COVID-19 and Other Pandemics | Anarchy in the USA

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Doc
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Re: Ebola fears

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President Obama, Ebola and the total collapse of credibility

Americans are no longer inclined to trust their government

Less than two weeks ago, the government told us that the Ebola virus couldn’t spread here.

Also, the Internal Revenue Service isn’t targeting, the Islamic State is JV, Iraq is secure, the National Security Agency isn’t eavesdropping, Benghazi was about a video, the economy is getting better and you can keep your health plan.

The crisis of confidence in government has now reached epidemic levels, just in time for the government to bungle a possible actual epidemic.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used to be among the few government agencies that were supposed to be incorruptible by politics. It was supposed to be like the judiciary and the Internal Revenue Service in that way.

Yet since President Obama assumed the presidency, just about every federal agency has been compromised by the leftist political agenda.

The list of corrupted agencies reads like an alphabet soup of acronyms: IRS, DOJ, DOD, VA, DOE, CIA, NSA, DHS, DEA, ICE, INS, HHS, OMB, EPA, SBA.

The CDC is not immune from the virus of rampant politicization.

According to a recent Pew poll, only 20 percent of the country has a “great deal” of confidence that the federal government will be able to prevent a widespread Ebola outbreak on U.S. soil. That number should surprise no one, given the long track record of incompetence or flat-out corruption across just about every government entity.

Why should we trust a government that couldn’t even set up a health care website to fight Ebola?

On Oct. 5, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Thomas Frieden, said: “The bottom line here is we know how to stop it. It’s not going to spread widely in the U.S. for two basic reasons. We can do infection control in hospitals, and we can do public health interventions that can stop it in its tracks.”

It is true that the disease has not yet “spread widely” here. Earlier this week, though, we had the first reported transmission of Ebola on American soil. Nina Pham, a 26-year-old nurse, who had been treating the now-deceased “Patient Zero,” Thomas Eric Duncan, contracted the virus, leading Dr. Frieden to claim that it was essentially her fault: a “breach of protocol,” as he called it. By midweek, another nurse who was on the Duncan care team tested positive for Ebola a day after she returned to Dallas from Cleveland. The CDC says it’s now monitoring more than 125 people for possible infection.

Dealing with Ebola requires medical professionals who know what they’re doing, from the top down to your local hospital.

There’s the rub: Dr. Frieden has been front and center, although many have questioned his forthrightness. However, the head of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, has been elusive. Ditto for the acting surgeon general, Rear Adm. Boris Lushniak, a physician. The nation has an Ebola czar of sorts, Dr. Nicole Lurie, whose job it is to “lead the nation in preventing, responding to and recovering from the adverse health effects of public health emergencies and disasters, ranging from hurricanes to bioterrorism,” according to the Department of Health and Human Services. She has been very quiet as well.

Meanwhile, all U.S. hospitals must be ready to identify and isolate an Ebola patient, but few actually are prepared. In fact, according to a survey by the largest professional association of registered nurses in the country, three out of four nurses say their hospital hasn’t provided sufficient education for them on the virus. National Nurses United says that out of more than 1,900 nurses in 46 states and Washington, D.C., who responded, a stunning 85 percent said their hospital hadn’t even provided educational training on Ebola, during which nurses could learn and ask questions. Many nurses report that their facilities have simply posted guidelines for spotting Ebola on hospital bulletin boards.

We have a disease the director-general of the World Health Organization has called “the most severe, acute health emergency seen in modern times,” and our nurses are being prepared for it by Post-it note.

The government simply has not offered guidance commensurate with the nature of this viral threat. It may be because it knows how bad the situation is and doesn’t want to provoke mass panic. Or it may be because it doesn’t know what it’s doing — which is in some ways worse. Either way, medical professionals and the public do not feel they are getting accurate and timely information.

After six long years of breathtaking incompetence, negligence and corruption, most Americans no longer believe what their government tells them. The collapse in credibility of government — and confidence in government — make this particular moment so dangerous. Whether it’s the virus of Ebola, the virus of Islamic terrorism or the virus of big government, few Americans think that their government has the will and the ability to contain the things that threaten them most.

And that crisis may be the gravest threat of all.


Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... tal-collap
"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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Who To Blame When You Get Ebola: A CDC Guide For Healthcare Workers

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Atlanta, GA -- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced new flowchart guidelines Monday to help healthcare workers understand who they could blame once they contract Ebola in the hospital setting. The new recommendations follow declarations by Dr Thomas Friedman, Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that nurse Nina Pham in a Dallas, Texas hospital contracted Ebola due to 'protocol breach' while caring for the now deceased Ebola victim Thomas Eric Duncan.

Nurses are used to getting blamed for everything. In fact, most nursing programs teach nurses how to take one for the team when bad things happen. Getting blamed for spreading Ebola is naturally accepted by most nurses as business as usual.

"After speaking with representatives from the American Nurses Association, everyone agreed blaming nurses for spreading Ebola was just the easiest thing to do," said Jason Fenster, a CDC spokesman who blamed his nurse last year for undercooked eggs while hospitalized for an undisclosed infection contracted at a CDC laboratory.

Following the release of these CDC guidelines, officials at the Dallas, Texas hospital confirmed they are probably going to blame three or four nurses for spreading Ebola while taking care of Mr. Duncan, including one on maternity leave for the last six weeks.

"I've been in the hospital CEO business for 30 years. Whenever bad things happen in a hospital setting, we can count on at least one nurse to take the fall. In fact, I'm so confident that a nurse is always at fault, we built an entire section into our hospital rules and regulations titled 'How To Blame a Nurse For Anything Bad That Could Lead To A Lawsuit," said Jed Brainer, CEO of Texas Presbyterian Hospital.

A spokesman at the CDC, who wished to remain anonymous, says guidelines to be released next week for non-healthcare workers and pets who contract Ebola will likely blame nurses as well.
http://thehappyhospitalist.blogspot.com ... urses.html
"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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Nonc Hilaire
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Re: Ebola fears

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The flow chart is accurate. Mrs. Hilaire is an RN in an award winning suburban ER. Yesterday they had an unannounced drill with a pretend ebola patient.

After coming into contact with everyone in the waiting room and given access to a public bathroom she was caught in triage when she was asked about recent travel. This is perfect performance so far.

Recommendations were that nurses should bring in a change of scrubs in case they need to be decontaminated. Mrs. Hilaire mentioned shoes, and then the testing monitors thought that would be a good idea, too. Nurses must buy their own scrubs and shoes.

No mention of decontaminating the waiting area or triage room. No mention of keeping the pt out of the general ER. The simple fact is that the ER is primarily a profit center equipped to handle the maximum number of patients per shift with the least amount of staff possible. Lower paid PA's and MedTechs substitute for physicians and nurses whenever possible.

If a patient catches a disease in the hospital they really don't care because that is just more billable patient days.
“Christ has no body now but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks with compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks among His people to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses His creation.”

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Typhoon
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Re: Ebola fears

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Nonc Hilaire wrote:The flow chart is accurate. Mrs. Hilaire is an RN in an award winning suburban ER. Yesterday they had an unannounced drill with a pretend ebola patient.

After coming into contact with everyone in the waiting room and given access to a public bathroom she was caught in triage when she was asked about recent travel. This is perfect performance so far.

Recommendations were that nurses should bring in a change of scrubs in case they need to be decontaminated. Mrs. Hilaire mentioned shoes, and then the testing monitors thought that would be a good idea, too. Nurses must buy their own scrubs and shoes.

No mention of decontaminating the waiting area or triage room. No mention of keeping the pt out of the general ER. The simple fact is that the ER is primarily a profit center equipped to handle the maximum number of patients per shift with the least amount of staff possible. Lower paid PA's and MedTechs substitute for physicians and nurses whenever possible.

If a patient catches a disease in the hospital they really don't care because that is just more billable patient days.
Do they have isolation rooms for infectious patients?

My understanding is that people in the US often end up in the ER if they cannot afford medical insurance.

In Japan, if one is sick one also goes to the hospital (or clinic), but to a general admission/waiting area to be seen by a physician who typically does not have an off site office such as in the US. The ER is for emergencies.
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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Typhoon wrote:
Nonc Hilaire wrote:The flow chart is accurate. Mrs. Hilaire is an RN in an award winning suburban ER. Yesterday they had an unannounced drill with a pretend ebola patient.

After coming into contact with everyone in the waiting room and given access to a public bathroom she was caught in triage when she was asked about recent travel. This is perfect performance so far.

Recommendations were that nurses should bring in a change of scrubs in case they need to be decontaminated. Mrs. Hilaire mentioned shoes, and then the testing monitors thought that would be a good idea, too. Nurses must buy their own scrubs and shoes.

No mention of decontaminating the waiting area or triage room. No mention of keeping the pt out of the general ER. The simple fact is that the ER is primarily a profit center equipped to handle the maximum number of patients per shift with the least amount of staff possible. Lower paid PA's and MedTechs substitute for physicians and nurses whenever possible.

If a patient catches a disease in the hospital they really don't care because that is just more billable patient days.
Do they have isolation rooms for infectious patients?

My understanding is that people in the US often end up in the ER if they cannot afford medical insurance.

In Japan, if one is sick one also goes to the hospital (or clinic), but to a general admission/waiting area to be seen by a physician who typically does not have an off site office such as in the US. The ER is for emergencies.
There is isolation and then there is isolation. There are exactly four hospitals in the US that have for strict infectious isolation rooms. That is a room for the patient and room for medical staff to disinfect outside of it.

Americans that can not pay for health care have been able to go to emergency rooms and the hospitals cannot turn them away . This has been the law since the 1980s when Reagan made it law. Before the advent of Medicare and health insurance doctors and hospitals would treat people for free if they could not pay. They just passed along the costs to people who could pay. But first Medicare then health insurance called that fraud.

So in fact the US had universal health care coverage until it had health care coverage
"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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Nonc Hilaire
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Re: Ebola fears

Post by Nonc Hilaire »

Typhoon wrote:
Nonc Hilaire wrote:The flow chart is accurate. Mrs. Hilaire is an RN in an award winning suburban ER. Yesterday they had an unannounced drill with a pretend ebola patient.

After coming into contact with everyone in the waiting room and given access to a public bathroom she was caught in triage when she was asked about recent travel. This is perfect performance so far.

Recommendations were that nurses should bring in a change of scrubs in case they need to be decontaminated. Mrs. Hilaire mentioned shoes, and then the testing monitors thought that would be a good idea, too. Nurses must buy their own scrubs and shoes.

No mention of decontaminating the waiting area or triage room. No mention of keeping the pt out of the general ER. The simple fact is that the ER is primarily a profit center equipped to handle the maximum number of patients per shift with the least amount of staff possible. Lower paid PA's and MedTechs substitute for physicians and nurses whenever possible.

If a patient catches a disease in the hospital they really don't care because that is just more billable patient days.
Do they have isolation rooms for infectious patients?
Not in the ER.
My understanding is that people in the US often end up in the ER if they cannot afford medical insurance.
Yes.
In Japan, if one is sick one also goes to the hospital (or clinic), but to a general admission/waiting area to be seen by a physician who typically does not have an off site office such as in the US. The ER is for emergencies.
All unscheduled intake comes in through the ER here. It isn't a bad system but it is overloaded and we really should have seperate waiting areas for sneezers and bleeders. That's just common sense, but would reduce profitability.

Basically it's a factory for making well people out of sick ones, and profit comes first. Patient experience comes second and quality of care is third.
“Christ has no body now but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks with compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks among His people to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses His creation.”

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Re: Ebola fears

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WHO internal reports faults WHO stating that the current outbreak could have been stopped early.
The agency’s own bureaucracy was part of the problem, the report found. It pointed out that the heads of its country offices in Africa are “politically motivated appointments”
So what does Obama do? He appoints a political party hack lawyer to be his point man on containing Ebola.

"Never let a serious crisis go to waste".......

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ ... story.html
WHO faulted for Ebola failures as Obama taps czar

By Associated Press October 17 at 5:29 PM

LONDON — The World Health Organization bungled efforts to halt the spread of Ebola in West Africa, an internal report revealed Friday, as President Barack Obama named a trusted political adviser to take control of America’s frenzied response to the epidemic.

The stepped-up scrutiny of the international response came as U.S. officials rushed to cut off potential routes of infection from three cases in Texas, reaching a cruise ship in the Caribbean and multiple domestic airline flights. Republican lawmakers and the Obama administration debated the value of restricting travelers from entering the U.S. from countries where the outbreak began, without a resolution.

But with Secretary of State John Kerry renewing pleas for a “collective, global response” to a disease that has already killed more than 4,500 people in Africa, the WHO draft report pointed to serious errors by an agency designated as the international community’s leader in coordinating response to outbreaks of disease.

The document — a timeline of the outbreak — found that WHO, an arm of the United Nations, missed chances to prevent Ebola from spreading soon after it was first diagnosed in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea last spring, blaming factors including incompetent staff and a lack of information. Its own experts failed to grasp that traditional infectious disease containment methods wouldn’t work in a region with porous borders and broken health systems, the report found.


“Nearly everyone involved in the outbreak response failed to see some fairly plain writing on the wall,” WHO said in the report, obtained by The Associated Press. “A perfect storm was brewing, ready to burst open in full force.”

The agency’s own bureaucracy was part of the problem, the report found. It pointed out that the heads of its country offices in Africa are “politically motivated appointments” made by the WHO regional director for Africa, Dr. Luis Sambo, who does not answer to the agency’s chief in Geneva, Dr. Margaret Chan.

Dr. Peter Piot, the co-discoverer of the Ebola virus, agreed that WHO acted far too slowly.

“It’s the regional office in Africa that’s the front line,” said Piot, interviewed at his office in London. “And they didn’t do anything. That office is really not competent.”

WHO declined to comment on the document, which was not issued publicly, and said that Chan would be unavailable for an interview with the AP. She did tell Bloomberg News that she “was not fully informed of the evolution of the outbreak. We responded, but our response may not have matched the scale of the outbreak and the complexity of the outbreak.”

Meanwhile, Obama moved to step up the U.S. response to the disease, naming Ron Klain, a former chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden, as the administration’s point man on Ebola.

Klain is a longtime Democratic operative who also served as a top aide to Vice President Al Gore. He does not have any medical or public health expertise. But the White House said he would serve as “Ebola response coordinator,” suggesting his key role will be to synchronize the actions of many government agencies in combatting the disease.

“This is much broader than a medical response,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said, citing Klain’s experience in the private as well as public sector and his relationships with Congress.

“All of that means he is the right person for the job, and the right person to make sure we are integrating the interagency response to this significant challenge,” he said.

Republican lawmakers continued pushing the administration Friday to consider restricting travel to the U.S. from the three Ebola-stricken West African countries. But despite Obama’s statement Thursday that he was not “philosophically opposed” to such a ban, Earnest affirmed the White House’s resistance to such a move.

Republican Mike Leavitt, a former health secretary under President George W. Bush, said Friday that he sees “lots of problems” with such a ban. While it may seem like a good idea, Bush administration officials who considered it to contain bird flu concluded that it would not work, while raising a host of difficult questions about who would be allowed to travel.

Other nations have taken steps to prevent travelers from the affected areas from crossing their borders. The Central American nation of Belize announced that it would immediately stop issuing visas to people from West African countries where Ebola had spread.

U.S. officials continued their efforts to contain the fallout from the nation’s first reported case of Ebola, Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian traveler who died last week at a Dallas hospital.

Officials said they were working to remove a hospital worker — who had handled an Ebola lab specimen — from a Caribbean cruise ship, although she had gone 19 days without showing any sign of the infection. The Carnival Cruise Lines ship was headed back to its home port of Galveston, Texas, on Friday after failing to get clearance to dock in Cozumel, Mexico, and officials in Belize would not allow the woman to leave the ship.

The lab worker and her spouse were in isolation and she is “not deemed to be a risk to any guests or crew,” a cruise line spokeswoman said.

Doctors at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland said that a Dallas nurse, Nina Pham, brought there for Ebola treatment was very tired but resting comfortably Friday in fair condition.

“We fully intend to have this patient walk out of this hospital,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said.

Another nurse to contract Ebola, Amber Vinson, was being treated at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta.

Concerns persisted about people who might have been in contact with her during a recent trip between Texas and Ohio. Police said Vinson stayed at the home of her mother and stepfather in Tallmadge, northeast of Akron, and the home has been cordoned off with yellow tape. Eight individuals in northeast Ohio were under quarantine, health officials said.

Frontier Airlines said it would contact passengers on seven flights, including two that carried Vinson and others afterward that used the same plane.

Despite the stepped up attention to disease, though, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim warned Friday that officials in many countries were focused too much on their own borders.

“I still don’t think that the world has understood what the possible downside risk is not just to the west African economy but to the global economy. And we are still losing the battle,” he said.
"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.nytimes.com/2014/10/18/us/am ... eethe.html
Amid Assurances on Ebola, Obama Is Said to Seethe

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR and MARK LANDLEROCT. 17, 2014

WASHINGTON — Beneath the calming reassurance that President Obama has repeatedly offered during the Ebola crisis, there is a deepening frustration, even anger, with how the government has handled key elements of the response.

Those frustrations spilled over when Mr. Obama convened his top aides in the Cabinet room after canceling his (fund raising)schedule on Wednesday. Medical officials were providing information that later turned out to be wrong. Guidance to local health teams was not adequate. It was unclear which Ebola patients belonged in which threat categories.


“It’s not tight,” a visibly angry Mr. Obama said of the response, according to people briefed on the meeting. He told aides they needed to get ahead of events and demanded a more hands-on approach, particularly from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “He was not satisfied with the response,” a senior official said.

In Belton, Tex., on Friday, environmental workers prepared to disinfect North Belton Middle School, which had been closed because of the Ebola scare.

Plastic drums containing potentially contaminated material were removed from the Dallas apartment where Nina Pham, a nurse at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, was staying before being treated for Ebola.

Marie Nellon on Saturday with her son at Kennedy Airport in New York. He traveled from Liberia, a country hit hard by Ebola.

As U.S. Steps Up Fight, J.F.K. Begins Screening Passengers for EbolaOCT. 11, 2014


The difference between the public and private messages illustrates the dilemma Mr. Obama faces on Ebola — and a range of other national security issues — as he tries to galvanize the response to a public health scare while not adding to the sense of panic fueled by 24-hour cable TV and the nonstop Twitter chatter.

People briefed on a cabinet meeting said Mr. Obama was angry at the Ebola response. Credit Jabin Botsford/The New York Times

On Friday, Mr. Obama took a step to both fix that response and reassure the public, naming Ron Klain, a former aide to Vice President Joseph R. Biden, to coordinate the government’s efforts on Ebola.

The appointment followed the president’s statement Thursday that the job was necessary “just to make sure that we are crossing all the t’s and dotting all the i’s going forward.”

“Part of the challenge is to be assertive, to be in command, and yet not feed a kind of panic that could easily evolve here,” said David Axelrod, a close adviser to the president in his first term. “It’s not enough to doggedly and persistently push for answers in meetings. You have to be seen doggedly and persistently pushing for answers.”
IE Be seen as a prick by those beneath him

For two turbulent weeks, White House officials have sought to balance those imperatives: insisting the dangers to the American public were being overstated in the news media, while also moving quickly to increase the president’s demonstration of action.

The Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and its arrival in the United States, is the latest in a cascade of crises that have stretched Mr. Obama’s national security staff thin. As the White House scrambled to stop the spread of Ebola beyond a handful of cases, officials were also grappling with an escalating military campaign against the Islamic State, the specter of a new Cold War with Russia over Ukraine, and the virtual disintegration of Yemen, which has been a seedbed for Al Qaeda.

Senior officials said they pushed Mr. Obama to name an Ebola coordinator as a way of easing pressure on the staff at the National Security Council.

At the meeting on Wednesday, officials said, Mr. Obama placed much of the blame on the C.D.C., which provided shifting information about which threat category patients were in, and did not adequately train doctors and nurses at hospitals with Ebola cases on the proper protective procedures.

On Thursday night, in televised remarks, Mr. Obama sought to reassure the public about the dangers from Ebola. But the sense of crisis that emanated from the White House was in sharp contrast to Sept. 30, when Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian who had traveled to Dallas, tested positive for Ebola. Mr. Obama received a telephone briefing from Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the director of the C.D.C., after which the White House issued a sanguine statement that concluded: “We have the infrastructure in place to respond safely and effectively.”

In the days that followed, Mr. Obama carried on as usual while his aides gamely added Ebola to their bulging portfolios. On Oct. 1, Mr. Obama met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, and later had dinner with friends at the RPM Steakhouse in Chicago, where he had traveled for fund-raisers and to deliver an economic speech.

By early October, as questions about the Dallas hospital’s treatment of Mr. Duncan mounted, federal officials began reassessing their response, even as they continued to express confidence.

C.D.C. officials publicly dismissed the effectiveness of screening for Ebola at airports in the United States. But Jeh Johnson, the secretary of Homeland Security, found a way to make it work over the weekend of Oct. 4. Mr. Obama announced the screening protocol the following Monday.

Even after Mr. Duncan’s death on Oct. 8, officials betrayed little sense of a change in approach. Mr. Obama traveled to California for campaign fund-raising and on his return to Washington, received a briefing from his secretary of health and human services about the announcement that a nurse who treated Mr. Duncan had contracted Ebola.

The business-as-usual sentiment at the White House changed abruptly, officials said, when it got word early Wednesday that a second nurse in Dallas contracted the disease. The fact that she had traveled on a Frontier Airlines flight despite having a fever added to the concern, officials said.

“This Frontier thing took it out of the abstract thing and to this level where people could identify with and made them scared,” a senior official said. Within hours, White House aides canceled a planned trip by Mr. Obama to Connecticut and New Jersey. Hours later, Thursday’s trip to Rhode Island and New York City was also scrubbed.
"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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Oxfam: World must do more to stop Ebola becoming ‘disaster of our time’

Charity says international community has two months to curb deadly virus but laments crippling shortfall in military support

theguardian.com, Saturday 18 October 2014 06.36 EDT

Countries must step up efforts to tackle the spread of Ebola in west Africa by providing more troops, funding and medical staff to prevent it from becoming the “definitive humanitarian disaster of our generation”, Oxfam has warned.

The charity said the world had less than two months to curb the deadly virus, which has killed 4,500 people, but noted a crippling shortfall in military personnel to provide logistical support across the countries worst affected – Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Its stark warning came as Britain and the US said the international community will be responsible for a substantial loss of life in west Africa and a greater threat across the world unless the financial and medical response to Ebola was greatly increased. The US secretary of state, John Kerry, said a failure to respond could turn Ebola into “a scourge like HIV or polio”.

Oxfam said that while Britain was leading the way in Europe’s response to the epidemic, countries which have failed to commit troops – including Italy and Spain – were “in danger of costing lives”.

The charity said it was extremely rare to call for military intervention but troops were desperately needed to build treatment centres, provide flights and offer engineering and logistical support.

More doctors and nurses were required to staff the treatment centres and there was a significant shortfall in funding to support the emergency humanitarian response, the agency warned.

Its plea for extra resources came as the World Health Organisation (WHO) pledged to conduct a full review of its handling of the Ebola crisis once the outbreak is under control.

The promise came in response to a leaked document that appeared to acknowledge the WHO had mishandled the early stages of the outbreak in west Africa.

“That review will come, but only after this outbreak is over,” the organisation said.

The WHO has been widely criticised for its slow response to the epidemic and its early reassurances – despite repeated public warnings from the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which was leading the fight against the virus on the ground.

MSF executive director Vickie Hawkins said on Saturday that the agency was frustrated and angry that the global response to the outbreak had been so slow and inadequate.

Meanwhile, the UN’s World Food Programme delivered hundreds of tons of emergency food rations to 265,000 people on Saturday, many of them quarantined in Sierra Leone.

Oxfam has called for EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels on Monday to follow the UK’s lead in responding to the Ebola crisis after the country committed £125m – the highest sum after the US.

David Cameron wrote to the European council president, Herman Van Rompuy, to call on EU leaders to agree at a summit next week to donate an extra €1bn (£790m) and to despatch 2,000 European clinicians and workers to the region within a month.

Mark Goldring, Oxfam’s chief executive, said: “We are in the eye of a storm. We cannot allow Ebola to immobilise us in fear, but instead we must move toward a common mission to stop it from getting worse.

“Countries that have failed to commit troops, doctors and enough funding are in danger of costing lives. The speed and scale of the intervention needed is unprecedented. Only a concerted and coordinated global effort will stop the spread.

“Providing treatment is vital, however reducing the spread of infection is equally important, which is why we need the massive intervention of personnel and funding immediately.”

An Oxfam spokeswoman added: “The Ebola crisis could become the definitive humanitarian disaster of our generation. The world was unprepared to deal with it. It is extremely rare for Oxfam to call for military intervention to provide logistical support in a humanitarian emergency.

“However, the military’s logistical expertise and capacity to respond quickly in great numbers is vital.

“The EU can help put the world back on track in the fight against Ebola by boosting military and medical personnel, committing life-saving funds and speeding up the process so that pledges are delivered rapidly in order to prevent, protect and cure people.”

In addition to the extra €1bn, Cameron wants EU leaders to agree to dispatch at least 2,000 workers to west Africa within the next month, to increase co-ordination of screening at European ports, and to improve coordination of flights to west Africa to fly frontline health staff to the region. Britain believes Germany is starting to respond, though it considers this has been slow.

The US and the UK have committed 4,000 and 750 troops respectively to help tackle Ebola, Oxfam said.

But the charity warned only some of these troops are on the ground, with most of the US contingent not due until 1 November.

Italy, Australia and Spain have committed no troops, despite Spain having a specialist medical expertise unit in its military, Oxfam said.

Germany has committed to military supply flights and plans a military hospital in the region, while France has some military staff in Guinea where personnel are reportedly building a hospital, it added.

The WHO has put the death rate from this outbreak at 70% and has warned that there could be 10,000 new cases a week in west Africa by December.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/o ... picks=true
"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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Image
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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Typhoon wrote:Image
Just wait. If the Ebola outbreak is not gotten under control, Ebola deaths will surpass Syphillis by Dec, TB in Jan, Hunger by Feb. Malaria and Aids by March or April.
"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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Should potential Ebola victims be sequestered?

I understand that the idea is to get someone that will make things happen. Obama's white house team and the CDC have let him down and let the country down. However appointing a lawyer means he will have a steep learning curve and not be able to judge what is real and what is BS until he gets up to speed.

Obama appoints lawyer to handle Ebola response

Post White House correspondent Katie Zezima explains the White House's decision to appoint former Obama administration official Ron Klain to coordinate its efforts on Ebola. (Casey Capachi/The Washington Post)

By Juliet Eilperin October 17 at 10:35 PM 

President Obama on Friday tapped longtime Democratic operative Ron Klain to coordinate the federal government’s response to the threat of widespread infection from the Ebola virus. The move came as the president and his administration faced mounting criticism about its handling of the disease.

The appointment of Klain, an experienced Washington lawyer who served as chief of staff to both Vice President Biden and former vice president Al Gore, signaled the administration’s recognition that an Ebola outbreak in the United States could overwhelm its management capacity.

In Klain, 53, Obama has enlisted a legal expert and Democratic strategist with a reputation for handling complex projects such as the administration’s economic stimulus package during Obama’s first term and the Democratic effort to challenge the 2000 presidential election results.

Despite repeated reassurances from the White House and federal public health officials that the chances of widespread infection remain small, the public anxiety about the disease continued to build, and it is increasingly becoming a political issue as Election Day draws near.

A growing chorus of Democrats — several of whom are embroiled in tight reelection contests — are calling for increased travel restrictions on passengers from West Africa, even though the administration and public health experts warn such a move would be counterproductive.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, led by Thomas Frieden, is on duty 24 hours a day.--

Oct. 15, 2014 | Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in his office in Atlanta in October, speaks with members of Congress about the Ebola crisis. (Michel du Cille/The Washington Post)

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Obama, who spoke to Klain by phone Friday morning, had chosen him because he “recognized that the response would benefit from having someone who could devote a hundred percent of their time to this specific task — that is, coordinating the response — and somebody like Mr. Klain, who has a strong management track record both inside government and in the private sector, is the right person for the job.”

While the president’s homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, Lisa Monaco, has been coordinating the domestic side of the inter-agency response to the outbreak since March, a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the administration began reassessing that approach after the issue “exploded on her agenda.” This week, the official added, the White House started seriously contemplating the idea of bringing in outside help.

Earnest noted that Monaco, who also helps direct the administration’s strategy to confront the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, “has significant responsibilities when it comes to other national security priorities as well.”

Klain will report to Monaco and Susan E. Rice, the president’s national security adviser. In another move to ramp up the White House response Friday, Obama decided to designate senior personnel on the ground in Dallas, including an experienced Federal Emergency Management Agency coordinator and a White House liaison.

Klain is tasked with coordinating domestic preparedness efforts and the U.S. military operation to help control the virus’s spread in West Africa. His appointment drew plaudits from Democrats but little praise from Republicans. Most GOP lawmakers questioned why the president chose someone with a political and management pedigree rather than someone with public health or infectious disease credentials. And some faulted Obama for not taking more aggressive action to halt the flow of people from Ebola-affected countries into the United States.

“We don’t need another so-called ‘czar’; we need presidential leadership. This is a public health crisis, and the answer isn’t another White House political operative,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) in a statement. “The answer is a commander in chief who stands up and leads, banning flights from Ebola-afflicted nations and acting decisively to secure our southern border.”

Even Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who had endorsed the idea of empowering a single person to oversee the federal response, tweeted that Klain was “not what I had in mind” and he preferred a Cabinet member “accountable to Congress.”

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Edward R. Royce (R-Calif.) questioned Klain’s lack of medical credentials, saying in a statement it was “right” to install someone in the post, “But I have to ask, why the president didn’t pick an individual with a noteworthy infectious disease or public health background?”

“The fact of the matter is this is much broader than just a medical response,” Earnest said Friday. “What we were looking for is not an Ebola expert but rather an implementation expert, and that’s exactly what Ron Klain is.”

Klain emerged from the Al Gore 2000 and John F. Kerry 2004 presidential campaigns with a reputation as one of the Democrats’ most able strategists.

“I wouldn’t call him a policy wonk by any means, but he was someone who got [that] you couldn’t formulate good strategy without understanding the policy,” said Chris Jennings, who served as a top White House health policy adviser under former president Bill Clinton and Obama.

A Harvard Law School graduate, Klain clerked for Supreme Court Justice Byron White before rising through the staff ranks in the Senate to secure the job of Gore’s chief of staff in his early 30s. Klain became close with Biden while serving as a staffer for the Senate Judiciary Committee when Biden served as chairman and helped advise Biden during the 2008 campaign.

During Obama’s pre-inaugural transition, the newly elected president wanted to find a role for Klain in the West Wing, and his name was mentioned as a potential White House communications director, according to a person familiar with the internal deliberations. But Biden also wanted him and convinced Klain to join the vice president’s office as chief of staff. More recently, Klain was a serious contender for the post of White House counsel — though W. Neil Eggleston ultimately took the job.

Mark Gitenstein, a former Obama administration ambassador to Romania, said Klain developed a strong relationship with Obama while helping prepare the then-senator from Illinois for the presidential debates against Republican nominee John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2008. Klain had served in a similar role for Kerry’s 2004 campaign.

Known for firing off e-mails at odd hours because he runs on little sleep, Klain is an enthusiastic Facebook user who frequently posts about his family. He is married to Monica Medina, who served as a top National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official during Obama’s first term and is the National Geographic Society’s senior director for international ocean policy.

Gitenstein said he believed that Klain’s management of the economic stimulus push in the first year of the Obama administration helped him prepare for the challenges that he’ll face managing the Ebola response. “It was a very difficult job — a management problem and a problem of getting the money to the right places, which required coordination with other Cabinet secretaries. . . . Ron really got his arms around the problem as fast as anyone I’ve seen.

Klain is taking a leave of absence as president of Case Holdings, the holding company for the business and philanthropic interests of former AOL chairman Steve Case, and general counsel of Case’s venture capital firm Revolution LLC. No start date has been set for his new White House job, but Earnest said Klain would start “soon” and is expected to work for roughly five to six months on the Ebola initiative.


The Klain announcement came as Ebola fears continued to reverberate across the country. Friday brought news that a health-care worker from the Dallas hospital that has been the epicenter of Ebola in the United States had been isolated on a cruise ship that left Texas on Sunday.

This health-care worker had no direct contact with Thomas Duncan, the Liberian man who was diagnosed with Ebola and later died after flying to Texas last month. But, according to Jen Psaki, spokeswoman for the State Department, the person “may have had contact with” fluid samples from Duncan during his treatment. Mexican authorities did not allow the cruise ship to make a scheduled visit to Cozumel on Friday, according to Carnival Cruise Lines. It is scheduled to return to Galveston, Tex., Sunday morning.

In addition, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced late Thursday that another large group of people had to be contacted and screened. The CDC had said it was reaching out to anyone who was on the Frontier Airlines flight taken by Amber Vinson, the second Dallas nurse to contract Ebola, when she traveled from Cleveland to Texas on Monday. However, the CDC says it is reaching out to passengers on the Frontier flight she had taken to Ohio on Oct. 10 to see whether they are deemed to be at potential risk.
"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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Appointing a lawyer is a dubious move.
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Re: Ebola fears

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Doc wrote:
Typhoon wrote:Image
Just wait. If the Ebola outbreak is not gotten under control, Ebola deaths will surpass Syphillis by Dec, TB in Jan, Hunger by Feb. Malaria and Aids by March or April.
Well, that's one speculation.

Ebola kills it's hosts quickly compared to the other diseases. Infections with a high and fast mortality rate tend to be self limiting.

Terrible for the victims and their kin.
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Re: Ebola fears

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Typhoon wrote:
Doc wrote:
Typhoon wrote:Image
Just wait. If the Ebola outbreak is not gotten under control, Ebola deaths will surpass Syphillis by Dec, TB in Jan, Hunger by Feb. Malaria and Aids by March or April.
Well, that's one speculation.
That is projection of the current trend.
Ebola kills it's hosts quickly compared to the other diseases. Infections with a high and fast mortality rate tend to be self limiting.

Terrible for the victims and their kin.
Yes I understand that it kills quickly and often That that tends to limit the growth. However there are still 5000 dead in West Africa and those limits have either failed to show up or they don't exist in the case of Ebola for reasons we do not understand. Like perhaps a second reservoir spreading it. There have been bodies of dead Ebola victims laying in the streets literally for days in some places..
"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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A message from Obama's new Ebola Czar

LklqCy_bpuY
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Re: Ebola fears

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This article pretty much covers what I have been saying about Obama's government response to Ebola. This is what difference it all makes.

A toxic president

By Michael Goodwin

October 19, 2014 | 3:31am

Chalk it up to karma, fate or bad luck. Whatever you call it, the Ebola scare is proof that Bad Things Happen to Bad Presidents.

The morphing of what is a single case into near panic is, according to medical experts, unwarranted. They point out that, so far, one person from Liberia died in a Texas hospital and two nurses who treated him got sick. Period, end of panic.

In rational and medical terms, they may be right. But their calculations omit another factor. It’s the X factor.

In this case, X stands for trust.

President Obama has spent six years squandering it, and the administration’s confusion, contradictions and mistakes on Ebola fit the pattern. This is how he rolls.

Don’t worry, there’s no chance of an outbreak, they said. Then it was, Oops, we must rethink all procedures for handling cases. Then there was no worry about a “wide” outbreak, yet quarantines for lots of people.

The irrational fear of an alien pathogen is fueled by rational suspicion of an incompetent and dishonest government. How did the so-called experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention give Nurse No. 2 permission to travel by air, even though she had a mild fever?

That’s a great question — if only the CDC would answer it. “I have not seen the transcript of the conversation,” was Director Thomas Frieden’s lame answer.

Meanwhile, the most obvious move, a travel ban from affected countries, is rejected with unpersuasive claims about the need to get aid workers to Africa. It looks and smells like political correctness searching for logic.

There isn’t any logic, so bet your hazmat suit a ban will happen soon. It’ll be one way for the new Ebola czar to make a mark.

But it will take a miracle worker to restore Barack Obama’s credibility. While there are many things to say about his tenure, the one thing you cannot say is that the nation trusts him.

Poll after poll, on subject after subject, show a collapse. Consistently now, a majority of Americans say Obama is not trustworthy. Most think he’s a failure, many say he is incompetent and the vast bulk — 70 percent in some cases — says his key policies are wrong for America.

He is so unpopular that members of his own party don’t want to be seen with him, lest his failures spawn a political plague.

Against that backdrop, any emergency will cause the national yips. The rise of the Islamic State and its beheadings of two Americans did it, and now Ebola is doing it.

As “Ghostbusters” asked, who you gonna call? Certainly not this White House.

Credibility is like a reservoir or a bank account. You make deposits in good times so you can make withdrawals when you need them.

Obama never made the deposits. It’s been all downhill since Day One. He blames others for failures, and when cornered or ambitious, reaches for a lie. Routinely.

The claim that “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” is a defining example, but hardly the only one. Don’t forget “shovel-ready jobs” to justify a trillion-dollar boondoggle. Or there’s “not a smidgen” of corruption at the IRS. And Benghazi was caused by an anti-Muslim video.

His lies are legion and now he’s like the boy who cried wolf. When he makes a national appeal on Ebola, the trust tank is empty.

If there’s one encouraging sign, it’s that Obama may sense he’s walking on thin ice. When Ebola started to dominate the news, he canceled two fund-raising trips.
http://nypost.com/2014/10/19/a-toxic-president/

Thanks to CD for pointing this out.
"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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Hey where's all the folks to told me that we had to get government out of the way to solve all of our problems?
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Re: Ebola fears

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Hoosiernorm wrote:Hey where's all the folks to told me that we had to get government out of the way to solve all of our problems?
If you have not noticed government isn't doing so great on Ebola.
Also if you have not noticed the people that told you that aren't anarchists.
There is a time and place for government outlined and limited in a thing called the constitution. You know the thing that the current head of government pretends does not exist?
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Re: Ebola fears

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Dallas Hospital Had the Ebola Screening Machine that could have diagnosed first Ebola patient in one hour but the government would not let them use it.
By Patrick Tucker

October 16, 2014

This story has been updated.

The military is using an Ebola screening machine that could have diagnosed the Ebola cases in Texas far faster, but government guidelines prevent hospitals from using it to actually screen for Ebola.

It’s a toaster-sized box called FilmArray, produced by a company called BioFire, a subsidiary of bioMérieux and it’s capable of detecting Ebola with a high degree of confidence — in under an hour.

Incredibly, it was present at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas when Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan walked through the door, complaining of fever and he had just come from Liberia. Duncan was sent home, but even still, FDA guidelines prohibited the hospital from using the machine to screen for Ebola.

The FilmArray retails for about $39,000 per unit and can screen for the genetic markers of a wide number of respiratory, gastro-intestinal and other illness, including Ebola, but only with the right “kit” in place. Current FDA guidelines would not have allowed Dallas Presbyterian Hospital to get that kit. That’s despite the fact that it can provide results with higher than 90 percent certainty and it’s one of the machines that the military is currently using to screen for Ebola in Africa.

The FilmArray performs polymerase chain reaction tests to determine the presence of Ebola on the basis of genetic markers. ”It will take the Ebola cells, break them open, expose the [ribonucleic acid] in the Ebola and match those with a target we’ve identified,” company representatives told Defense One. The machine can work off of blood or even saliva samples.

BioFire Diagnostics, a Utah-based firm that produces disease detection technology, confirmed that the Dallas Presbyterian Hospital did in fact have one of the machines (possibly for as long as two years) sitting on the shelf when Duncan came in.

But unless hospitals agree to use the machine specifically for research purposes, rather than actually diagnosing patients with Ebola, they can’t look for Ebola in samples, which they did not. These are so called research use only machines.

The FDA rules in what are called “research use only” machines are far more lax than for machines that must provide clinical diagnosis. According to representatives from BioFire, even after the FDA approved the use of the machine for Ebola screening and allowed workers at the hospital to acquire the proper kit for Ebola testing, a 10-20 day “validation” procedure would kick in before they could change the machine’s use from diagnostics to research — and the results would have to go to the Centers for Disease Control for confirmation.

The FilmArray is also what the medical team at Emory used it (RUO) to diagnose the first two Ebola U.S. patients, Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol. In a recent paper, published in the journal Lab Medicine. They write "Polymerase chain reaction (PCR)–based microbiological analyzer (BioFire FilmArray [BioFire Diagnostics, Inc, Salt Lake City, UT]) designed to detect a panel of viral, bacterial, fungal, or parasitic pathogens, many of which might be found in patients returning from a resource-poor region and might complicate care. Among other pathogen-specific markers, this instrument detects Ebola viral RNA, a capability that we believe could have value for monitoring progression of and recovery from Ebola infection in this setting."

Dr. Luciana Borio, assistant commissioner for counterterrorism policy and acting deputy chief scientist at the FDA, recently told National Journal that the agency was looking to speed up evaluation of new drugs to treat Ebola.

The FDA didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

The screening machine is more than good enough for the military, though, which played a big role in the machine’s development for Ebola detection.

In March, the Defense Department, through the Joint Program Office for Chemical and Biological Defense (JPEO) awarded BioFire a $240 million contract to adapt the FilmArray for use to screen for illnesses like Ebola.

The company participated alongside two other companies for the Next Generation Diagnostics System prize. The winning system had to be able to spot a wide number of chemical or biological agents, diagnose them on a minute level, and return a positive or negative.

“This is a fantastic opportunity to deliver the most cutting edge diagnostic system to our warfighter,” Kirk Ririe, CEO of BioFire Defense said in a March press release. “The motivated team at JPEO has pushed an aggressive schedule and a cost effective approach that will be met by exploiting our FilmArray’s commercial diagnostic capabilities, to provide for our nation’s bio-defense and improve DOD health care.”

Company officials confirmed that FilmArray and another BioFire products called JBAIDS are in fact in use by the U.S. military in West Africa right now.

Speaking before a congressional panel Thursday, CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden acknowledged that airport screening for Ebola was extremely limited. He also said that he was open to any strategy to reduce risks to the general population from Ebola. Other witnesses at the hearing said the U.S. is rapidly speeding up the development and deployment of new diagnostic systems.

What might those look like? Probably a great deal like the machine that the military is using to screen for Ebola in Africa right now.

Update: BioFire has confirmed to Defense One that they have approached the FDA seeking emergency use authorization to allow more hospitals to use the FilmArray to screen for Ebola.

The FDA responded to Defense One's request for comment with the following statement:

"The FDA understands the importance of quickly diagnosing Ebola cases in the U.S. and abroad. We are committed to working with BioFire and other companies in the most expedited manner to increase the availability of authorized diagnostic tests for Ebola for emergency use during this epidemic. The FDA works extremely rapidly to make a determination on an Emergency Use Authorization once the information is submitted to the agency for review. The FDA may not authorize the use of a diagnostic test before reviewing data about its performance in detecting Ebola virus in human specimens and determining that the standard for authorization is met. Doing so would also be irresponsible and potentially unsafe.

It is important to note that the FDA has been reaching out to commercial companies to encourage them to work with us on the development of rapid diagnostic tests. Additionally, the FDA has already authorized the use of three in vitro diagnostic tests to help detect Ebola virus. Additionally information can be found here."

On October 10th, the FDA has granted emergency use authorization to three screening system called Ebola Zaire Target1, which was also developed with help from the Defense Department; the CDC Ebola Virus NP Real-time RT-PCR Assay; and the CDC Ebola Virus VP40 Real-time RT-PCR Assay.

By Patrick Tucker // Patrick Tucker is technology editor for Defense One. He’s also the author of The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move? (Current, 2014). Previously, Tucker was deputy editor for The Futurist, where he served for nine years. Tucker's writing on emerging technology also has appeared in Slate, The Sun, MIT Technology Review, Wilson Quarterly, The American Legion Magazine, BBC News Magazine and Utne Reader among other publications.

October 16, 2014

http://www.defenseone.com/threats/2014/ ... ica/96713/
"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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I keep hearing about stopping direct flights from effected regions of Africa but the only direct flights are from Senegal and there are only 5 per week. Most flights from Africa go through Europe and unless you want to ban all flights from EVERYWHERE and just close down the country for a few months tell me about rationality. There are about 150 per day that come from those regions of Africa and only about 13500 people in those countries who even have a Visa to be able to buy a ticket and travel here.
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Re: Ebola fears

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http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-29 ... print=true
Nigeria has been declared officially free of Ebola after six weeks with no new cases, the World Health Organization (WHO) says.

WHO representative Rui Gama Vaz, speaking in the capital Abuja, said it was a "spectacular success story".

Nigeria won praise for its swift response after a Liberian diplomat brought the disease there in July.

The outbreak has killed more than 4,500 people in West Africa, mostly in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone.

An estimated 70% of those infected have died in those countries.

The WHO officially declared Senegal Ebola-free on Friday.

Meanwhile, European Union foreign ministers are meeting in Luxembourg to discuss how to strengthen their response to the threat posed by Ebola.

European countries have committed more than 500m euros (£400m; $600m) but the UK is pressing to double that amount.

The money is being sought to help reinforce over-stretched healthcare systems in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea and to mitigate the damage Ebola is doing to their economies.

Ahead of the talks, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier suggested the EU could send a civilian mission to West Africa that would serve as a platform for sending medical staff.

Another diplomat said there were plans for three countries to spearhead aid to the region - the UK for Sierra Leone, France for Guinea and the US for Liberia.

Earlier, the Spanish government said a nurse who became the first person to contract Ebola outside West Africa had tested negative for the virus.
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Re: Ebola fears

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Hoosiernorm wrote:I keep hearing about stopping direct flights from effected regions of Africa but the only direct flights are from Senegal and there are only 5 per week. Most flights from Africa go through Europe and unless you want to ban all flights from EVERYWHERE and just close down the country for a few months tell me about rationality. There are about 150 per day that come from those regions of Africa and only about 13500 people in those countries who even have a Visa to be able to buy a ticket and travel here.

They need to shut down commercial flights from the effected countries to the rest of the world to protect the third world. Quarantine is how Ebola has always been stopped in the past. Once it gets to the rest of the third world we will never get rid of it.
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Re: Ebola fears

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The US now has possibly more Czars than the late former Russian imperial family.
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Re: Ebola fears

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Typhoon wrote:The US now has possibly more Czars than the late former Russian imperial family.
Next in line,

The Imam of Influenza;

The Sultan of Syphilis;

The Godfather of Gonorrhea;

The Pope of Pneunomia; and

The Consigliere of Cancer
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