Ebola - slow to spread, hard to catch. So something like AIDS?

Yeah, look at all the economic damage that happens because of those five-to-ten cases that happened in the United States! I dunno how we'll make it through till Christmas!!!!!

With only a few, it's only about $200,000 or so per case (according to the government), not counting all the tracking and tracing. New York was using 470 people to track a little over a hundred contacts, but the day after the election they said they were tracking 327 people. Maybe they're using the same 470 people for that, or maybe they've now got 1,200 people handling it. That's from one case, unless there's another case they're not telling us about. If the experts are right, we can expect more:

Pandemic risk expert Dominic Smith, a senior manager for life risks at Newark, Calif.-based RMS, a leading catastrophe-modeling firm, ran a U.S. simulation this week that projected 15 to 130 cases between now and the end of December.

Given a 28 day doubling time, that would probably mean 30 to 260 cases by the end of January, and 60 to 520 cases by the end of February, and of course 120 to 1000 cases by the last week in March - assuming no secondary infections. Taking New York as an example, one infect person has tied up 470 health care workers. A thousand cases spread all over the country could therefore tie up 470,000 health care workers because you can't get the economies of scale because the cases aren't concentrated in a small population.

With only two cases, the majority of the public already supports restricting travel from the hot zone. With a hundred cases the public will be demanding the impeachment of politicians who allow that travel to continue, because Ebola is a very scary disease. So scary that earlier CDC researchers described it as their worst nightmare. So what did Canada and Australia do to prevent such a politically suicidal outcome? They sent out a memo and stopped potential west African Ebola carriers from arriving. But that only works if the potential Ebola carriers are limited to people coming from west Africa. If we let it spread into the US, then we've put Canada, Australia, and every other country at risk from travelers from the US. Why would any rational government want to do that, and even insist on doing that?

Australians are overly cautious about anything coming on their soil anyway. When I hit port in Syndney, I bought a candy bar out the vending machine of my ship that I had to throw away half-eaten. They don't fuck with anything over there. And frankly, the Land of Oz has more than enough things out to kill them without ebola, like dingoes eating babies and snakes and their 100 billion spider varieties, all of which are more real dangers to them than ebola would ever be.

And also,

I worked with a foreigner who'd been to Australia. He expressed his frustration when an Australian official in charge of letting people in, staring at his paperwork, asked him if he'd had difficulty learning to speak English as a foreign language. His loud reply was "I'm Scottish, from Scotland! What do you think we speak there?"

Anyway, just because our advanced health care systems can, in theory, keep an Ebola outbreak from spreading far in our population doesn't mean they can do a darn thing if it spreads to an indigenous animal species. Ebola is an animal disease that's been found in dogs, pigs, porcupines, monkeys, and bats. We are not its natural host. We're willfully taking the risk that it will find a new natural host outside of Africa, potentially a host that has far more human interactions than its African host. Somehow that risk is being weighed against the horror of stigmatizing west African travelers while a lethal disease sweeps through their population.

Wait. What?

Don't let your dog or cat eat bush meat. I don't.

Hell, my dogs won't eat a soup bone unless I season it with salt and pepper and brown it first. It's pathetic.

The other night I was discussing Ebola with the clerk at the Shell station, and he said that when he was deployed to the Congo he drew the line at bush meat. He said the Africans would just barely let it touch the fire, flip it over once, and eat it extremely rare.

Anyway, we haven't spent much time studying Ebola because it's so deadly. Can it be spread by insects like fleas? Quite possibly, if the flea bites two different animals within a few minutes. Can it infect mice? Yes it can. That's how we're testing some of the drugs. Could it become endemic in New York City rats? We really don't know. We're just gambling that it won't. We haven't even ruled out an insect host.

Oh! Okay I finally get it!

Aw, c'mon. Eating bush is awesome.

How did I get quoted in that?

I've been taking lessons in quote tag usage from Dayton, apparently.

Yes, that must be what everyone in the entire continent does. Tsssk, those Africans.


While I know eating bushmeat without proper preparation is dangerous - this stuff looks dangerous to eat for entirely different reasons. I doubt any (Western) dog would touch these things.

And yet we assume that the entire continent has exactly the same burial rituals, even though they're less genetically and culturally related than the rest of the world put together. In truth, the only thing we can say about African culture is that it must support Obama's policies, because...

Also, to date, there are no known things that some Western dog will not eat, including vomit, socks, underwear, and anything in our trash cans. I used to watch a golden retriever that killed rabbits and ate them whole, like a snake, which was pretty amazing. Until then I hadn't realized that a golden retriever could actually suck down an adult rabbit in one big glob and move it through its throat and into its tummy, but they do. That probably explains why you don't find rabbit skeletons all over your yard. I think dogs may have evolved this ability because of their lack of thumbs which precludes them from using knives and forks. On the flip side, my rabbits, which you think would eat what we consider rabbit food, wouldn't eat lettuce but were nuts for buffalo chicken wings. They also love bananas, even though rabbits can't climb banana trees and have no idea where bananas come from.

An excellent argument against flight bans. Congratulations, your failure is complete.

You might want to flesh your logic out a bit, because I can't see any connection between cultural diversity and the necessity of spreading a lethal hemorrhagic fever to other parts of the world.

Focus on the first sentence. You have reached in that sentence, a position diametrically opposed to the position you staked out early on the thread.

Still not seeing it. There's no place more diverse than New York City, and yet they have extensive quarantine regulations (not only specifically mentioning viral hemorrhagic fevers, but even distinguishing pneumonic from bubonic plague), which they have used time and time again. In fact, there it is illegal not to quarantine people carrying any of a long list of communicable diseases.

Cool, that means you will likely continue making a fool of yourself. Good show!

So your argument is that C follows from A because of underpants gnomes?

That is your argument, just pointing it out for you.

Then please point it out. I'm all ears. I'm sure everyone else is just as confused as I am about what you mean.

No...no, we aren't.

Well then perhaps you can explain his point for me.

Meanwhile, the African Cup of Natons is being pushed back a year so it doesn't spread Ebola.

No, everybody is not. The rest of us live in the real world.

Well then please express that bit of it relating to your point - in words.

I ran across this on another forum, but I think Chesterton may have known gturner.

So you didn't actually have any point, or if you did, you think revealing it in a public forum would somehow violate operational security. My working assumption is that your point had something to do with Africa, and possibly something to do with Ebola, since that was the main topic of the thread, but I can't be certain - because you won't come out and say what it was.

No, just relinquishing the stage for reasons noted by Chesterton. Keep doing what you do, gturner, the thousands of Ebola victims thank you.

There will be many more thousands of victims because we're stuck on the idea that containing it is unfair and discriminatory, as was explained in the State Department video I linked earlier.

I thought recent reports were saying that the infection rates are slowing.

No, you are mistaken. gturner has pointed out that thousands will soon die if we don't seal off the dark continent.