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

In Liberia, yeah, in Sierra Leone, not so much.

 

Reports are conflicting. The outbreak seems to be slowing in Liberia but may be strongly accelerating in Sierra Leone - or Sierra Leone may only now be finding out how bad the outbreak has been all along in the hinterlands, creating an illusory sudden increase in infection rates.

Meanwhile, as I said, the African Cup of Nations is delayed indefinitely because other African nations don't want to watch their citizens die by the thousands. Gul and many top officials seems to be advocating for that.

 

Speaking of African nations:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/h...oned-detective-work-thwart-ebola-in-mali.html

and to re-copy it, in case you missed it in the admittedly long article:

Or, yanno, keep screaming about the sky falling or whatever.

 

The New York Ebola doctor is about to be released from the hospital, no collateral damage. Looks like the Mali-CDC approach is working wherever tried.

http://news.yahoo.com/york-doctor-infected-ebola-released-hospital-ny-times-222059256.html

 

CBS's Lara Logan is quarantined in South Africa, along with her 60 minutes crew. If you have to be quarantined, at least try to get quarantined with a hot reporter.

 

@gul is a top official? When did that happen?

 

Last US Ebola Patient Free of the Disease

 

What about the millions infected by bowling and riding the subway?

 

Yay, now gturner can go back to not giving a shit about the still thousands of African nations that are still struggling!

 

Those aren't in the clear for a few more days, and the doctor's significant other is still in quarantine. If the states where the west Africans are arriving insist on quarantines or monitoring, there's really nothing the federal government can do about it.

There aren't thousands of African nations struggling with Ebola, there are three. Most of the other African nations insist on travel bans and quarantines to make sure they don't get it, too.

 

Yanno, except for Mali, in spite of the one case that made its way into its border.

 

New Sitrep. Despite their comments, though, the situation in Guinea is not slowing. Perhaps in some areas, but in total the increase is consistent, barring the recent spike in the graph (sudden increase, sudden decrease in the next report).

 

News on the vaccine front...

 

Didn't "Unintentional Pricks" open for "Green Day" a few years back?

 

RIP, “the Ebola threat”: How a toxic narrative served its political purpose

There are no cases of Ebola in the U.S., and panic seems to have subsided. It's almost like an election just ended!

The Ebola was supposed to have killed us all by now. Or at least a couple hundred million of us, give or take. Jaundiced, hemorrhagic carcasses were supposed to be lining the streets, while the few survivors retreated to isolated bunkers in the Badlands or the Rocky Mountains to weather the storm and procreate for the eventual reconstruction of civil society.

If the level of attention and panic displayed in the media and in politics toward “the Ebola threat” were proportional to the reality on the ground, this is what America on Nov. 11, 2014, should have looked like: a nightmarish hellscape of near-extinction, somewhat comical in its rapid erasure of human progress. Of all the possibilities, it was the Ebola that did us in. Who’da thunk it? You just have to laugh.

As it stands, though, there are currently zero (0) cases of Ebola in the United States. Craig Spencer, the New York doctor who was isolated after testing positive for the Ebola hemorrhagic virus in late October, is now free of the virus. He has been released from the hospital and is being fêted. Look at him, hugging that big softie lug of a mayor they have in New York City. “It is a good feeling to hug a hero,” the mayor said. Everyone’s having a great time.

When news came out last night about Spencer’s release, it was seemingly the first big news story about Ebola in the United States in the past week — quite a change from even two weeks ago, and for weeks before that, when Ebola was the top news story in the United States. It was pure frenzy. After Spencer tested positive for Ebola, we hadgovernors throwing healthy women in parking lot tents in Newark. That nurse, who bravely won her freedom, is apparently going to move from her home in Maine to get away from all the attention and start over. She needn’t bother. The panic is over.

What happened in the last week or so to replace Ebola as the top headline? Last week’s many political elections! A genuine news event that merits heavy coverage, sure. And now that’s giving way to other immediate political concerns, like who’s up and who’s down for the 2016 presidential election.

Dare we suggest, though, that the Ebola fever was destined to break as soon as Election Day passed — and the panic had served its purpose?

Ebola was the disease; “The Ebola” was the political vehicle through which rage against the Obama administration’s incompetence could be channeled. The medical experts in our government bureaucracy were unsuited to the task, and this was microcosmic of the red-taped inefficiency and general fumblin’ around that defines Big Government. The Ebola also served as a central, go-to component for the free riffing that defined Republican candidates’ campaign rhetoric. Before the Ebola panic, these poor dears in the conservative party were stuck with flat, workmanlike imagery about ISIS terrorists crossing the porous border. The Ebola added that critical third dimension — ISIS terrorists infecting themselves with Ebola and crossing the porous border.

A sprinkling of Ebola panic really helped the whole thing jump off the page. It helped the Republicans close out their campaign to retake the Senate, retain the House, and win something like a million state legislative bodies. It was potent. Democrats, in the last stages of the campaign, had recognized this potency and played along.Senate Democrats in tight races threw their weight behind silly ideas like shutting off all travel to the Western part of a continent. President Obama hired an “Ebola czar” from whom very little has been heard. Democratic governors were prepared to lock up healthy people in parking lot tents, too, if presented with such opportunities.

There may be more Ebola cases to come. But the experience with this first “wave” (of a few cases) should make it pretty clear that the American public health infrastructure is more than capable of preventing a serious outbreak. As in: Although it may have been caught a touch off-guard at first, “Big Government” righted the ship and proved its ability to clamp down on the problem. The public response has been a success. The CDC has done a Good Job.

Let this be a lesson. There’s not a lot of trust out there in government to achieve results. Much of that is deserved. But when figures in the media, or in the Democratic Party, latch onto easy but not necessarily truenarratives about how, say, the CDC’s response to Ebola has been a debacle, it only accelerates these overly cynical impressions. It is fun to talk shit about the government. I have been known to do this myself. But to let narratives about the government’s incompetent handling of “the Ebola threat” persist, when the government’s response appears to have been relatively competent, damages the cause of those who believe that government can play a positive role in civil society.

 

So the Ebola scare was dreamed up by Obama to punish disloyal Democrats?

 

Also,

 

It isn't the first time we've been subject to unreasonable hysteria, and its hardly partisan. Ebola, ISIS, school shootings, are some big ones, we also get bent out of shape over razor blades in Halloween candy, or video games.

Maybe it's a statement on how safe our society really is that we feel like we need to get caught up in hyperventilating about statistically rare threats. Perhaps our lives are so dull that it's more exciting to feel like we're on the edge of disaster. Maybe the powers that be use the panic in order to get certain laws passed that wouldn't pass otherwise.

Regardless, if you thought Ebola was actually a risk you wouldn't leave the house. If you think your kids are truly at risk for a school shooting, you'd keep them at home. If you really thought someone was going to poison Halloween candy you'd never let them go trick or treating. Yes, Ebola is dangerous. ISIS is real. Horrible things happen at schools. Stuffing your face with processed food while texting and driving is worse.

 

Throw in "rape culture," "war on women" and "voter suppression" as phantom menaces.

Oh, and of course global warming/climate change/climate disruption/denial of science.

 

And Jesus. Don't forget Jesus.

 

Did we talk about genes yet? http://www.cbsnews.com/news/twins-with-rare-genetic-disorder-could-hold-clue-to-cure-for-ebola/

 

Somewhere in one of these threads there was an article about how some patients seem to have a genetic edge in recovery once they contract Ebola (rather like that subset of Europeans whose descendants are apparently immune to plague), but nothing like this...great find!

 

Great interview with Margaret Aguirre from the International Medical Corps can be heard here. According to her, the 21 day quarantine on returning aid workers has slashed the number of people willing to volunteer dramatically. It seems that plenty of people can manage the 10 day training period necessary before they're shipped out for three weeks, but adding the 21 day quarantine upon their return makes it impossible for people to even consider going to help.

 

So when faced with an incredibly lethal viral hemorrhagic fever that could cut the world's population in half if unchecked, we rely on volunteers. Think if our Presidents fought wars like that. "Gee. I hope some of our fine troops will wander over to Europe and stop those Nazis, and I don't want us to do anything to dissuade them from doing just that."

But the thing is, vastly more people do go to war like that than have gone to help out against Ebola. Prior to Pearl Harbor, over 6,000 Americans volunteered to fly for the RAF and RCAF, knowing they'd be gone for years and likely die in flames, hit by ground fire or by Messerschmitts and Folke Wulfs, or get shot down, captured, and tortured by the Nazis before spending more years in a POW camp. But surfing the Internet for 21 days? IT'S JUST TOO MUCH TO ASK.

 

Which is exactly what several people said at the beginning of this thread. That the Republican posturing on ebola is not based upon medical facts and that it wi only worsen the situation, cause the disease to spread more, and ironically make the US less safe. We are seeing that come true right now.

 

Especially when you're not being paid to do so, and have to find someone to manage your affairs for you while you're locked up in a pointless quarantine, in addition to the rest of the time in which you'll be gone. Even if you had someone paying you for your time, how easy would it be for you to find someone who could take care of your place while you're unavailable for 52 days? (That's 10 days away for training, 21 days out of the country, and then another 21 days in quarantine, and we're ignoring things like travel time, so it'd probably be a minimum of 60 days, once you factor those elements in.)

 

The medical fact is that it's a deadly viral hemorrhagic fever that we don't want to spread here. Nobody else wants it either. In New York City, for example, every health officer has the power to quarantine a person who carries a disease that makes them a potential danger to others, including cases of viral hemorrhagic fever - which is explicitly mentioned in the law. In some states violating a quarantine order can get you a year in jail and a thousand dollar fine. We wrote all those laws to stop deadly communicable diseases, many of which weren't nearly as frightening as Ebola.

 

It's a good thing some of those Republican governors quickly stepped in to provide pay and hold people's jobs open for when they return - using their powers as head of the various National Guards. If only someone in the federal government could come up with something like that - paying people to work, and paying them for hazardous duty. It's ingenious!

Instead we have the Administration's kabuki dance and word salad - with Ron Klain being the only person under a federal quarantine order, lest someone see him somewhere. He's harder to spot than Elvis.

 

Funny thing about being in the medical profession in the US, finding a job is not hard to do at all. What is hard to do, is to find someone to take care of your shit while you're gone. A friend of mine went on vacation for a week and had to shell out $1,200 to have her dogs taken care of at a kennel. She could afford it, what with her being a nurse and all, but had she been gone for two months, the tab would have been almost $10K. Then there's the matter of what a volunteer would be paid while they're gone. Given that they're working for aid agencies, the amount would have been small, if anything.

We don't quarantine people coming from Asia, even though that's where most of the flu strains originate, and flu kills more people annually than ebola has to date. But go on shitting yourself about ebola. You've got a better chance of winding up married to Rush Limbaugh than you do of catching ebola.

Liberian President lifts state of emergency as ebola cases decline.