [Doctors Without Borders (MSF)] had in their manual—and we had been trained by MSF.

Q: Were you wearing PPE in your job, disinfecting doctors and nurses?

N.W.: No, I was wearing gloves and a disposable apron. There were times I had a mask on. I was behind a line where I did the disinfecting. They were on one side of a line and I was on the other side. I never crossed those lines. We just don’t even have a clue what happened.

I’ve often wondered if I was back there now, having been through the experience, what would I do differently. The only thing is I took temperatures of family members who would come to see patients. I never had to turn anybody away because they had a temperature, but it’s possible I might have come in contact with somebody on the outside who had Ebola and maybe shook a hand? Although we weren’t really shaking hands with anybody. Most people had a fear of even us. They felt like to be involved with Ebola, you had it.

Q: On what date did you start feeling symptoms?

N.W.: Tuesday, 22 July. That afternoon I started running a fever. I felt like I had malaria. I contacted an SIM doctor. We did a malaria test and it was positive. I had malaria medication at home, and I went home and I stayed home. I was weak. I had the headache. Had the fever. Those were my symptoms. I took malaria medications but was just not shaking the fever at all. On Saturday, our doctor came over and she said, “We’re just going to do the Ebola test to relieve everyone.” I was just thinking still malaria. They did another malaria test and it showed negative, because I had taken the medication. Then they did the Ebola test that Saturday morning, and Saturday night the result came back that I was positive.

Q: Do you think you had malaria coincident with Ebola?

N.W.: I did. I tested positive for it.

Q: What happened next?

N.W.: They left me at home for the next 10 days.

Q: Was David there?

N.W.: Yes. It’s just the grace of God that David did not come down with Ebola. For the whole 4 days that they thought it was just malaria, David did the cooking at our home. I just didn’t feel good. We were still sharing our bedroom. Our doctor was exposed and she had dinner with us the night she told us I had Ebola. I’d had malaria once that year. I knew what it felt like and it was so similar.

D.W.: They isolated me after that. For a few days, I went in to see Nancy in a PPE. Our home became an isolation unit. Then they said, “We can’t let you do that anymore because you can’t get back to the United States by commercial aviation.” They kept me out.

N.W.: Thankfully there was a window near where my bed was and David could stand outside and talk to me.

Q: David, did you check your temperature every few hours?

D.W.: Yep. I got close to 99.2° [37.3°C], but I realized after I took my temperature that I’d just had a cup of coffee.

Q: What happened with Kent Brantly?

N.W.: I got sick the 22nd and Kent on the 23rd. Kent was actually much sicker to begin with, and then I took a turn for the worse. Kent went out on Saturday the 2nd. I left August 4.

Q: You and Kent Brantly both received ZMapp. Do you think it helped?

N.W.: It’s given at three different times. I had two of the doses in Liberia, and the third at Emory. I don’t know that I can say when I was given the ZMapp it made a dramatic difference in how I was feeling. I think I was very, very, very sick, critically sick. I’m not saying it didn’t help—I do think it had some benefit to it—but it wasn’t this huge, dramatic “I had this ZMapp and now I can sit up and take a shower.”

They give ZMapp via IV and they give it slowly and then turn it up a little. When they turned it up on me, my hands started itching terribly and then they turned it back down so I wouldn’t have a reaction to it. That’s the only thing I remember about the ZMapp.

Q: Were you very ill when you left Liberia?

N.W.: I didn’t know whether I would survive the flight.

D.W.: I wasn’t sure either. She had to be carried into the aircraft. She didn’t walk in or walk off.

N.W.: I was in PPE the whole trip back. And I was dehydrated. They were having a terrible time in Liberia finding a vein in which to run fluid. At one point they decided to try and do an IV into the bone. That was very painful. They don’t really know what happened, whether the needle bent when it went into the bone, but once they tried pushing fluid, it was excruciating and they decided to stop. When I got to Emory they just put a central line in.

Q: Would you go back again and work in an Ebola treatment unit?

N.W.: I’ve done some reading on that and talked to doctors at Emory about that. My doctors at Emory are not sure how long immunity would last. It’s not been studied. I’ve read that even if a survivor was willing and able to help with the care for Ebola patients, because there are so many strains of Ebola, it would still be very wise and necessary to operate in PPEs and not just assume you’re immune.

Q: What do you think of your own role in this epidemic and the fact that it wasn’t until you and Kent Brantly became ill that the world began to take notice that something was seriously amiss?

N.W.: Never in my life would I have dreamed this would happen. We’d been in Liberia for a year and had a doctor come into the country in March or April who laid out a graph of other Ebola timelines and how the disease had gone along in Congo and Uganda, and how it was just this steady little disease working its way along—and then it spikes and spikes again and grows into a mushroom. He overlaid where Liberia was on that graph. He made the observation that we had not seen the worst of it yet.

D.W.: People were calmed down and thought it was over. In early June, Monrovia started getting the multiple cases from Foya [a town in the north that borders both Sierra Leone and Guinea, the two other hard-hit countries].

N.W.: We hadn’t started to hit the mushroom at all. And then Samaritan’s Purse had an epidemiologist who came into the country who sat with us and said, “I went to Foya. You have not seen the end of this. It’s going to get bad.”

D.W.: All along, we were concerned there was not a larger response. It’s the publicity that was generated from Nancy’s story and Dr. Brantly that woke things up. That was astonishing.

Q: You knew it was wildly out of control?

N.W.: I would have never predicted the numbers WHO [the World Health Organization] and CDC [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] are predicting now. I looked at that and thought, “Oh my goodness”; we had no clue it was going to go to that extent. You’re talking a half-million in Liberia alone.

Q: What did you think of the media coverage of ZMapp?

D.W.: Initially it seemed a bit sensational: This is the magic bullet. That’s what they do, they gravitate toward that, but they’ve also backed off that and had a more balanced approach. It’s promising, but don’t put too much hope into it until more studies are done.

N.W.: I think they understand, too, that nobody really knows how much it helped. Because there were so many other things playing into it. There were blood transfusions. The other care given to us.

Q: Did you have a blood transfusion?

N.W.: I did. I had blood transfusions in Liberia and Emory. Neither was convalescent serum, though. There wasn’t a match.

Q: How’s your health now?

N.W.: I’m recovering. I’m regaining my strength. When I left Emory, I could hardly walk up steps at all. I have some neuropathy in my feet. While I was in Emory it was excruciating. They couldn’t even put sheets or blankets on my toes. That’s much better.

I wear out easily. And of course there’s just the emotional side of it. I was on that job from the 11 June case, that first patient we had, to 22 July, and I saw about 40 people and we saw one survivor during that period of time. To watch the rest of those people die was difficult. I was dealing with some of their families and trying to encourage them and pray with them. To watch families watch their loved ones die, that’s hard, too.

For a story about Ebola's infection risk for health care workers, click here.

*The Ebola Files: Given the current Ebola outbreak, unprecedented in terms of number of people killed and rapid geographic spread, Science and Science Translational Medicine have made a collection of research and news articles on the viral disease freely available to researchers and the general public.
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
Mr. Perfect
Posts: 16973
Joined: Mon Dec 12, 2011 9:35 am

Re: Relative risk

Post by Mr. Perfect »

Typhoon wrote:The faith of some in the power of the POTUS is a nothing if not a wonder to behold.

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Compared to more common viruses such as influenza, the ebola virus is not particulary infective, requiring direct contact with the blood and/or bodily fluids of an infected individual.

Which is very fortunate.
Democrats for decades have blamed Ronald Reagan for the entrance and spread of AIDS in America, so obama more than deserves the blame for this by Democrat standards, except obama had far more heads up.

Further, obama has ran on the primacy of competent government that you can rely on, and so if you can't hold him accountable for those positions when the government fails, what can you hold a politician accountable for.

As always, obama is not one man, he is the executive over massive and incredibly expensive government agencies under his direct control. The design of our system is accountability to the voting public. I don't why you would want to remove that.
Last edited by Mr. Perfect on Sun Oct 05, 2014 12:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Censorship isn't necessary
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