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Home » Ebola here, ebola now

Ebola here, ebola now

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m busy for the rest of the day, so I can’t write an in-depth post on the ebola news right now. But here’s a thread for discussing it. I suggest Drudge for a roundup of current articles.

I would caution people to remember that ebola is passed through body fluids, which ordinarily means close contact. However, when you have people with ebola vomiting in public, it’s hard to believe transmission to bystanders could not occur. Plus, the history of this outbreak is that medical people, even using stringent methods of protection, have been infected.

So it is worrisome that some cases seem to have come here through air travel (I’m not speaking of the two American medical personnel who were transported back to the US under strict quarantine conditions). It would seem that temporarily blocking travel from the affected countries would make sense, but that has not been done.

Comments

Ebola here, ebola now — 49 Comments

  1. I am in one of the places an ebola patient turned up, and in the news some of the “pods” are going… they are worried it may be airborn, which is why so many suddenly have come down with it out of nowhere…

    i cant really say more than that…

    whee…

    too bad my big data chip was killed to benefit a man with over 400 million… or else i would be someplace else now.

    🙁

  3. As a child of the Fifties I can recall quarantine signs for various diseases tacked to doors. What ever happened to that basic public health tactic?

  5. It would seem that temporarily blocking travel from the affected countries would make sense, but that has not been done.

    What would it matter? Considering we effectively have no southern border at this point, it would be impossible to do a quarantine if it did show up here as an airborne variant. Even non-weaponized, imagine the damage 20 people could do who came here and injected themselves with the virus after crossing, then went to major population centers…

  7. This isn’t just an invasion of the U.S. Biological warfare is being waged against us.

    Where is our Pinochet?

  8. There is a great deal of blathering, obfuscating reassurance by the globalist PC crowd, including the CDC chief. Dr. Frieden, and a Dr. Lipkin (prof of epidemiology) with the lead op-ed piece in today’s WSJ.

    None address these questions:
    1) How come the healthcare workers in Africa, including the two Americans, knowingly dealing with and understanding Ebola, still get infected? What does that portend for the folks at Emory?

    2) Why is everyone so quick to assert there is NO possibility of airborne transmission? That is patently an intentional falsehood. A sneeze carries whatever virus is in the nasal secretions, whether flu or Ebola. Nasal secretions are a “bodily fluid”.

    3) Why are we bringing Ebola-laden patients to the USA instead of flying help to them and leaving them in place? This seems to have something to do with their civil rights and our necessary, government-granted duties to render tender mercies. Kinda like the duties we apparently owe Guatemalan MS-13 “children” hustling over our borders.

    It is interesting the Ebola Americans go to Atlanta, not the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD–just outside D.C.– even though our rancid politicians will be home for the recess.

  10. I think I heard that the border patrol has now apprehended people from 50 or 75 different countries, meaning that it’s not just Central Americans that are exploiting our southern border…not by a long shot.

    I also heard that signs posted on the border are being increasingly written in Chinese!

    It’s pretty easy to see how this could explode.
    But we’ve talked about the threat of a pandemic before. This is just a few more data points.

  11. As if health care workers on the frontlines in Africa fighting against an illness with an extraordinarily high mortality rate are just playing around with safety protocol … Now that we’re taking safety seriously, folks, there’s nothing to worry about.

    It’s the most astonishingly arrogant and stupid thing I’ve heard all week. Famous last words? Or something for the idiots to pretend that they never said, or blame it on other people, when this all goes terribly wrong?

  12. Well, what’s the word from Mt. Sinai Hospital, Dodger? I heard that possible case turned out not to be Ebola after all, but they “ruled it out” in about an hour, kinda like how they immediately “know” that any attack in America “isn’t a terrorist attack, swearsies!”

    Hope it isn’t but wouldn’t be surprised either way. (This was in NYC, BTW: the hospital folks followed the Health Alert protocol that the CDC epidemiologists have issued for this non-emergency.) I’d be more inclined to believe the govt. numpties if they didn’t have the inveterate habit of treating us all like children.

  13. My biggest concern is drug resistance TB and other diseases coming in through the border crash rather than worrying about ebola, at least for now. Its been nearly 100 years since the last world wide pandemic, our current rogue regime seems to be courting a panademic. Perhaps this will be the mother of all crisis too big to waste.

  15. BTW, how about this for a Democrat rallying cry:

    “Ebola now, Ebola tomorrow, Ebola forever!”

    It ties the racism angle in nicely, I think.

  16. mf:
    What is your point? That we Americans should have no concerns about importing Ebola? That we should medically do more for the wretched West Africans? So they can engage in their periodic slaughters of one another in better health?

  18. I feel like we are poised for the perfect storm of numerus infectious outbreaks, not only with ebola making it to our cities, but with the combination of many unvaccinated kids + thousands of foreign children – infected with TB, small pox, measles, scabides, lice, etc. – being spread throughout our country (even Alaska & Hawaii!) by DHS.

    I have little faith that our current bureaucrats at HHS and elsewhere will have the wisdom or competency to deal with these outbreaks objectively and with the safety of America’s citizens as a top priority (over political and ass-covering considerations).

    This could get really ugly.

  20. I’ve only looked at headlines and the tv news reports on this so I can easily have missed the answer to my question. How was the decision made to bring the people back?

    Right now my impression is that of some bureaucratic type decision. No one person actually made the decision. It was a dictate from a faceless entity and that has me apprehensive considering how much I’ve learned to trust the government and its bureaucrats.

    However it was made, I hope those two will be the lucky ones and will recover fully.

  21. mf:
    Everyone here knows African medicine stinks, South Africa still marginally excepted though declining under Bantu rule, and that USA medicine leads the world. Thanks for your kind effort to educate the educated.

  23. I thought some of the facts in the article would be interesting. I had no idea there were only 37 doctors for a country with a population 4 million. I doubt few here knew that either. But I could be wrong.

  24. Mf, I didn’t know precisely how bad it was, but I’ve worked with some nonprofits who had dealings in Africa, so sadly I wasn’t surprised.

    Anecdote: a man I knew 20 years ago whose job was to travel to every hellhole in the world said there was one, one paved road running across Rwanda; the Germans and Belgians were the colonial powers who’d built all the infrastructure.

    This man said ruefully that the Rwandans had no more idea about maintenance of roads than children — this road is going back to jungle now that they have self-rule, and is impassable in the rainy season.

    So it goes, in Africa. And a big big part of the problem is that Communists engineered most of the anti-colonial rebellions (or rode them into power), and have wreaked their usual havoc on the hapless inhabitants.

  25. I have come to the conclusion that we would be better off if we reinstituted the colonial system of rule in 3rd countries. It would stop our border situation and allow us to get revenue from our military and civil efforts.

  26. This man said ruefully that the Rwandans had no more idea about maintenance of roads than children – this road is going back to jungle now that they have self-rule, and is impassable in the rainy season.

    children with ak47s and grenade launches and “go fast” trucks with 30 cal machine guns on it… while stoned off their arses on khat…

    AK47 Chimpanzee fires on West African Soldiers!
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62ZJgVQT2gQ

    subtitled… “aw.. isnt he cute”

  27. “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.” -Sir Edward Grey

  28. CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta spoke about six patients in New York City that were tested for Ebola and one who had recently traveled to Africa that is undergoing tests for the Ebola virus

    He also pointed out that even though the patient isn’t in isolation, “This isn’t the kind of thing that they worry about spreading to other patients in the hospital, spreading to people who are walking around the hospital. This is not an airborne virus. This is something that spreads only when somebody is very sick and they start to actually shed the virus in their bodily fluids. So, it’s somebody who comes in contact with those bodily fluids who is not protected. While we don’t know the particular story with this patient, we don’t know if in fact he has the Ebola infection, in terms of concern for the hospital population at large or the population around the hospital, it’s still very minimal.”

  29. Artfldgr – Just read that post, too.
    *THIS* is why I don’t trust the people who should be controlling outbreaks like ebola and protecting the public – they’re already lying/withholding information.

    And the part about them not being isolated while awaiting test results, well it’s not as easy to avoid bodily fluids as they appear to think. I read Hot Zone years ago, and I recall that in the final stages of ebola, the patient’s internal organs disintegrate, they’re bleeding from every orifice, vomiting, etc – they’re nothing but a huge explosion of bodily fluids.

  30. I read Preston’s “The Hot Zone” way back in ’95 when I was a young teenager and I can still say today that nothing, absolutely nothing in life has put such pure terror into me like that book. It turned me into a hypochondriac for years.

    I recently decided to revisit the book and some of Preston’s other writings on Ebola since, and I can tell you that anyone looking for comfort in those books/articles will be sorely disappointed.

    The one consistent theme I notice in his writing – which is noteworthy not because he is an expert, but because he spent considerable time talking with the CDC/USAMRIID people most experienced with the disease – is that we know basically nothing about the Ebola. We do not know its host (the bat stuff is speculation based on some tests they did where some bats were infected with it deliberately but remained unaffected). We do not know why Ebola Reston – which IS airborne – does not affect us but is 100% lethal to monkeys. We don’t how Reston showed up in monkeys from Mindanao, or what it was in Kitum Cave that infected at least two people (despite a massively funded expedition to find out just that), or why or how it shows up in now East Africa, now West Africa, or – above all – how it is transmitted.

    One case saw a Danish kid who Preston calls Peter Cardinal (infected at Kitum Cave) vomit blood straight into the face of a doctor in Denmark (or Sweden, can’t remember) – and the doctor did not get Ebola. Another case saw the same thing happen to a doctor in Kenya, who received his unwelcome dousing from the Marburg-infected Charles Monet (also infected at Kitum Cave). He got Ebola, but survived.

    In his chapter on Ebola in “Panic in Level 4,” Preston reports about a nurse who died from Ebola after wiping his eye with infected blood on his glove. Another doctor worked in a tent for weeks with Ebola patients dying all around him and did not get it.

    Also, he reports in The Hot Zone about an experiment done where Ebola was aerosolized and used to infect to monkeys – through the air.

    The doctors Preston spent time with are pretty much unanimously frank about their fear and bafflement before this horrendous filovirus. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. I got no sense of “We know enough about this virus to control an outbreak if it should happen” from anyone in any of Preston’s writings.

    So I really am perplexed by the certainty expressed in a lot of these news reports. One thing I ought to mention is that, in the second half of The Hot Zone, for those who haven’t read it, Preston details the joint Army/CDC effort to clean up the Ebola Reston-infected monkey house in (where else) Reston, VA. Read that section with an eye to what’s happening today.

    Understandably, the people in charge kept lips sealed and refused to push the panic button. But they knew far more than they let on to the public, and they even sent a man who may have been infected right into the local hospital.

    I am convinced that the experts do not know what they are dealing with, and moreover that they know that they don’t know what they are dealing with. They are playing with the equivalent of a biological nuke, and I’m not sure why. Michael Savage seems to think it’s about pharma money, and maybe that’s a part of it, but I suspect it’s more about extremely naive idealism.

    The most heartbreaking thing that one will observe time and again in Preston’s books and articles, is just this: Ebola preys on idealism and compassion. This doesn’t mean we should be cold-hearted bastards, but we need to use our heads and be more risk-averse than we’d normally be. A lot more risk-averse.

    I exhaust every prayer I have that we never have to encounter this demon in the form of a virus. It is truly from hell.

  32. Please read about “airborne” on Wiki. Airborne means carried in the air, via an aerosol.
    Viruses are little packets of DNA or RNA, usually in a wee protein envelope. They do not have wings to fly. They are “airborne” by carrier aerosols such as nasal secretions/sneezing, or in dust particles wafted by a breeze.
    So all Ebola strains can be airborne. Any assertion to the contrary, as made by the CDC and by Fox News, and by anyone else, is a flat-out lie.

  33. is that we know basically nothing about the Ebola.

    not true..

    we have a cure… its made by a company called MAPP
    the cure is ZMAPP

    you cant invest inthe company, market wont let you
    otherwise i would own shares this morning

    however, word has it that obama will pitch a fit that a private company has this, and cant share it openly for free… and that because govt was part of it (like tons of other things, and that the law allows), it should be state property.

    of course when he does this, he will no realize or care that he just threw a wrench into most research and the docs and schools that would capitalize on it.

    not that they help much
    mine negated my future and exterminated by family by circumstances, and they can hurt me a lot more, and no hope of any avoidance, recompense or future…

  34. Airborne also concerns how long the virus becomes viable in the air. If a virus can only be carried by heavier than air particles, and any lighter one either does not carry it or renders it non viable, then the virus can’t spread very far air wise. So it just falls in the air and is not borne on the air.

    In terms of weaponization, trying to get something airborne allows it to be spread farther. Since it’s easy to saturate a bombing site, but one can’t bomb every part of a city, including the internal buildings.

  35. Dr. Kent Brantly Lives the Gospel from a Sick Bed
    August 5, 2014
    By Jeannie DeAngelis

    Quietly and without fanfare or demand for attention, Dr. Kent Brantly, a young doctor from Fort Worth, Texas, was doing missionary work in Liberia with evangelist Billy Graham’s family-founded charity Samaritan’s Purse when he contracted the merciless hemorrhagic Ebola virus, which kills 50-90% of those unfortunate enough to contract it.

    By going to West Africa to care for the sick and dying, the husband and father of two small children demonstrated true heroism, and through his service to others, the Christ-like charity that Barack Obama is always pontificating about but never seems to practice.

    more:
    http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/08/dr_kent_brantly_lives_the_gospel_from_a_sick_bed.html

  36. I suspct that one reason the two patients were brought teo Emory is because doctors and scientists wanted to closely observe the effects of drugs they planned to use. Because of the impossibility of doing widespread controlled experiments with ebola, they have to use the ZMAPP in a way that they can follow its usage.
    I am not too worried about airborne transmission at this stage, but I do think things need to be watched.

  37. My first thoughts of this latest outrage were with Alinsky, Emmanuel and Ayers. Why would a responsible leader bring individuals infected with a deadly virus to the US? They wouldn’t. But Hope n’ Change is a different program. The CDC is located in a very unfriendly region of the country. Excluding the city of Atlanta and other regional urban areas, it’s staunchly Christian and conservative. Suppose 2014-2016 rolled around and millions were unable to vote due to quarantine, disease, death?

  38. Why would a responsible leader bring individuals infected with a deadly virus to the US?

    It’s a good thing that people are leaping to these thoughts, if only in a propaganda sense.

    Because what people used to do on the net was to come up with instant excuses, siphoned straight in from their closest MSM source, that such and such was doing this and this for that reason. Mostly made up.

  39. Case in point, Sarah Palin in 2008. The moment they outputed the first two interviews of her by Katie Couric and the other deathshead talker, people including here were talking about “oh she is this” and “Oh she is that”, exactly to the tune of the Leftist propaganda.

    And I sit there thinking, humans are just a bunch of crabs in a bucket. They do what they are told to do, and when nobody tells them anything, they wait for the Word before doing what they are told.

  40. Michael Fumento wrote the book, “The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS,” which predicted in 1993 that AIDS would continue to be confined mostly to the homosexual and drug user population. That was in direct conflict with the U.S. government’s “AIDS Doesn’t Discriminate” propaganda campaign, and he was absolutely correct.

    Why Ebola’s nothing to worry about
    08/05/2014
    by Michael Fumento

    We’re now witnessing the worst Ebola epidemic ever – and on your list of worries it belongs .?.?. nowhere.

    Here’s a rule of thumb about diseases: The rarer and less likely they are to kill you, the more hype they get. The New York Times ran more than 2,000 articles on SARS, which ultimately killed zero Americans.

    This is only the deadliest outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease because past ones were so tiny. At this writing, there have been 1,603 reported cases in Africa and 887 deaths.

    That’s too many. But every day about 600 sub-Saharan Africans die of tuberculosis, and contagious diarrhea claims the lives of 2,195 children, the vast majority of them in sub-Saharan Africa.

    Malaria, syphilis, AIDS and probably dozens of other diseases each year kill Africans at higher rates than Ebola is killing right now.

    more:
    http://nypost.com/2014/08/05/why-ebolas-nothing-to-worry-about/

  41. Thank you, mf. I appreciate your contributions to the discussion. Here’s my perspective, as someone who has lived in Liberia in the past (specifically the northern area where Ebola first entered the country), has an educational background in biochemistry and molecular biology (though not working in that field) and is currently sitting on his couch about 3 1/2 miles from the hospital rooms of Dr.Brantly and Mrs. Writebol. I don’t have a problem with bringing them here. I think it was the right thing to do based on the situation and the risks involved. I think they have the technology and training to safely and effectively help these people. And if that’s the case, they should. And if we can learn something valuable from them, so much the better. Every medical advance known to man has been made the same way.

    I have a bigger concern about the CDC next door to Emory, which 365 days a year houses and works with just about every one of the most dangerous pathogens on earth. It’s right in the middle of a busy commercial and residential neighborhood. These two patients, in isolation and closely watched, are nothing compared to that reality. I’ve passed by that complex many times on bike rides.

    One last thought about Liberia. The medical system there is definitely rudimentary compared to here. But people still live their lives, have hopes and dreams, are friendly and welcoming and worthy of our concern. They gave me help and compassion when I was sick (fortunately not seriously) and that was my turning point in my time there. There’s nothing like being sick far from home in a foreign land and nothing better than feeling better and realizing that you will be able to make it and even thrive. Contrary to what you might see on tv or the internet, Liberia and Africa are not just one unending display of misery. People actually live normal lives most of the time. They get up in the morning, eat breakfast, go to work out to their farms

  42. …go to work or to their farms, raise their kids, relax and socialize and generally do normal things. It’s just that the normal things are not done quite the same way we do them. They have plenty of problems but they are normal people.

  43. kcom:

    Glad it helped.

    For us to even call ourselves conservatives in all the best sense of that word, we need to maintain a sense of proportion in the face of the daily onslaught of news that is designed to worry us and make us believe we are dependent on leftist nitwits. It is not in the best traditions of conservatism to cry loudly over and over that the sky is falling and we are all going to die. The left will always shout it louder so we win nothing by doing it.

    The country I grew up in will always be the country that goes to the far ends of the earth to help people in need and no matter what happens I hope it keeps doing that because if it stops, it will no longer be America.

  44. Thanks, mf. Unfortunately I might have made my contribution too late for anyone else to read. I miss Liberia and even after reading all the Ebola stories I still want to go back for an extended visit. It’s an interesting place and has plenty to offer besides misery and death.

  45. Here’s an interesting article by a woman who was infected with Marburg virus (a close cousin of Ebola), came back to the U.S., got sick and was treated and recovered, and all without knowing what she had (until she was tested a year later after she was fully recovered). Despite being sick and theoretically infectious no one else she interacted with, touched or who treated her got infected or sick.

    Marburg experience

  47. mf and kcom, I appreciate your comments.

    Many of us have become distrustful of ALL government in this country. As a result, we may have developed blind spots and prejudices that cloud our vision. Ebola is a terrifying disease because of the horrific way that people die. Unfortunately, because it has always seemed to be self limiting before, it has been considered to be of less import. The truth that viruses do evolve and sometimes become more dangerous is something that can’t be ignored. On the other hand, not much work has been done on Ebola because it is “over there.” Now that it has come “over here,” people are paying attention. Because it has unknowns, it creates anxiety and fear. The lab that has developed the ZMAPP serum has been funded by DOD because they want to be able to protect against bio-threats. It appears that nine years of work have produced some tangible results.

    Your comments about the people of Liberia are very familiar to me, kcom. My grandparents supported a missionary family in Liberia for many, many years. Those missionaries loved the people of Liberia. I wondered why until I visited Africa myself. Though I didn’t go to Liberia (I was in Kenya & Tanzania), I found the people, for the most part, to be welcoming and hard working. My observation about their poverty was that their African governments are mostly kleptocracies or Communistic – both of which stifle any chance at progress out of the poverty you see. Trillions of dollars of aid have been poured into Africa with little result. IMO, only changing their governments to the point where private property and free enterprise are accepted will allow them to move forward.

    I’m cautious about what may happen, but I’m not pushing the panic button just because I don’t trust the administration to do much right.

  48. Thanks for the comment, J.J. I certainly enjoyed my time there. As I said, they have lots of problems, many of their own making in one way or another, and you wish they’d make smarter choices about many things, but they are still people with real lives who are worth getting to know. Their governments do hold them back so terribly but in the long run that’s a problem they have to solve in order to move forward. And there’s no easy solution to that. But one way or another they have to figure out a way to do that. It comes back to that old saying, “you get the government you deserve” which I’ve always thought was better said, “You get the government younger earned

  49. Excuse the premature submission.

    Better said “You get the government you’ve earned.”

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