Why the liberal 'pooh-poohing' of the Ebola danger?

In My Humble Opinion
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At the height of the “panic”, one of my IRL friends posted on Facebook that she’d just had a long conversation with her 15-year-old daughter, who was afraid of getting Ebola. She explained, as well as she could as a layperson, that this was not something we had to fear in this country.

I don’t think this was available at the time; if it was, she would probably have known about it too.

http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/pdf/how-talk-children-about-ebola.pdf

Medical history, and epidemics in particular, is one of my interests, so I’ve been following this story closely from the time I heard about the brewing epidemic last March. I don’t think these were the first or only Americans to contract Ebola and/or be treated here, either; I really believe that there have been others who were never correctly diagnosed, and either recovered or died while those around them thought, “What on earth is WRONG with this person?” Over the past few months, I’ve had to inform some people who had heard that the Ebola virus was created in a lab and thought it was a new disease, simply because they had never previously heard of it.

I recently re-read a book about Lassa fever, which is very similar to Ebola and was discovered in Nigeria in 1969; the book came out a few years later. That book mentioned some people who were thought to have Lassa fever but immunological testing proved they didn’t, and I honestly wonder if some of them had Ebola.

Just a few days ago, I found a podcast on You Tube of Dr. Brantly speaking at a Christian school in Atlanta, Probably within the past couple of weeks. Chances are, he was back in town for a checkup, and did have connections with that school. His sister and BIL had taught there, and he attended a basketball camp there when he was a teenager, and speculated that there was more to his invitation than just the basketball camp. :wink: He also appears to be getting a bit of a belly on him, which may not be a bad thing considering how incredibly awful he looked when he was discharged from the hospital. :frowning: I finally realized what it was that he resembled, and it was the late-stage AIDS patients you used to see around all the time.

Until I saw him climb out of the ambulance and walk into the hospital, which I still can’t believe he did, I just figured that he and Nancy Writebol, who recently returned to Africa with her husband :slight_smile: would end up in an unmarked mass grave somewhere. I also believe that she in particular would have remained anonymous had they known this would be an ongoing news story that produced worldwide headlines.

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The book is called “Fever: The Hunt for a New Killer Virus” and wowzers, was it scary! Scientists mouth-pipetting specimens on an open countertop, patients air-evaced on commercial trans-Atlantic flights - just goes to show how much we didn’t know, and still don’t.

My friend first heard of AIDS herself when she was about 15 years old, and used this conversation as a “teachable moment” about the disease, which IS something Americans need to be concerned about, although acute fear isn’t generally warranted.

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Again on his Twitter feed, he Photoshopped this picture to make it more “him”, and also said that he will soon be leaving Monrovia, and even though the food on the airline he’s using is really bad, this flight will probably be much better than the one he was on last time he left that city.

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I just heard on NBC News that an American citizen was diagnosed with Ebola in Sierra Leone, and will be flown back tomorrow to be treated at the NIH.

:frowning:

No other details were given; I wish this person the best.

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Perhaps you are thinking of this story.

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I was 18 in 2004. I never claimed there was going to be a draft over Iraq, but I can assure you I was concerned about it. Particularly because people within the Bush administration considered it an option.

I’m far more worried about someone’s unvaccinated kid giving me a form of mumps that’s just enough attenuated from the one I was vaccinated for than getting Ebola.

There’s a big difference between understanding how the world around you functions and fearmongering.

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Measles has broken out in west Africa, in part because parents were neglecting to get their children immunized over the maelstrom that’s been the past year.

The NIH patient’s condition has been downgraded to critical, and one of the 10 people brought back here, also from Sierra Leone, will be admitted to the isolation unit in Omaha because they are exhibiting Ebola symptoms. :frowning: I sure hope this is yet another case of malaria, KWIM?

Also on this feed is a recent story about some people who took the experimental vaccine, and this may account for a sizable number of the “people in isolation with Ebola symptoms” we heard about last fall. The vaccine itself made them terribly sick (David Writebol sure said it did, but he felt it was a small price to pay to advance medical science) and the protocol required that they be kept in isolation for an unspecified period of time.

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The epidemic was recognized a year ago today. :frowning: On a related note, I also saw another story stating that while Liberia was Ebola-free for several days, a few cases have been diagnosed in the meantime, so they aren’t out of the woods yet either.

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And yet somehow, SOMEHOW, in spite of all the predictions of the people who were terrified that we were due for a zombie-ebola apocalypse here in the west, there hasn’t been a case in… how long? Months? And it’s dying down in Africa? Almost like all the sane, rational people were saying at the beginning in threads like this one?

But no! If someone vomits on you… and you swallow it! You could get Ebola! :smack:

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Is that how Spinal Tap’s second drummer died? :stuck_out_tongue:

I first saw that movie in a theater with a few hundred other people who also didn’t about that scene. I never heard an audience howl that loud until I saw “About Schmidt” on opening weekend, and we didn’t know about Kathy Bates’ full-frontal nude scene. :smiley:

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Some people are wondering if a new Liberian Ebola case was sexually transmitted, because her boyfriend is a recently recovered survivor.

http://www.idweek.org/ebola_idweek_2014/

:confused:

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The person was listed in critical condition for a while, and I heard earlier today that s/he has been upgraded to serious. It sounds like s/he is on the road to recovery.

:slight_smile:

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The NIH-treated patient was discharged from the hospital, apparently on the road to a complete recovery. S/he remains anonymous. :slight_smile:

I stumbled onto this a few days ago. Turns out Nancy Writebol and her husband appeared on a Scandinavian talk show in October! I had absolutely no idea.

Her portion of the program is not viewable outside Norway and Sweden, but this is.
All of this is SFW.
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And proof we are still learning…

A woman in Liberia has apparently been infected with Ebola by unprotected sex with an Ebola survivor several months after he recovered from the disease.

Subsequent tests showed viral RNA present in his semen 6 and a half months after his recovery from the disease. That is far longer than we previously knew the virus could be found in semen after the onset of symptoms.

The woman did not recently attend a funeral or have other direct contact with an Ebola patient.

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Marburg, the other known filovirus disease, can also be sexually transmitted, as was discovered very tragically during the first identified outbreak in 1967. A scientist who recovered gave it to his wife this way 3 months later, and she died. :frowning:

As for the American and other Western male survivors, I just can’t imagine that any of them would have been released from the hospital if they were shedding live virus from ANYWHERE. Some of us on another board wondered if the doctor who was at Emory for 6 weeks was there so long for this reason, and maybe it was but he was also much sicker than any of the other known American victims; among other things, he was on a ventilator for about 2 weeks and dialysis for almost a month.

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And now we know Ebola can persist in the eye long after it is cleared from the blood.

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This link goes into more detail.

British Ebola survivor Will Pooley, who was diagnosed by Dr. Crozier and was later his plasma donor, is interviewed in a current “Frontline” program about the epidemic, although he’s described only as an RN. Incredibly, he’s returned to Sierra Leone and AFAIK is still working there. :slight_smile: Pooley, however, was never critically ill and his diagnosis might have been missed had he not been living in a known Ebola zone.

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Liberia was declared Ebola free, and in recent days, two cases, one fatal, have been identified. I didn’t think it was truly “gone”; only that cases weren’t being correctly diagnosed or located.

The Brantlys have a book coming out later this month. Here’s the first chapter.

So far, it doesn’t lay the religion on as thick as I had expected.

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Dr. Brantly wrote an essay that was printed in yesterday’s Washington Post. In short, he says that just because we aren’t hearing much about Ebola any more doesn’t mean it’s gone (because it isn’t) and that he and his family went back to Liberia earlier this summer for a visit. :cool: I do suspect that it was probably in large part a working visit; Drs. Spencer and Crozier have done that as well in the meantime.

As for the book, it’s #1 in “Communicable Disease - New Releases” and I had a really wild thought: What if this replaces Harper Lee at #1 on Amazon? :confused: :eek: That would be yet another entry on the bucket list they didn’t know they had.

p.s. Might be nice of me to post a link to that essay.

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Trials in Guinea of an experimental Ebola vaccine have proven so effective that the trial period has been cut short so that the vaccine can be more promptly administered on a widespread basis!

Safety was compared to that of the flu vaccine by a vaccine researcher who was not a part of the trial.

The Lancet published (pdf link) the results of the study.