As between those two versus Russia and China I know which ones will still be problems in 20 years and which ones will be long-since gone and mostly forgotten.
Hint: it won’t be Ebola nor IS / ISIS.
That’s for damn sure. If you think people are being hysterical now, wait until flu season gets into full swing.
Symptoms of Influenza
Fever or feeling feverish/chills
Cough
Sore throat
Runny or stuffy nose
Muscle or body aches
Headaches
Fatigue (tiredness)
Some people may have vomiting and diarrhea, though this is more common in children than adults
Symptoms of Ebola
•Fever
•Severe headache
•Muscle pain
•Weakness
•Diarrhea
•Vomiting
•Abdominal (stomach) pain
•Unexplained hemorrhage (bleeding or bruising)
At this point I’m more worried that some nutjob is going to hurt a flu victim out of fear that the person has Ebola and presents a threat to them than I am we’ll have a serious Ebola outbreak here.
Used to be, politicians wanted their constituents fat, dumb and happy. Now it seems that some — most (I’m sore tempted to say “all”) on one side of the spectrum — want them dumb and scared. Fat is optional.
They followed the procedures in their hospital. Despite the protective gear used they still got it. What chance does a captive audience on a plane have? If it was so damn difficult to get then it wouldn’t be spreading.
Stop being cavalier about a deadly disease with a 70% mortality rate. The ability for this to spin out of control hinges on how it’s contained in the early stages of outbreak. It’s nowhere near contained in Guinea and all it takes is a handful of people to go to different parts of the world and lie about their condition until it’s too late. Look at what took place when ONE person came over. What makes you think there aren’t a dozen people with the same desire to bypass our impenetrable state-of-the art barrier of questionnaires and thermometer readings? I can think of 30 million reasons why our border protection is deficient.
Those people at the hospital were mopping up puke, shit, piss, and blood. Tell me, if a stranger collapses on the street doing all of the above simultaneously are YOU going to go over a perform a clean up, or are you going to call 911 while keeping your distance?
99% of the populace will call 911 and wait for the pros to clean up, and thus will not need protective gear and protocols.
You do not see the difference there?
Smallpox not only had a similar mortality rate, it really was airborne and readily spread in that manner. Yet we not only contained it, we eliminated outside of a few laboratory samples.
Yes, folks, we really do have the capability to deal with Ebola. And a lot of other extremely nasty diseases.
And yet… Nigeria had someone slip through the cracks and start an outbreak in their country, and they DID contain it. With far fewer resources than the US or Europe or a lot of other places.
Of course, not panicking and instituting reasonable quarantine had a lot to do with that.
I can see no reason to think Mr. Duncan ever intended any harm to anyone. When he did become ill he sought treatment and was entirely honest about his travel history. I don’t find him to be the boogeymonster.
Now, the hospital, on the other hand, THEY dropped the ball. Maybe we should blame them and not Mr. Duncan for diagnosis and treatment lapses.
Sad but true.
Yes, but Exceedingly Well Armed isn’t.
Honestly, what’s the HELL is the threshold that triggers “Foment Revolution” ?
Yes, this is exactly correct, and that’s WHY picking a political clown was such a stupid move.
News flash: great numbers of people are irrational, fear-driven, and prone to making stupid choices without a real understanding of the risks and benefits of various options. If they weren’t, half of the chowderheads in elective office wouldn’t be there. No intelligent person seriously expects there to be some superdoc that can sweep in and and fix everything: but even if you think Ebola is no real risk at all, half or more of the population is not intelligent, and they’re shitting themselves in fear. In our media-besotted age, calming those irrational fears is part of the president’s job.
It would be nice if Obama’s approval/competency ratings were such that he could go on TV and do it himself, but he doesn’t. The obvious task then is to make sure whatever you *do * projects an image of competency and professionalism. No, an “Ebola Czar” doesn’t need to do anything, any more than the “cancer czar” appointed last year really does anything. Just find someone who seems trustworthy and can project an image of calmness and control, and it will help the fever break.
So the obvious choice then is an unknown guy whose two claims to fame are coordinating a politically-charged stimulus of uncertain effectiveness, and working for the most gaffe-prone politician in the country. :smack:
From what I understand, wasn’t Klain the guy who led the effort to fix the ACA website? Seems to me like he’s not a clown.
Cite the nurses were mopping up puke, shit, piss and blood. They were medical personnel wearing full gear knowing the person was infected and specifically tasked with dealing with it. This is not the case with people outside of hospitals. And as it stands now there is nothing except security theater in place to stop cases from entering the country.
The ONE person who entered the US died from it and infected 2 people. He did not collapse in the street excreting bodily fluids everywhere. He was given the care we can expect if infected.
2 of the pros got the disease. Do you see the difference between the pros getting it while fully gowned versus the average person on the street.
The known version of ebola has shown to be transmittable via aerosol among monkeys. That’s the known version. The new variant is still an unknown.
No kidding, we have a vaccine for it. When we didn’t it caused havoc.
It doesn’t matter if he’s Jesus or Charles Manson. You’re creating a strawman to knock down. And helied about his contact with ebola victims and Liberia was talking about prosecuting him.
“They” used the protocol they were taught to use. Blaming the professional is pointless in an epidemic. They’re not the first line of defense, they’re the last. Again, we are exponentially more mobile than Nigeria or Liberia so it’s critical it doesn’t enter countries with high volumes of travel.
That’s a point.
Maybe it’ll keep people with the flu home.
Nigeria is a totally different situation. They have had no new cases since September 8.
Most airlines have suspended service to Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. The main exception is Brussels Airlines, and they are being careful who they allow to board.
You are sounding here like one of those big government, pro-regulation, liberals. Even though I may also be guilty, in other contexts, of being a big government liberal, this is a good problem to leave in the hands of private industry. They can handle it in a flexible and reasonable way without knee-jerk regulations.
And yet the people who shared an apartment with him, interacted with him in the hospital during multiple visits while he was symptomatic, and cared for him before his diagnosis never contracted it. The two pros who contracted it had insufficient equipment at the time and were not properly trained in how to suit up/remove their suits to prevent contamination.
Aerosol is not airborne. There’s no evidence anyone has ever gotten ebola via aerosol (like sneezing) or airborne transmission.
I agree only a nutjob would attack somebody for being sick but that particular nutjob might know what he’s doing. The flu’s a lot more dangerous than Ebola.
It’s worth noting that children are lot being infected on the same level of adults (nor are men as affected as women). This illustrates the well-known reality that Ebola is a caregivers disease. It also quite strongly suggests that there isn’t some unexpected mode of transmission.
What crisis?
When more people get killed by Ebola in the US, than have been killed in one single school massacre, then I’ll worry.
As it stands, Lightning is a bigger risk to an American than Ebola is.
You think nurses don’t deal with puke, shit, piss, and blood? Do you even know any nurses? What, you think that if a nurse walks into a room and the patient is lying in bodily waste they just leave them to stew in it? Who the hell do you think cleans up such a patient?
Apparently they were wearing inadequate gear, to the point the nurses were trying to improvise better seals. Let’s hope everyone has learned something from this and going forward medical personnel will have better equipment.
People outside of hospital are not expect to take care of people with Ebola - at least not in this country.
Short of closing our border to everyone, and not just by air but also land and sea, there is no way to be certain to keep it out. We’re not going to shut down international travel like that short of a genuine apocalypse, which we’re nowhere near.
Disease crosses international borders every day. That’s how West Nile Virus wound up in North America, among other things.
Incorrect. There have been THREE people who came from Africa with the disease, two of them have since recovered and didn’t infect anyone else. Or did you forget about the doctors who were brought here from Liberia already ill with the disease?
This is why the nurses currently ill with Ebola were transferred to the centers that had treated the doctors, because those facilities have demonstrated a better competence at handling this than the Dallas hospital.
Bullshit. An adult running a 103 degree fever is serious, and he told them he’d come from West Africa. Those both should have been red flags but, you know - uninsured, black, foreign, poor… quick get him out of here and let him be someone else’s problem.
If he’d been insured (never mind America, at least middle class, and white) they would have paid more attention.
Well, OK, that’s the “care” I’d expect if I was uninsured… because I’ve been uninsured and the medical system treats you like trash if you don’t have insurance.
Professional pilots are more likely to die in an airplane simply because they’re in airplanes more often than other people. Electricians are more likely to get electrocuted because they’re always working with chained lightning. Firemen are more likely to die in a fire than other people because they run into instead of out of burning buildings.
Likewise, medical professionals who treat people with infectious disease are more likely to get infectious diseases that you or me because they’re around infectious people a heck of a lot more often than we are. Yes, even if they’re pros.
The fully gowned pros are going toward the people with Ebola and working hands-on for hours at a time. Versus the general public, which is nowhere near people with Ebola and can easily keep their distance.
The Reston outbreak occurred in crowded laboratory conditions among monkeys already infected with simian hemorrhagic fever virus. It’s a different virus species from the Ebola currently making people sick, and the Reston virus does not make people sick. That’s why none of the people working at the lab got sick, even through at least six of them had antibodies against the disease in their blood. Out of a total of 178 animal handlers who had had contact with the monkeys Wow, bit scary virus that doesn’t make you sick. It didn’t even make the guy who cut himself with a dirty scalpel with autopsying one of the dead monkeys sick.
It’s not the same virus.
Geez, let’s hope the current version causing illness mutates to be like the Reston version. Then we can really stop worrying.
Oh, and can we be sure that virus was airborne? We are talking about a lab with confined monkeys who, you know, do things like fling poo at each other and spit and stuff. Or maybe one of those 178 animal handlers got a bit careless and cross-contaminated some stuff while feeding them, or cleaning the cages.
When we didn’t we imposed quarantines. The whole world wasn’t simultaneously ill with smallpox for centuries at a time.
I wasn’t talking about his conduct in the airport, I was specifically speaking about his conduct when he was ill and sitting in an ER seeking treatment. He wasn’t ill at the airport and denial is a pretty damn common trait in people. When he couldn’t deny it any longer he was truthful and the Dallas hospital ignored the vital information he gave them and kicked out on the street.
Ken Brantly also used the protocol he was taught to use. No matter what any medical professional working with Ebola patients runs a non-zero risk of getting the disease. Every single one of the medical professionals flown out of Liberia with Ebola for treatment in the US or Europe followed protocols and they still got sick. Lots of others followed protocol and didn’t get sick.
Also, while we are more mobile (for some of us - quite a few Liberians and Nigerians are, in fact, world travelers as should be apparent by now, they’re not all dirt-poor and living in mud-floor huts) we are also far more capable of dealing with the disease than poor, rural African people who have done most of the dying in this outbreak.
Anyhow - it’s too late to keep it out of countries with “high rates” of travel. People have already traveled while carrying the virus. Yes, we should take reasonable precautions at borders and transportation hubs, but we need to grow up and come up with a plan on how to deal with anything that slips through the net. Because it will happen. It always does.
70 people were in close contact with the guy. Their ongoing training on this sort of thing has probably been a two-hour half-assed inservice once a year, and they probably got some rushed refresher training right before they went on duty. And 68 out of the 70 appear to have done everything right, or else they got lucky. That’s actually better than I would have expected.
It seems like people who are usually all about individual liberty, states’ rights, and limited government now think it should be the easiest thing in the world to sweep in and imprison a bunch of innocent people for weeks. It’s hard because it should be hard. The responsibility for carrying out the nuts and bolts of public health policy generally falls to the states, and often even the city or county level. So whose job is it to actually say someone can’t fly? That’s why I think a “czar” is a good idea, since we don’t have a Surgeon General at the moment–we need someone at the top to coordinate the various arms of the response.
Anurses’ union has come out with suggestions:
We’ve got some of the world’s best hospitals in Texas. But the one that sent the Ebola patient home–then finally treated him–doesn’t seem to be very far up the list. Blame the bean counters who run it.
I’m not happy with a “czar” for the effort. It ought to be the Surgeon General’s job. Too bad the idiot Republicans refuse to approve the President’s choice.
Next year’s fashionable look for the scientifically-challenged: White, white and white. Clothing, floors, car upholstery, skin, hair…
I don’t see what the big deal is. We can just drop a squad of motorcycle commandos from F-16s; they’ll have that Ebola under control in no time.