Thomas Eric Duncan has died of Ebola
I was hoping he’d live, for many reasons. But despite being cared for in Dallas rather than Liberia, Thomas Eric Duncan becomes not just the first person to be diagnosed in this country, but the first person to die of the disease in this country.
RIP.
His death illustrates the fact that the disease can come here, and that treatment in this country (at least if begun in its later stages, which unfortunately was true for Duncan) is no panacea. The question of whether an earlier diagnosis would have mattered in his case remains open, but I’ve read that in general it can.
We have one of the better health care systems in the world. But if this thing is as contagious as some fear, or our response is as inadequate as some fear, the bell that tolled for Duncan could toll for many others. If an epidemic occurs and enough people are affected, even the best health care system in the world could be utterly overwhelmed by sheer numbers.
I’ve dealt before, briefly, with the question of whether Duncan was guilty of lying to authorities about his Ebola exposure, as has been claimed by Liberian authorities. I have notes for a longer piece on the subject, which I may or may not ever write. But the gist of it is that, the more I researched the question, the more convinced I became that the answer to it was “no.” Without going into a lot of detail in this post, I’ll just add that it’s based on things such as when he applied for his visa and purchased his plane ticket (way before his Ebola exposure), and that no one in his hometown knew that the woman they’d helped had actually died of Ebola until many days after Duncan had already left the country and come here. In addition, unless he was suicidal when he visited that Dallas ER room that first time, why would he not have shouted out to them that he’d been exposed to the disease, if in fact he knew it at the time?
Those questions are now moot in the sense that Duncan has died, although false accusations are still disturbing.
But now we turn to the very important question of the living. The wait continues for those who were exposed to the disease through him. Perhaps Duncan’s death can function as a wakeup call to those sanguine enough to have thought it couldn’t happen here, or that modern medicine could see Ebola victims through. Perhaps the end result of all of this will be a better response both by public health authorities, the government, and the medical profession.
One can hope, anyway.
Latest laugher is more screening at the airport.
Why not just close the US for people that have been in those three countries?
Answer: Race.
Back to blood.
false accusations are still disturbing
We still don’t know that the accusations are false, it is all conjecture. You have your opinion, others feel differently. But from the article you linked:
“From the clinic, where she was given an intravenous drip but deteriorated sharply, they were sent to an Ebola treatment unit and then another, at a time when there were no Ebola beds available in the city”.
He went to two separate Ebola treatment centers with the patient. You can blame denial, but that is certainly suggestive.
Perhaps Duncan’s death can function as a wakeup call to those sanguine enough to have thought it couldn’t happen here, or that modern medicine could see Ebola victims through.
As much as I didn’t want him to die, I also didn’t want the entire country trying to get to America because they are convinced we have a cure and are just hiding it away.
Can someone please explain why we don’t at least shut down routine travel between the USA and the affected parts of West Africa?* I’ve heard those governments spokesmen saying that this would disrupt the affected countries and cause civil unrest ‘over there’…. Yes, and so? Is that really the reason? We must leave ourselves open to this disease for the sake of protecting the national interests of some West African countries? Would they do that for us? Would any nation do that for us? Excuse me if I doubt it.
There are some weird politics at work here.
* Excecpt for needed supplies and equipment, medical personnel, soldiers, government officials (yeah, right!), etc.
i hope this is not rhetoriocal as well
Can someone please explain why we don’t at least shut down routine travel between the USA and the affected parts of West Africa?
MSNBC Panel: Even PROPOSING An Ebola Travel Ban Is Racist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLBxNUh5ytQ
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes: Bill Maher A “Racist” For Criticizing Islam…
http://weaselzippers.us/201802-msnbcs-chris-hayes-bill-maher-a-racist-for-criticizing-islam/
Infecting a Nation for Politics and Money
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/66582
“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing.”–Christopher Manes, Earth First!
“I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.”–John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal
Lea:
Yes, another rumor was that they went to Ebola treatment centers; some articles describe it that way (usually without a source). Most articles say they did not, however, and that they went to several hospitals. And the article I linked to is quite convincing on their lack of knowledge of her Ebola status—they exposed themselves even after she died, unknowingly.
Of course it’s possible he knew. Nevertheless, false accusations ARE disturbing, and after fairly exhaustive research (many many hours, because the question became of interest to me) I would say I am about 90% sure he has been falsely accused.
I’m not sure I’m going to write a longer article about it at this point, though. Most people would consider the question moot. But it still disturbs me very much, because I think he was innocent.
Artfldgr:
I don’t have Asperger’s, and even I’m not sure whether that question was rhetorical or not.
But the construction “could someone tell me why…” is often both rhetorical and not, at the same time. It sometimes means “Yes, I sort of know the answer, but the behavior seems so odd to me, so upsetting, that I can hardly believe (or don’t want to believe) the answer I already know. So please, give me another.”
we are at war, but are not allowed to know it, because we have not updated the definition of war and combat to include cyber actions, germ actions through third parties, immigration as warfare, and many other concepts (like dumbing down, population control through feminism collapsing it, racial conflict, etc).
by waging war this way, you avoid the nuclear bombs and still dispatch your enemies by weakening them to the point morally, physically, culturally, and economically… instead of shooting them.
as long as your under the point of conciousness, the sleeping tiger sleeps, and does not wake up in a rage. by the time it would, the people that would fight, are not capable of it.
rightg now they are lowering the standards to normalize womenin the military. the rate of failure of women in combat units is horrid. at the level men fail at 1% women fail at near 30%…
this means that the women will cause the men to fail. marines have to go two miles in 17 minutes with equipment… women 30 minutes… given the weakest link point, this means that any group that has one woman, has to all perform at HER LEVEL, because otherwise, she will be left behind in combat
[note that the idea of not leaving anyone behind was NOT a military point for all parts of the military, but its been promoted to the point that 10 living people will now die to get a body]
add to this that we have equiped the chinese and the russians with modern computer technology, manufacturing ability, and more… and that they are beefing up their militaries for war for a couple of decades, and we are unilaterally disarming, and have removed our best generals and such (like stalin did when he nearly lost to barbarossa)…
been wanting neo to discuss this for 10 years or so now… never happens… so its worse and worse
Pentagon Lifts Veil on 7 New Obscure Chinese Weapons
http://www.wired.com/2013/05/china-report-weapons/
Two new models of stealthy jet fighter. A new(ish) aircraft carrier. Separate ballistic missiles for targeting orbital satellites and ships at sea. A host of cyberespionage tools. Everybody’s already heard about China’s main new weapon systems, developed and deployed in alternating fits of secrecy and pageantry over the past decade of the Middle Kingdom’s explosive economic and military growth.
Military and Security Developments
Involving the People’s Republic of China 2013
http://www.defense.gov/pubs/2013_China_Report_FINAL.pdf
most people would be floored and flabbergasted as to what they ACTUALLY have that we know (we dont know a lot as they are still closed and secret as russia still is as well).
The Chinese Su-27 fighter: Shenyang J-11
Dongfeng EQ2050 Mengshi ‘Brave Soldier’ (humvee copy)
The Chinese M16: the CQ
The Chinese Predator: Chengdu Pterodactyl
russia has been testing new nuclear weapons in violations of treaties… they now have more deployed weapons than the US has, and are found to not have gotten rid of most of the weapons they agreed to get rid of.
new tanks, subs, transports, bombers, fighters, nuclear strategic and tactical weapons, and more
all in preparation for the war that is coming
Yep; we all know why: Gotta touch all the PC bases and send out the right pathic signals…
Actually very sad, on several levels.
I hope he finds peace.
And I hope to hell his death does not itself become a political tool – but I know it will.
Artfldgr has the right of it. That our borders remain open and that there is no travel quarantine of the three most effected countries is due entirely to intention, not ‘irresponsibility’.
Mike:
I agree: very sad for many reasons.
One is that he came here to reconcile with an old girlfriend, the mother of his college-age son, and perhaps marry her. Now he is dead just a short while later, vilified (falsely, I believe) by millions around the world, she is in quarantine waiting to see whether she’ll come down with the deadly disease, and many other people have been exposed.
A greater risk than an Ebola pandemic in the US (and that is a risk), is Ebola spreading in Central, South American or Caribbean countries that are more similar to the countries in Africa that are affected.
This article, http://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/ebola-in-caribbean-and-central-america-would-trigger-mass-migration-to-u-s-general-warns
contains this quote from Marine General John F. Kelly, the head of U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM):
“If it comes to the Western Hemisphere, the countries that we’re talking about have almost no ability to deal with it – particularly in Haiti and Central America, It will make the 68,000 unaccompanied minors look like a small problem.”
Folks who fear contamination will migrate north in huge numbers and folks with the disease might also migrate north in hopes of a cure.
Most articles say they did not, however, and that they went to several hospitals.
Which is to say most articles gloss over what kind of hospital they went to. They are less specific. I think this is because they, like you, were inclined to give Mr. Duncan the benefit of the doubt and feel sorry for him, but it does not prove your point.
I also agree with Artfldgr as to China preparing for war, one perhaps 5-20 years from now.
Even not considering the Ebola factor- why was he given a visa- single, unemployed and from a country with large numbers of over stayers?
And I get why you feel sorry for him, he tried to help someone and got a horrible disease. That is terrible and I don’t wish Ebola on anyone.
I think you are taking questions about whether he knew too personally. I agree with you that he probably didn’t plan to come here because he thought he had Ebola, he planned to already (possibly because he wanted to get away from the outbreak, even, which makes total sense).
Hey, denial is a powerful thing. And the man is dead and his family is grieving and hopefully not infected. This is not about blame, just following the story through to see what happened and how we can potentially prevent it from happening again.
Lea:
No, I don’t think I’m taking it too personally.
My opinion is based on the facts I’ve read, and logic. The more I read, the more I realized people were just repeating the “he lied” meme without any facts to back it up.
For example, (and I’m in a hurry, so I’m not going to provide links), there was a Breitbart piece quoting Duncan’s boss saying “he knew, he lied.” Turns out that the Liberian article the Breitbart piece was based on said the boss hadn’t seen or spoken with Duncan since Sept 4, long before the exposure occurred. It was merely the boss’s opinion, no different than anybody’s, based on no facts at all. And repeated and repeated online till it becomes a Truth Everybody Knows.
And that was the case with all the “he knew” evidence. It was all garbage in, garbage out.
Plus, logic dictates he didn’t know, or by the time he was in the hospital ER he would have told them he’d been exposed recently. That is, if he wanted to live. There is every indication he wanted to live, yet he never told them, even though he DID say he’d come from Liberia (or Africa, in another report).
And by the way, blaming Duncan for not telling them does NOT help us to deal with the Ebola situation better. It puts the onus on the patient to tell health care staff things the patient cannot necessarily be expected to know, and can be used as an excuse. Health care should not rely on patients telling them stuff that patients do not necessarily know. Also, as I’ve written in a previous post, I believe the fever criteria for Ebola should be lowered, because both he and the Spanish nurse presented with a lower fever, and both had histories (his travel history, her history of caring for another patient) that should have red-flagged them.
And by the way, blaming Duncan for not telling them does NOT help us to deal with the Ebola situation better.
It’s not ‘blame’ but knowing that people are not always rational and will not always volunteer important information IS helpful to hospital staff. Because they need to ask, if they think it’s at all a possibility. Like if they have a patient who is african who comes in with fever and stomach pains.
MDs in the ER have very little time to see a patient. They do not generally take a full travel history. Now we can hope they will be far more alert.
And I agree with you about the fever criteria, but I am sure they are worried about false positives. But combine that with travel history and you will be in a much better diagnostic position.
I agree with you Neo that he was not aware he was infected, he certainly didn t immediately seek out hospitalization when he landed in the US, its an obviously carefree selfie he took at the airport with that lady in a yellow dress.
To me Dallas Presby dropped the ball not even following through with the *guidelines* they had in place. I agree too you cannot expect somebody to know the health status of everybody they interact with. He assisted a pregnant lady who was sick, & he didn t know the particulars of her illness, what is unusual about that. Any one of us might help somebody in distress & not expect a fatal illness to befall us as a result. RIP Mr Duncan .
He got about as good treatment here as in Africa.
Spent a few days in your house getting dehydrated, then go to hospital and get infected by various things there. Mission accomplished.
Should have just used his money and connections to get a containment cell built for him and get treated with fluids and IV there.
Will do about as much good.
Possible new case in Frisco, a Dallas suburb, in a patient who supposedly says he was exposed to Duncan.
Neo is right — blaming Duncan is not the way to go, and we should instead focus on preparing/training medical providers.
And there seems to be quite a bit lacking in the preparedness of health care staff in this country — see National Nursing Survey: 80% Of Hospitals Have Not Communicated An Infectious Disease Policy:
carl in atlanta,
Q: Can someone explain why passengers from west Africa are not immediately deported, but also why the southern border is open to illegal aliens carrying other diseases and potential terrorists?
A: Because its a part of the plan to fundamentally transform America.
The second question is why our military personnel are placed into a situation where they will be exposed to ebola? The answer to this question is the same as the answer to the first question. An epidemic killing millions is the perfect storm to declaring bho dear leader for life with VJ as Rasputin. Btw, I am not paranoid. 🙁
Frisco Patient Exhibiting Ebola Symptoms
http://dfw.cbslocal.com/?lead=frisco-patient-exhibiting-ebola-symptoms
the patient claims to have had contact with Thomas Eric Duncan, referred to as Dallas ‘patient zero.’
It is not clear how the patient had contact with Duncan. The CDC says the patient did not have direct contact with Duncan and he was not one of the 48 people being monitored by federal, state and local health officials.
Media: Blocking Travel From Ebola Countries Is Racist
That didn’t take long. Mere weeks into the U.S. Ebola scare, and liberal media personalities are already playing the race card. Would a ban on travel from countries struggling to contain Ebola actually work? Maybe, maybe not. But that doesn’t matter, apparently. The real problem with the travel ban is that it’s obviously racist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7JrN_ZV-YE
“One can hope, anyway.”
Look what hope has gotten us in the last few years. The worse President in my lifetime!
NEO: Plus, logic dictates he didn’t know, or by the time he was in the hospital ER he would have told them he’d been exposed recently. That is, if he wanted to live.
no… logic does not dictate that… it says nothing either way… all your doing is settling upon the answer that makes you more comfortable, and calling it logic.
one could just as logically say that he was afraid that once he said something, he would be a pariah, and not be treated or even be killed.
his logic is not the logic of a person living in the US all their lives, such a person would settle upon different things than someone from a country where people commonly attack each other in groups for various political reasons…
(but thats ok, we have machette attacks here too
7 charged in gruesome machete attack on CTA Brown Line / http://wgntv.com/2014/09/09/7-charged-in-gruesome-machete-attack-on-cta-brown-line/
not to mention the restaurant robbery in manhattan)
How maudlin is it possible to become?
“How very sad, for many reasons”
“He came here to see an old girlfriend and possibly marry her”
And see one of his children, whom he had not seen in 16 years.
And how he didn’t really know he had Ebola, though living in its heartland and crapping and puking all over himself.
“May he find peace.”
Wow. No wonder we have no barriers to the entry of the undesirables, whether or not infected.
John Wiley Price Suggests Race A Factor In Dallas Ebola Case
http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2014/10/07/john-wiley-price-suggests-race-a-factor-in-dallas-ebola-case/
looks like those who are insulated feel that they can pander on and on, and that regardless of whats going tohappen tothe little people, keep going on and on.
Too bad it’s too long for a bumper sticker.
Might be useful thematically if shortened up in some manner
Q: Why won’t Obama prevent X?
A: Because it’s part of his plan to fundamentally transform America.
Don Carlos:
Just go right ahead and keep ignoring my factual, logical reasons for thinking he did not know he’d been exposed to ebola, which I’ve expressed on many threads and in many comments.
Just go right ahead and keep pushing a false “Oh, you stupid illogical bleeding-heart” meme, because I actually do have sympathy for a man that logic and facts tell me is innocent, and falsely accused.
Go right on emphasizing the emotion at the expense of the logic and facts on whether he was innocent or guilty.
You only make yourself look illogical and petty.
“MollyNH Says:
October 8th, 2014 at 2:51 pm
I agree with you Neo that he was not aware he was infected …”
There’s a difference, I think you would certainly agree, between “to know”, and to suspect a likelihood, or good possibility.
You don’t think he suspected at the time of his first visit to the hospital?
Just asking, since I quit tracking the early part of the story, the history of his condition, after last week.
According to CDC, 150 people a day arrive from the affected areas in Africa. That’s a lot of people to keep track of, but not that many to be inconvenienced by banning flights to the U.S.
Allowing 150 to come in a day is nuts. Republicans should jump on this. Obama is putting the nation at risk for political purposes.
DNW:
If he suspected or knew about his previous exposure, at the time of that first visit—and if he was not suicidal—he would have told them about his previous exposure. He did not.
Neither his subsequent behavior (exposing his loved ones to the disease) nor his previous behavior, indicates such knowledge. By the time of his second visit he suspected he had Ebola, because the symptoms had become unequivocal.
And there’s no indication from his previous life that he was the sort of person who would knowingly expose his loved ones to Ebola.
Tell you what, instead of relying on Molly to bring me up to date, and since I am one of those who first alluded to the report that the Liberians said he was lying, I’ll go back and take a systematic look at the links.
It may be that the timeline shows that he could not have suspected the woman he was helping could have had ebola, given a 21 day incubation time.
If that is a valid assumption.
I take it the argument is that no one in the city at the time he was carrying the pregnant woman around, was known to have ebola yet?
DNW:
Follow the link to the LA Times story I’ve provided in the earlier post I wrote on the subject and it will answer some of your questions.
He lived in a suburb of Monrovia, and Monrovia of course has had Ebola. But when I tried to find out whether the pregnant woman was the first case of Ebola in the local area (the neighborhood, the community) in which he lived, there was no information on it. Her symptoms (convulsions) were thought to be from a complication of pregnancy or from malaria. He came here about 3 1/2 days after she died, and apparently never knew she died from Ebola before he came. The neighborhood didn’t learn it until after he became ill in Dallas, and others had become ill, too, who had touched her. Then they put two and two together.
Those are inferences about what we take to be typical human motivations and behavioral constraints, are they not?
Those assumptions did not have much force with AIDS; as we saw any number of persons reported to have deliberately, not merely negligently, exposed others to infection.
I will probably be much more persuaded once I follow the argument that he could not have suspected his problem was the result of the contraction of ebola, because no known cases were reported in the vicinity of his home … or wherever it was he was living.
This seems pointless. Duncan’s knowledge irrelevant. They are now saying one of the Deputies that went to the apartment is patient number 2. President Ebola will never escape this stupidity.
It will be interesting to see what if anything his phone records show as to contact with Monrovia in the days immediately following her diagnosis and within his first days in the US. If those records become available subsequent to the filing of criminal charges either here or as was suggested, in Liberia.
I don’t know why we care whether Duncan knew. The man is dead, and our precautions should never have depended on a sick person telling the truth, or even understanding the need to do so, in any case.
Now, if you want to talk about what people ought to know and what they ought to say to whom before exposing others, let’s consider the new maybe-patient, a deputy who allegedly was ordered to enter Duncan’s not-yet-cleaned apartment without any protective gear. When he developed symptoms today, did he call for help from the relative quarantine of his home and explain what his illness might be, so that he could be safely checked out? Why no, no he did not. Knowing exactly what he had been exposed to, and thus what might be going on, he left his house and walked into a clinic with his wife, thus possibly exposing and certainly scaring the pants off goodness knows how many other patients and health care professionals. Apparently nobody thought to tell him how to safely manage any symptoms he might develop during the Ebola exposure period — but don’t worry, peasants! Grownups are in charge and all is well!
DNW, Mr duncan perhaps *trusted* the medical professionals at Dallas Presby ???
Perhaps he was in denial as well & figured that he gave all the pertinent data & said he was from West Africa & “if these pros are sending me home with just this Rx I must not have it”.
It was up to the medical professionals to connect the dots not the patient. Sadly the patient paid the ultimate price. It takes *great gumption* to be discharged with a RX & show back up at the same ER & say *I m Back* ! Probably makes sense to lay ground work & say “if I m not better can I come back or call you” But sick people often do not think clearly. Sad situation, or perhaps he should have gone to another hospital, people have done this before.
OK, so this is what I get from the LA Times article:
So,
1. She was dead 3 to 4 days before he left for the US.
2. She died within hours (apparently less than one full day) of them trying to get her to a hospital
3. She was transfused at a clinic, but was so bad, she was sent to an ebola treatment center to seek admittance. They (the family and Duncan) were unable to get her into two which they apparently visited.
4. Neighbors indicate – or make the accusation – that the family knew full well that she likely had ebola.
Now, I do not know enough about the symptoms of a dire malaria attack so as to compare it to an ebola infection in its final phase, but it seems likely to me that if ebola was known to be in the area, even a modestly educated or intelligent person would be expected to have some awareness that what she was suffering from, and what would kill her 3 or more days before Duncan decamped, was unlikely to be mere malaria.
The next thing I guess I need to look at is the strict timeline of ebola’s arrival and publication in Monrovia. Was Duncan aware that the area was struck, before the woman died?
By inference he appears to have been
For what do we expect he thought when they were sent by the clinic off to ebola treatment centers? Was the clinic likely to mistakenly send a woman in the final throes of ebola to an “ebola unit” while simultaneously diagnosing her with the symptoms of malaria?
Can we believe that the family and Duncan, while in the taxi, imagined that they were sent off from the clinic in search of admittance to an ebola unit, with a malaria patient on their hands?
This past weekend I watched an interview with an expert doctor on Fox, who guaranteed that nobody who came down with ebola in the United States would die from it because our medical care here was too good. He said that people in Africa have a high mortality rate because of inferior care and the weakened immune systems of the inhabitants of the areas where the outbreaks occur.
My contention since the first doctor contracted this has been the medical community had been too confident and too arrogant about it. I don’t think this will change the minds of the doctors who made them up a long time ago, but it may alert the public to take the experts’ opinion with a grain of salt and raise awareness.
Assuming that Duncan really did not know, then this makes even more tragic because it means that our current policy is not only foolish but dangerous and potentially deadly to others.
neo has persuaded me — as I read the tea leaves the same way.
I believe that Barry is not banning flight because of racism — not politics.
He’s (strangely) anti-White and anti-Jewish. (He’s pro-Semitic if you acknowledge his bias towards Arab Muslims.) He’s indifferent to Kurdish Muslims. He’s all crossed up over Turkish Muslims. He loves Iranian (Shi’ite) Muslims.
He does NOT favor minorities — unless they’re on his OfA team.
I don’t consider him to be a Democrat — He’s a Barry’st. OfA is but front for his Digital Black Hats & ACORN green shirts.
Beware of the ‘green police.’
(They did in Anne Frank, referenced twice in the script! Weird and uncanny.)
I could go on… but as one can see, a playbill is required to know who’s on first, who rates second, etc.
%%%
Even at this hour, the bobbing heads still believe that ebola has an ‘incubation period.’ Such a mental construct is entirely false. Eggs have incubation periods — even pregnancies.
Bacteria and viruses NEVER have incubation periods. It’s a term of art from the 19th Century — and the chicken coop. Something that farmers could understand. (92% of the population.)
Bacteria and viruses reproduce by fission or by cloning 100+ copies inside a host/ victim cell. It’s the latter phenomena that permits a structure far tinier than a bacteria to loom so massive in our bodies — so quickly.
Spanish flu could go from a standing start to full on death in 10 hours.
HIV can go from a standing start to full on death in 10 years.
Shingles can go from chicken pox to an elderly outbreak in 50 years.
Many, many, many, of our mental health ailments are but outward manifestations of viral injuries to the brain. This includes extreme paranoid schizophrenia. The single most famous (unacknowledged) victim of such an infection was Caligula. ALL of his paranoid antics occurred AFTER he was struck down by a virus so intense that he was expected to die. It would’ve been better for all concerned if he had done so.
The most famous viral attack against the brain is rabies.
Viruses pass clean through the membrane protecting the brain. Bacteria, can’t.
Indeed, they’re SO small that transmission by way of aerosols is the NORM. We sneeze for a thousand different reasons. Viruses merely take advantage of our reflexes to spread themselves among us.
Once ebola gets past our skin barrier — we’re pretty much done for. Ebola doesn’t set off our immune system — until it’s in a very late stage. By that time, the immune system is firing off — not from ebola — but from the debris field of its shattered hosts.
Our T-cells actually have NO DIRECT IMPACT on ebola.
THIS is why the carriers have no temperature until w a a a a y too late.
The only logical mechanism that stops the propagation of ebola within the human body is that it gloms onto partial fractions of destroyed cells/ tissue — and emits its DNA engine into “free space”, that is, ejecting its DNA out into the general blood stream by mistake.
It’s so small and tiny that it has no ability to recognize that the cell wall segment it’s attaching to is a “fence flying though a tornado.”
With this in mind, it’s possible to imagine a ‘universal’ cure: dummy cell wall targets. These may have to be tuned to our own DNA so that they don’t trigger a T-cell cascade.
This approach could stop dead countless viral attacks — to include the common cold. The dummy targets would hopefully be able to refresh themselves. Give a sufficient concentration, they may be able to chop down the peak of any viral wave.
It’s something worthy of research.
Since I don’t have access to a lab — I offer it up to Art and his buddies.
Well, let’s see.
How likely, or even reasonable to assume, is it that Duncan could not have suspected he was exposed?
We see in the LA Times article that Duncan’s neighbors think that the Williamses knew their daughter had ebola. We see also that Ms Williams was in such dire condition that she was sent from a clinic to an ebola unit; though she was ultimately unsuccessful in being admitted to either of the two to which Duncan and her family took her.
She then died within hours of this attempt to get her into an ebola unit.
Yet Duncan is supposed, under the most generous interpretation, to have had reasonable doubt that Ms Williams had died from ebola or that he was exposed.
Unless he’s a literal moron, which is a possibility I guess, I do not see how that is possible.
So perhaps we are uninformed as to the state of knowledge in Liberia itself, or in Monrovia specifically, as to the situation relative to the ebola plague?
What was the status quo ante to Duncan’s leaving Liberia 4 days after the death of Ms Williams, and arriving in the U.S. on Sept. 20 only to develop symptoms himself four days later?
From Newsweek: http://www.newsweek.com/timeline-worst-ebola-outbreak-ever-276284
Looks to me as though he could not possibly have been “unaware”.
I thought the timeline always suggested that he didn’t know. According to what I read he arrived on the 20th and got symptoms on the 26th, well after his arrival. If that’s true, he couldn’t have known he was carrying Ebola when he got on the plane. He could have suspected he might be, but then, as Neo says, it doesn’t make sense for him to leave the hospital with that knowledge and go back home.
He would know the key to advanced Western medicine is being cared for by advanced Western medicine. Leaving the hospital wouldn’t accomplish that (if that was his goal). Perhaps the reason he left is he felt relief, happy that the hospital ruled Ebola out without realizing they were idiots and did no such thing. They just dropped the ball.
That actually happens a lot. Hospitals tell people they’re fine and then see them back in the emergency room a few days later, much sicker, because they weren’t fine.
My friend at work was throwing up after lunch one afternoon. Co-workers took her to the hospital. They were going to give her anti-nausea drugs and send her home. But, things changed at the last minute when they discovered she had stage 4 colon cancer. Oops!
I would think that if you had high quality care from the start of the disease, you could probably survive long enough for your own body to develop the effective antibodies to stop it. I think a lot of the victims bleed out and die of organ failure before the immune system can respond. However, I think you are talking about expensive care in that case.
I’m trying to understand the rationale for not instituting a travel ban, assuming for argument’s sake that this is more than the Administration being reflexively PC.
The CDC director has made several not terribly cogent statements to the effect that (a) such bans would make the situation worse, (b) the best way to combat the outbreak is at the source in West Africa, and that (c) there is a right to return.
So, he seems to think a travel ban would prevent people and resources from going into West Africa with medical aid, and that lack of such aid will cause the situation to worsen. The “right to return” bit, which I had to ponder for a while, seems to be referring to the right of aid workers to return to the U.S.
Another random thought … there’s been mention of the corruption endemic in many of the governments in that region. Given that a travel ban would have severe negative economic consequences, I’ve wondered if there was a worry that African governments might suppress reporting of ebola cases if a travel ban were in place. That certainly would hamper efforts to get a handle on the outbreak.
Comments?
The Ebola thing is scary enough – especially as my daughter and I are about to start a round of almost weekly participation in public book and craft events here in Texas. This is the time of year in which I (and other retail outlets large and small) sell the most of our offerings. Having the last quarter of the year be an economic bust will be a hard thing economically.
The epidemic which I think has the greater potential to sink the Obama administration, assuming that any news reporters other than Sharyl Attkisson wants to do some serious reporting – is the polio-like enterovirus which as suddenly begun sprouting up in all sorts of places. It affects children, many of who have respiratory issues and allergies already. It has, at last count, already killed almost half-a-dozen children nationwide and put hundreds into intensive care.
Ebola may be about to hit – but the enterovirus is already here. If I were the parent of a school-aged child in a public school — especially one which has experienced a sudden influx of children from Central America, I’d be chewing my fingernails up to the wrist and considering home-schooling already.
If this administration deliberately wants to seriously piss-off parents of school-age children, they’re well on the way to it.
Look again at the Newsweek timeline above and tell me that he didn’t know he was smack in the middle of the ebola outbreak. For three months prior.
Then look at the Times article Neo cited in extenuation of his moral culpability, and note that he had just days before taken a woman to “ebola treatment units” seeking her admission: and that she was dead within hours of his doing so:
LA Times article cited by Neo.
Frankly the only reason I can see for having any “doubts” is that upon reading and re-reading the Times article and others as well, they seem almost deliberately designed to bury the critical facts under a pile of human interest debris and competing -” who are we to judge?” – narratives.
Effen eh, man.
Mrs Whatsit Says:
October 8th, 2014 at 5:14 pm
So you see why I railed about the need for entirely different protocols for ebola suspects.
They need to STOP MOVING AROUND.
Specialists need to come to them.
Forget the paperwork: Uncle Sam will cover the tab.
The suspect needs to be either quarantined on the spot — (rare) — or immediately transported in specialist vehicles to isolation — AWAY from common hospitals.
Since we don’t have any medicines, the only thing available is palliative care. That should be done TOTALLY away from ordinary medical assets.
FORGET the trick isolation rooms. Even getting the suspect into such rooms means that ebola has been spewed every step of the way through those facilities.
WHAT ARE THEY THINKING?
It’s already established that hospitals cross-contaminate patients ALL THE TIME.
With ebola, that risk is on steroids.
My esteem for the medical profession is taking a HUGE dive.
Who is running this circus?
It affects children, many of who have respiratory issues and allergies already.
Michelle’s “health diet” has made their immune systems even weaker.
Intentional? Heh
You still have time, I estimate, before the outbreak hits your location. The US is still pretty big and 21 days is a rather large cushion.
I’m of the same view that Duncan’s knowledge or lack of it isn’t a problem for us any more. Although it was a minor one that led to this cascade failure chain to begin with.
Most people do not have the knowledge to see to repair their ignorance. They don’t know about Ebola or its symptoms or that doctors are clueless, as usual. They don’t know how to remedy their ignorance. They don’t know what they don’t know.
Even with the internet, they are still clueless, ignorant, mass of wretches. That’s humanity for you.
Here’s another cheerful thought:
They did dialysis on him. Those machines are expensive, so they will have to figure out how to decontaminate it. At this point, I’m not convinced we have the ability to do that.
A hospital is NO PLACE to be running medical tests upon a highly contagious — end days — patient.
EVERYTHING exposed to the patient is RUINED for further usage.
We’re not even sure — at this stage — what it takes to decontaminate this strain of ebola.
When you’re faced with this many unknowns, don’t compound the nightmare by cross-contaminating everything in sight.
Yet, that’s EXACTLY what the medical ‘brains’ are doing.
This gets to another basic point: doctors are NOT scientific. They should NOT be attempting to cure victims that — at this state of our knowledge — are actually lab rats/ guinea pigs.
The poor victims ought to have at least the knowledge that their extreme suffering advances the medical knowledge and that others will be saved.
But, as it stands, these hospital settings make science IMPOSSIBLE. One does not have controlled conditions.
Who can say if T.E.D. died of ebola — or that ebola left him open to yet other contagions that — together with ebola — did him in.
Such combinations are TYPICAL of HIV infection. It’s the kind of thing that is to be EXPECTED.
Such events, however, contaminate any science.
The essence of a scientific experiment is to drill down to just one metric — in highly controlled circumstances — to expose natural behavior: proton, sulfur, bacteria, steel beams — whatever.
Any study is ruined when you have more balls in the air than the Cat-in-the-Hat.
You end up with hopelessly sloppy statistical co-relations — that can be disputed to the end of time. We’ve all seen them — Drudge has one posted at least every week. They’re garbage, of course.
Just something to fill the ‘news hole.’
A hospital is NO PLACE to be running medical tests upon a highly contagious – end days – patient.
It’s like they are running bioware tests, to see if ebola when in contact with enterovirus cells and various sequences, whether it will mutate. It’s like they are begging for it.
The Doctor Class, as usual, with their medical unions and fear of lawyer unions and suits, will tell the peasants what to do and the peasants will do it. Hussein ordered the park rangers to put the rod on the peasants and WWII veterans and they obeyed. Democrats were ordered by their President to forcibly bring up healthcare at Christmas and Thanksgiving, and they obeyed.
When they are told to use bio weapons or turn in their Tea Party neighbors to the government death squads, they will obey. Ebola or no ebola.
You end up with hopelessly sloppy statistical co-relations – that can be disputed to the end of time.
The Nazis and Imperial Japanese bio teams solved that by exposing humans to almost random vector diseases in random situations, and used the data to note similarities. Basically a statistical crunching service, that doesn’t rely on a hypothesis. It just generates raw data that can prove any number of theories or fuel any number of applications. The US pardoned some of the Japanese bio warfare teams, since the information was useful for anti viral defenses. The chemical effects were also pretty useful.
So long as the Hussein O Regime has enough patients and targets, they can solidify any further research hypothesis once they find a “trend” or “potential causal relationship”.
Hospitals are great places to go if you want to die, however.
Given what Blert calls cross contamination, which is basically daily as the non documented workers use ER services like people use eye check ups at the doctor or lens office.
The Pure and Rare medicine and medical service is supplied to your Political Class. They get the best things, because they don’t have to worry about you all contaminating their Mix.
DNW:
I have read perhaps 25 or more articles describing what happened in Liberia with Duncan and the woman who died, and (as I believe I’ve stated elsewhere) the articles differ somewhat on the facts, and there’s very little sourcing. However, although some of the articles cite the family (and Duncan) as having taken her to an ebola clinic, the vast majority of the articles cite “hospitals” and do not mention ebola clinics.
I referred you to that LA Times article not because every word in it is gospel or completely clear (for example, it’s not clear why or how she went to an ebola clinic, since she’d actually been told at another clinic that same evening that she had malaria). I referred you to it for the story of how the village reacted and what it knew, which seems consistent with the timeline and the behavior of Duncan as well.
For example (from the same article) [emphasis mine]:
And if it was unclear what the Williams family knew or didn’t know about what she actually had, it’s even MORE unclear what Duncan knew or didn’t know, since he (a) wasn’t a family member, and (b) was riding in a cab to help carry her, not in charge of any decisions and probably not even privy to the medical decisions or even the discussions between the family and the medical staff. It sounds to me as though the family went from medical facility to medical facility trying to get her a bed somewhere, because they knew she was critically ill, and so they went everywhere, and there was no room in any hospital of any type.
There there’s this:
So, what did the family know? We don’t know. But it’s safe to assume that, whatever they family knew (and I doubt they knew all that much, although they might have suspected something), Duncan knew considerably less. The community also knew less:
The neighbors—who knew she had taken ill and died, and participated in funeral rites for the her without knowing how she died—did not know she died of Ebola till others had taken sick, and Duncan was already sick by that point.
So people who read an article here and there about it, and who are confidently saying “he lied; he knew” are just not basing that on a preponderance of evidence. I see the bulk of the evidence as going against the notion that he knew—and that evidence includes (as I have said several times) the fact that if he knew, it makes no sense that he failed to inform the Dallas hospital of his exposure.
I think this man pretty much sums up the mindset that Duncan probably had. This man more or less played the same role, and had the same relationship to the Williams family, and has no apparent reason to lie:
Also this:
That’s all from the same article. And yet you think that, because at one point she apparently was at an ebola clinic, they knew (including Duncan) that she had ebola? I think, on the contrary, the confusion and lack of knowledge is apparent.
In Africa, by the way, death from pregnancy-related complications or from malaria are common—probably a good deal more common than Ebola. For example, in Liberia, “According to the 2009 Health Facility Survey (prior to the ebola epidemic there), malaria accounts for 34.6% of outpatient visits and 33% of in-patient deaths.” That’s a lot of very serious cases of malaria. And the maternal mortality rate in Liberia is 770 per 100,000 live births. Compare that to the US, 18.5 per 100,000 live births. So you can see why it was very plausible that she had died of either malaria or pregnancy (and convulsions, her main symptom, are the main symptom of a pregnancy-related illness called eclampsia, which is sometimes fatal).
Putting it all together, it is far more likely he didn’t know she had ebola than that he knew. It only became clear to people after he and the others had become ill themselves.
Teri Pittman:
I don’t know whether it would work with ebola, but they already have protocols in place for the prevention of infection when dialysis is used with AIDS patients and people suffering from other blood-borne diseases.
Medically this narrative is all kaka. What confidence do you have in the judgment of people who “thought it was a fever or some other thing?” Or treat a convulsion “caused by malaria” with IV fluids? And then take her to an Ebola clinic which was full, and she “died” hours later. There is so much missing from her history that those giving it were operating at an elementary grade level. OK. That’s all they’ve got, but it is insufficient for valid diagnostic conclusions. Even a beginning 3rd yr med student will tell you that. A simple review of systems would ask the salient questions.
Don Carlos:
Of course it’s not medically important, much less sufficient for a diagnosis. That’s not why I was giving you all that information. All that information only is relevant to what Duncan (and the woman’s family, and the community) were told she had, and more importantly what they thought she had. They are laypeople, not medical people. I don’t think she necessarily had even received a medical diagnosis (except for malaria, at that one clinic—and that was more an opinion/guess than a diagnosis) by the time she died.
The family and the community came to the conclusion many days afterwards that it was ebola that she’d had, and ebola that she’d died from. They only figured that out because so many of them sickened, and quite a few died, and that’s when it became obvious it had been ebola.
From the American Thinker, there’s this:
“The Canadian Health Department states that airborne transmission of Ebola is strongly suspected and the CDC admits that Ebola can be transmitted in situations where there is no physical contact between people, i.e.: via direct airborne inhalation into the lungs or into the eyes, or via contact with airborne fomites which adhere to nearby surfaces.
“That helps explain why 81 doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers have died in West Africa to date. These courageous healthcare providers use careful CDC-level barrier precautions such as gowns, gloves, and head cover, but it appears they have inadequate respiratory and eye protection.
“Dr. Michael V. Callahan, an infectious disease specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital who has worked in Africa during Ebola outbreaks said that minimum CDC level precautions —
“led to the infection of my nurses and physician co-workers who came in contact with body fluids.”
“Currently the CDC advises healthcare workers to use goggles and simple face masks for respiratory and eye protection, and a fitted N-95 mask during aerosol-generating medical procedures. Since so many doctors and nurses are dying in West Africa, it is clear that this level of protection is inadequate.
“Full face respirators with P-100 (HEPA) replacement filters would provide greater airway and eye protection, and I believe this would save the lives of many doctors, nurses, and others who come into close contact with, or in proximity to, Ebola victims.”
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/08/airborne_transmission_of_ebola.html#ixzz3FckxpcfB
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook
(Link to the CDH publication, and their information on through-the-air transmission, at the site linked above. Rhesus monkeys at a lab WERE infected without direct contact; ergo, we know that it can’t be ruled out.)
The dead man’s girlfriend is now bitching bitterly that we didn’t do ENOUGH for her boyfriend: who’s not even an American citizen — because RACISM! and Al the Pal Sharpton is on his way to stir the fertilizer.
The fact that the guy had state of the art treatment at OUR expense makes no odds with this one. Watch her sue, and watch the Leftists shovel our money at her, with glee.
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is the tongue of the ingrate foreigner!
Here’s the pertinent info from the Canadian Health Department fact sheet:
HOST RANGE: Humans, various monkey species, chimpanzees, gorillas, baboons, and duikers are natural animal hosts for ebola virus [Footnote 1 Footnote 2 Footnote 5 Footnote 22 Footnote 23 Footnote 24 Footnote 25 Footnote 26 Footnote 27 Footnote 28 Footnote 29 Footnote 30 Footnote 31]. Serological evidence of immunity markers to ebola virus in serum collected from domesticated dogs suggests asymptomatic infection is plausible, likely following exposure to infected humans or animal carrion [Footnote 32 Footnote 33].
The Ebola virus genome was discovered in two species of rodents and one species of shrew living in forest border areas, raising the possibility that these animals may be intermediary hosts [Footnote 34]. Experimental studies of the virus have been done using mouse, pig, guinea pig, and hamster models, suggesting wild-type ebola virus has limited pathogenicity in these models [Footnote 35 Footnote 36].
Bats are considered to be a plausible reservoir for the virus. Serological evidence of infection with ebolavirus (antibody detection to EBOV, ZEBOV, and/or REBOV) has been reported in fruit bats collected from woodland and forested areas near Ghana and Gabon, with reduced frequency of isolation from bats collected in mainland China and Bangladesh [Footnote 37 Footnote 38 Footnote 39 Footnote 40].
INFECTIOUS DOSE: Viral hemorrhagic fevers have an infectious dose of 1 – 10 organisms by aerosol in non-human primates [Footnote 41].
MODE OF TRANSMISSION: In an outbreak, it is hypothesized that the first patient becomes infected as a result of contact with an infected animal [Footnote 22]. Person-to-person transmission occurs via close personal contact with an infected individual or their body fluids during the late stages of infection or after death [Footnote 1 Footnote 2 Footnote 22 Footnote 42].
Nosocomial infections can occur through contact with infected body fluids, for example due to the reuse of unsterilized syringes, needles, or other medical equipment contaminated with these fluids [Footnote 1 Footnote 2]. Humans may be infected by handling sick or dead non-human primates and are also at risk when handling the bodies of deceased humans in preparation for funerals [Footnote 2 Footnote 10 Footnote 43].
In laboratory settings, non-human primates exposed to aerosolized ebola virus from pigs have become infected; however, airborne transmission has not been demonstrated between non-human primates [Footnote 1 Footnote 10 Footnote 15 Footnote 44 Footnote 45]. Viral shedding has been observed in nasopharyngeal secretions and rectal swabs of pigs following experimental inoculation [Footnote 29 Footnote 30].
INCUBATION PERIOD: Two to 21 days [Footnote 1 Footnote 15 Footnote 17.]
COMMUNICABILITY: Communicable as long as blood, body fluids or organs, contain the virus. Ebola virus has been isolated from semen 61 to 82 days after the onset of illness, and transmission through semen has occurred 7 weeks after clinical recovery [Footnote 1 Footnote 2 Footnote 59 Footnote 60.]
I dunno, international flights are looking a little iffy these days. . . .
The Canadians can’t accept the obvious: NO-ONE can stay in such haz-mat suits in west African weather.
The use of water to splash down haz-mat suits has been posted to the Web.
Such a technique must spread ebola to every surface in sight.
&&&
Viruses are NORMALLY spread by aerosol. They are SO tiny.
The public readership is being entirely miss-led by such technical literature. Such writers don’t want to commit to anything that has not been scientifically proved to an overwhelming degree.
This is true even if the likely transmission mode is obvious to even a prole.
Such articles are not written to protect the public; they are written to protect the scientific reputation of their author.
have shouted out to them that he’d been exposed to the disease
Sick people and including sick people afraid of dying often live in fear, denial, and irrationality.
If I am not diagnosed with Ebola, I don’t have it, even if I was intimately exposed to it. It’s a test: I don’t say I have Ebola, then I get an honest diagnosis, not one based on fear.
I must ask: you’ve never seen this behavior with regard to, for example, cancer?
Beverly:
The dead man’s girlfriend said nothing of the sort, at least as far as I can see. It was his nephew who complained that Duncan wasn’t transferred to the special hospital where the other patients were treated, and of course Jesse Jackson had some choice words.
This was the statement of Duncan’s girlfriend, in toto. I don’t think you characterized it properly when you wrote “The dead man’s girlfriend is now bitching bitterly that we didn’t do ENOUGH for her boyfriend: who’s not even an American citizen – because RACISM!…How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is the tongue of the ingrate foreigner!”
Actually, her statement was quite restrained:
The only thing she said that could even be remotely characterized as criticism was this, “‘I trust a thorough examination will take place regarding all aspects of his care.” Under the circumstances, I think that was fairly kind and neutral, because his care certainly had flaws, or at least possible flaws, that do need investigating (the delay in diagnosis, specifically). She also describes herself as feeling “sorrow and anger that his son was not able to see him before he died.” That’s not a criticism of how Duncan was treated medically; it’s a reaction to the bitter twists of fate.
Eris Guy:
Of course I understand about denial.
But that’s not the issue here.
What people are accusing Duncan of is that he knew that the woman he’d helped had died from ebola, and that he consciously lied about what he knew. My point is to show that he didn’t lie about it; he was either in denial or ignorant about that exposure (I think most likely ignorant)—one or the other, or perhaps a combination of portions of the two. The woman’s family was also most likely in denial or ignorance about what she died of, and about their own exposure.
So my statement that he’d be shouting it to the hospital staff if he knew he had been exposed to a woman with ebola addresses the accusations of people who say that he knew he’d been exposed to ebola and was lying about it. My argument is meant to refute the idea that he knew and was lying, not the idea that he may have been in denial and not told. Of course he may have been in denial and not told, but that’s a separate issue, so I didn’t include it in the argument about why his behavior can’t be explained by saying he was lying.
The Spanish nurse didn’t tell her own doctors either. Dear lord. “Despite her trade union insisting that she had asked three times to be tested for Ebola before the infection was confirmed on Monday, El Pais claims Mrs Romero Ramos admitted to the paper that she did not tell her doctor she had been in contact with the two Ebola patients.
Two hairdressers are now reportedly being monitored for the symptoms after it was discovered that the nurse was in contact with them after seeing her doctor.” http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ebola-outbreak-spanish-nurse-discovered-she-was-infected-by-reading-news-on-her-phone-9784019.html
How in the devil is this supposed to be contained if everyone, including Duncan (may he rest in peace) and NURSES are in denial or flat out lying. I’m afraid that DENIAL is an issue that must be addressed in containing it. Denial seems rampant.
On the tombstone of our civilization the inscription must be: “They died from the fear to be called rasists”.
Ebola Polka!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2C5roIkdKo
Everybody dance to the liberal tune!!!
neo-neocon, people with autism often have problems with things like sarcasm, of which rhetorical questions often are. nothing you can do about it, but guess, and hope for the best… 🙂 (its one of the fun things about sheldon cooper of big bang theory!)
Neo: He lived in a suburb of Monrovia, and Monrovia of course has had Ebola. But when I tried to find out whether the pregnant woman was the first case of Ebola in the local area (the neighborhood, the community) in which he lived, there was no information on it.
June 17: Liberia says Ebola has reached its capital, Monrovia.
July 25: Nigeria, Africa’s biggest economy, confirms its first Ebola case, a man who died in Lagos after traveling from Monrovia
Aug. 20: Security forces in Monrovia fire shots, tear gas to disperse crowd trying to break out of quarantine, killing a teenager.
Sept. 13: Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf appeals to Obama for urgent aid in tackling Ebola.
Sept. 20 – Liberian national Thomas Eric Duncan flies from Liberia to Dallas via Brussels and Washington after reportedly trying to help a woman with Ebola in his home country.
Sept. 23 – The CDC estimates between 550,000 and 1.4 million people in West Africa may be infected with Ebola by January.
Sept. 25 – Duncan goes to a Dallas hospital complaining of fever and abdominal pain. He is sent back to the apartment where he is staying, with antibiotics, despite telling a nurse he has traveled from West Africa.
Sept. 28 – Duncan’s condition worsens, and he is taken to the Dallas hospital by ambulance.
Sept. 30 – CDC confirms Duncan has Ebola, making his first case diagnosed in the United States.
Oct. 4 – Duncan’s condition worsens from serious to critical.
Oct. 8 – U.S. government orders five major airports to screen passengers from West Africa for fever, in an effort to bolster defenses against the spread of Ebola
i left out a lot, as the focus was monrovia for the comment. she could not have been the first case as she and duncan would have been long dead by the time he came to the US. given the military firing at citizens and others in monrovia, everyone there knew that it was there, even if they had no radio, as the security forces were acting.
cont.
Ebola Virus Quarantine Sparks Clashes in Liberia
Clash in Slum Reflects Emerging Security Crisis, Days After Residents Stormed Center Holding Suspected Ebola Victims
http://online.wsj.com/articles/ebola-crisis-raises-new-security-concerns-in-liberia-1408559352
Liberian soldiers on Wednesday fired into a crowd of young men who were trying to escape a quarantine that cordoned off an Ebola-stricken neighborhood in the capital.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Residents of Monrovia’s West Point neighborhood woke early on Wednesday to learn that security forces had been ordered to enforce a quarantine–effectively barring any resident from entering or leaving the labyrinth of tin-roof homes near the Atlantic coast.
from other sources:
The family of the woman, Marthalene Williams, 19, took her by taxi to a hospital with Mr. Duncan’s help on Sept. 15 after failing to get an ambulance / Mr. Duncan, who was a family friend and also a tenant in a house owned by the Williams family, rode in the taxi in the front passenger seat while Ms. Williams, her father and her brother, Sonny Boy, shared the back seat, her parents said
the family said it took Ms. Williams back home in the evening, and that she died hours later, around 3 a.m [Mr. Duncan then helped carry Ms. Williams, who was no longer able to walk, back to the family home that evening]
Sonny Boy, 21, also started getting sick about a week ago, his family said, around the same time that Mr. Duncan first started showing symptoms.
In a sign of how furiously the disease can spread, an ambulance had come to their house on Wednesday to pick up Sonny Boy
September 15th is Monday, Wednesday was Sept 17 – Sonny Boy had died on the way to the hospital
The cordoned off area was west point.
Duncan lived at 72nd SKD Boulevard.
i put these two places into google maps, which could not find 72nd, but could find skd boulevard
they are 14 km apart.
Mr. Duncan quit abruptly on Sept. 4, giving no reason. [that he may have been planning to flee BEFORE catching anything, or making the fatal mistake of helping a patient. however, he knew that the patient died that night, and he knew sonny boy died as well]
the FAMILY MEMBERS say he didnt know
but he borded the flight on sept 20
given that he lived inthe same building, and he helped the pregnant woman get to a hospital, and she died that night… sonny boy died on the 17th… and he then borded the plane feeling sick on the 20th. its hard to believe he thought he had a cold, not ebola…
the timeline reveals that in order for him to not know, he had to ignore two deaths, wait three days, then board a plane after he was already feeling symptoms.
so logically speaking… unless you can imagine that he did not know about the woman he brought back, sonny boy as well, and ignoring he was sick, he could not have been ignorant of what was going on unless he somehow missed those other things.
‘
Ebola on the Border? Border Agents Catching Liberian Illegals Crossing from Mexico
Agents are reporting that they have caught hundreds of illegal aliens crossing our Southern border from African Ebola “hot zones” over the past several months, the majority of them from Liberia, where Dallas Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan is from.
And as a Federal GAO report told us last year, for every illegal caught at the border, an estimated 5 more slip through. So potentially thousands of West African illegals may have entered the United States illegally in just the past 6 months.
HS figures indicate that 112 individuals were caught illegally crossing into the United States from Guinea, 231 from Liberia, and another 145 from Sierra Leone, the three Ebola “hot spots”. This represents a 95% increase over 2013, before the Ebola crisis heated up.
And DHS pulled 30% of its agents off the border in August, to deal with the massive influx of illegal minors from Central America, leaving even fewer agents to defend against invasion, as the Ebola catastrophe gets worse in Africa, and people get more desperate to get to America for treatment.
Neo: He came here about 3 1/2 days after she died, and apparently never knew she died from Ebola before he came
she died the same night they returned from the hospital, and he lived in the same building renting from her family, sonny boy died before he left and he had symptoms… they were around 10 miles away from the quarantined area where they shot people to keep them in.
DNW Now, I do not know enough about the symptoms of a dire malaria attack so as to compare it to an ebola infection in its final phase, but it seems likely to me that if ebola was known to be in the area, even a modestly educated or intelligent person would be expected to have some awareness that what she was suffering from
Malaria is treatable, and so there would be no reason to send her home sick vs ebola which is not treatable.
the hospital knew by how serious her symptoms were vs time – early on they can appear the same, but ebola gets worse faster.
blert He’s (strangely) anti-White and anti-Jewish. (He’s pro-Semitic if you acknowledge his bias towards Arab Muslims.) He’s indifferent to Kurdish Muslims. He’s all crossed up over Turkish Muslims. He loves Iranian (Shi’ite) Muslims.
turks and kurds wont arrange lucre for him, or benefits, arabs and iranians are well known to reward others, and jew hatred is part of marxism – and marxism and islam will not change because to do so is to become something else – and so, as long as marxism exists, jews will be endangered, and “jew lovers”, white christians who saved them, are also targets for saving them and helping to establish them – of which they prevent marxisms goal that way
My position is that Duncan had good reason to suspect he had been exposed; which, as I understand your previous remarks, you deny.
I think that he had good reason because the article you cited states (and I have also pointed out its defects) that Williams and her family and Duncan were sent to ebola treatment clinics, and that (unless they are actual morons- literally) it should have been impossible for them not to suspect she may have had ebola, and that they – including Duncan – were exposed.
I leave it to you to explain why they were sent from the clinic to what the article describes as an ebola treatment center in the first place, if the clinicians figured she had malaria.
I have also based by skepticism of the claim that Duncan had no reason to suspect that he might have had contact with an ebola victim based on the ebola outbreak timeline from Newsweek.
Ebola had broken out in his district, the capital, 90 days before.
On July 30th schools were being shut down by the government and quarantines declared.
On August 20th, troops were firing on those trying to break the quarantine.
[Now Art reports (if true) that Sonny Boy also died before Duncan decamped, and that Duncan would have known it.]
Yet, as I understand it, it is your position is that Duncan had no reasonable basis to assume he had been exposed?
I make no assumptions concerning the professional competency of those in the social hellhole that is Liberia; and few, I hope concerning the powers of inference of the “average” – if there is such a thing – Liberian.
We know however that ebola reached Monrovia 90 days before Duncan came to our shores; that schools were closing, quarantines imposed, and quarantine breaking crowds fired upon in the months before he came here.
We also know that it is reported that the deathly ill woman Duncan was helping to transport around – and he may have been subtly coerced into doing so as her parents were his landlords – was sent by some clinic or another to what are reported to be two ebola treatment centers.
Now, are Liberian clinicians of the type who transfused the woman and saw the desperate near death situation she was in, stupid enough – assuming the news account is true – to send a convulsing yet supposed malaria victim, to an ebola treatment center for further care?
What sense does any of that make?
When you are confronted with confusing double talk about an issue having moral implications, it’s often not because the situation is so naturally and impenetrably foggy, as it is that the fog is being deliberately generated.
Thank goodness we have modus ponens and tollens to apply at least to the “accounts” if not to the “facts”.
DNW:
Of course he had reason to suspect he’d been exposed. I’ve never denied that, and I don’t know why you would think that’s what I’m saying.
But how serious would any such suspicion have been, under the circumstances? Not very; he had much more reason to suspect she’d had malaria or died from her pregnancy. And that’s what he had been told, as well (and by some medical authorities.) Did he believe he’d been exposed? Not likely; almost no one else who was part of the same drama thought they’d been exposed either, and acted accordingly. Did he know he’d been exposed? Very very very unlikely.
The question to a Liberian isn’t: “is there any chance whatsoever that you might have been exposed?” because the answer would always have been yes. It is “have you been exposed?” His truthful answer—as far as he knew—almost certainly would have been no. If he’d been of a very analytical mind, and had been thinking very clearly, and had some small suspicion he’d been exposed (we don’t know whether he did or didn’t), he could have said “I think there’s a small chance.” That would have been a better response. But not saying it is no indication whatsoever that he was lying.
Artfldgr:
Your timeline is incorrect.
Sonny Boy did not die that early:
Also, Duncan had already bought his airplane ticket when he quit his job. He had applied for the visa months before. The trip had been planned for many months. Perhaps even before ebola came to Liberia, or perhaps in the earlier stages of the epidemic. I have little doubt that he—or anyone with sense—might have wanted to leave Liberia when the epidemic got going. But he had plenty of other reasons to leave—and plenty of family here (including a son, and the mother of the child, with whom he’d reconciled).
I’m in a hurry now and don’t have time to find the links, but I’ve provided some of them in this post and other comments and posts.
I stand corrected on the Sharpton vs. Jackson issue. But the Christian Science Monitor yesterday said the family of Duncan is asking for a “probe” into why he died while the American cases (so far) lived.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/world/africa/ebola-victim-texas-thomas-eric-duncan.html
“He was holding her by the legs, the pa was holding her arms and Sonny Boy was holding her back,” said Arren Seyou, 31, who witnessed the scene and occupies the room next to Mr. Duncan’s.
Sonny Boy, 21, also started getting sick about a week ago, his family said, around the same time that Mr. Duncan first started showing symptoms.
In a sign of how furiously the disease can spread, an ambulance had come to their house on Wednesday to pick up Sonny Boy. Another ambulance picked up a woman and her daughter from the same area, and a team of body collectors came to retrieve the body of yet another woman – all four appeared to have been infected in a chain reaction started by Marthalene Williams.
A few minutes after the ambulance left, the parents got a call telling them that Sonny Boy had died on the way to the hospital
Because you say that he was being vilified; and I take it for not being truthful, when the truth as you see it supported the proposition that he had no idea he might have been exposed to ebola.
I take it that your argument is that:
A. Neither Duncan nor the Williams family could have reasonably surmised that Ms Williams was dying or had died of ebola; even though the news reports to which you referred made reference to her dire condition and to the clinic where she was transfused, sending her off to an” ebola treatment unit”
1. You dispute that we can conclude she actually was directed to an ebola treatment unit
2. You dispute that the neighbors could have reason to suggest that the Williams family more or less knew prior to or shortly after Williams’ death.
B. You also seem to now believe that there is no significance to the fact that Duncan lied in writing in response to the form question ” Have you taken part in a burial or funeral rites, or touched the body of someone who died in an area where there is ebola” http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/10/03/1412293140277_wps_1_This_Oct_2_2014_photo_sho.jpg
But please note what it is the question actually asks: not, if he touched someone known to have ebola, but if he touched the body someone who died in an area where there is ebola.
Now I suppose one could argue about the grammar of the question, and whether it refers only to actual corpses; and then go on claim that Duncan had not touched her for several house before she actually expired … But certainly the phrasing of the question must have gotten his attention and required a certain amount of deviously self-serving parsing if he were to mentally respond, ” I never touched an ebola corpse” before checking off “No”.
Since of course he was in an area with ebola, and he had just recently handled the body of someone who had shortly thereafter died in an area with ebola. That being an area infested with ebola, one can conclude from the Liberian government’s own pronouncements quarantines, and acts, for – oh – about three months prior.
Now, if you are asking me what it is I think you are actually arguing, I, after having copied all of your comments and articles on the subject of Duncan, would have to say I am not sure. You views seem to have shifted over time.
However my view is quite plain. It is that Duncan is not being unjustly vilified. This, on the basis that in my view he could not possibly have been unaware that he was in an area with ebola; an area in which it was epidemic; a situation close to catastrophic; and that he had handled a woman who had just recently died in a area with ebola.
As far as assessing Duncan’s behavior according to what a rational or morally scrupulous actor would have done in his place had he concers for others of the kind you imagine, and then imputing those motives and assumptions to Duncan, with the aim of exculpating him on that basis; I think I’ll take a pass on that.
DNW…
That form (the penmanship) sure makes it look like T.E.D. was used to filling out forms, and was quite literate.
It gives the general impression that he spent a fair amount of time in the office.
(I’ve seen countless shipping documents — and the typical driver has lousy handwriting — even check marks jump around the page.)
That’d be entirely consistent with his position handling international and domestic freight.
So I must now dismiss the ‘stupidity angle’ — unless someone else filled out his document. ( It happens. )
DNW:
I feel as though I’m stating the same things over and over, and you’re not understanding. Not sure why.
I’m not going to keep going on and on with this, but I’ll make one more effort. And I’ll add a few details, as well.
He is being accused of lying. Lying presupposes you know something. I don’t think he knew Williams had died of ebola, nor do I think he was lying about anything in the questionnaire.
Am I certain? Of course not. So there’s a chance (I place it at perhaps 10% or less that he knew, and was lying).
There’s a huge difference between having some sort of reason to suspect, very slightly suspecting, actually suspecting, and actually knowing.
So, I’ve never denied he might (accept on the “might”) have reason to suspect—especially if he had better-than-average knowledge and awareness, as well as certain information that I don’t know whether he had but that I don’t think he had. But even with some of that knowledge and a mild suspicion that she had ebola, he could easily have rejected that suspicion and decided she didn’t have it, and that she had died of either malaria or a complication of pregnancy (such as eclampsia, for example). In particular, she apparently had received a diagnosis of malaria from a clinic staff member on the night she died, so he would have every reason to think she had had malaria, and if he’d had any small suspicion of ebola he would have been likely to have discarded it at that point.
So, in regard to the question of whether he is being wrongly vilified for lying, the most important thing to know is his state of mind when he was asked the question. The relevant question is: did he know, at the time he answered the question, that she had died of ebola? The answer can be “no,” even if at some earlier moment he might have had some suspicion that she had, a suspicion he had later discarded.
In Liberia, people die at a rate much higher than here. The rate of death from other things (such as malaria) is much higher than from ebola, actually (at least, as far as I can tell from the statistics I looked up). He was told she had malaria. I’ve already dealt with a lot of the other questions (such as their going to an ebola clinic in addition to hospitals in general, and what that may have meant, and what Duncan may have known about it) here, so there’s no reason to go into that all over again.
The unjust vilification in this case does not consist of people saying he might have lied. Of course he might have lied. It consists of people saying “he lied, of course he knew, he came here knowingly and selfishly and didn’t care who he infected,” and people saying “he got his ticket knowing he’d been exposed to ebola, in order to get treatment here, and he lied in order to get here.”
About the query on the questionnaire: “Have you taken part in a burial or funeral rites, or touched the body of someone who died in an area where there is ebola?” No one has alleged that he took part in her funeral. No one said he touched her body after she died. Why would he answer “yes” if those things are not true?
In a sense, all of Liberia is “an area where there is ebola.” The question makes no sense if everyone in Liberia who’s been to a funeral in the last half year must answer “yes” to it. At any rate, however, as I said, there’s not been a single allegation that Duncan went to her funeral or touched her corpse.
What’s more, it’s not at all clear how a person is supposed to interpret “area”—and that’s not nitpicking, that’s actually a very real and important question. Duncan lived in Paynesville, a Monrovia suburb—and in his neighborhood, Marthalene Williams (the pregnant woman he had helped carry) turns out to have been Duncan’s neighborhood’s very first case of ebola:
How was Duncan supposed to know that Williams had ebola if she was the first case in the area? Do you still think Duncan lied when he failed to check that box? He did not live in an “area” with Ebola, unless you consider all of Monrovia and Liberia to be such an area, and he had not been near her corpse, as far as we know.
Hindsight—yours—is 20/20. But Duncan did not have the benefit of that.
Hope that clears things up for you. I don’t know how to be any more clear than that. Unless new facts are uncovered that change any of this, I remain more convinced than ever that Duncan didn’t lie.
blert:
Note my comment above—
The woman Duncan carried and who later died was apparently his neighborhood’s first ebola case.
That makes it even less likely that Duncan knew she had ebola. And less likely that anyone in the neighborhood knew it, until more people who’d been around her had died from it.
neo…
You’ve already persuaded me.
I don’t think the case is there to prove him malign… or too dumb to know what’s up.
Even though ebola was epidemic… Liberia has so MANY other diseases that her symptoms were lost in the noise until the last.
I can’t believe that her relatives would’ve conducted routine burial rites if they’d thought she had ebola.
The word was out already that such attempts were lethally dangerous.
The best explanation for the family’s behavior is that — even at the end — they STILL didn’t recognize ebola.
This is also proving to be a major problem for our professionals. Unlike the Black Death, ebola in its earliest manifestations is obviously being taken for everything BUT ebola.
This latter trait should have everyone’s hair on fire. We can’t spot ebola until it’s had plenty of time to spread to other candidates.
The authorities — everywhere — have to insist on a new protocol: face masks for anyone falling ill –and for those attending.
Further, such persons are highly discouraged to soldier on — going to work, school, etc.
The authorities need to have test methods and specialist responders so that ebola candidates are flagged as early as possible.
Because ebola is vulnerable outside the body, amazing results may be had by simply going anal retentive and cleaning every surface in sight — and the ventilation system.
We have to stop the impulse to head to the ER. They can’t help you. It IS a crackerjack way of spreading ebola far and wide, though.
Field response ought to be by EMTs — equipped with protection AND field test kits.
Since the latter don’t exist, there is work to be done.
{ DNA replicators used for forensics should be modified and mass produced so that EMTs can pull in the genetic signal — long before the candidate is fulsomely contagious. }
We need early detection protocols — yesterday.
&&&
We have to STOP permitting returnees from floating off into the general population. They need to spend time getting cleared by the above methods.
Obviously, this must mean that commercial flights have to stop — yesterday.
If we can confine ebola to Africa, at least someone will be alive to tackle the disease. If ebola cuts loose in Europe or America — all research figures to collapse.
At such a time, total panic will prevail, just like in Africa.
If you haven’t figured it out: the economies of west Africa have ALREADY come to a complete halt. No-one wants to shake hands anywhere.
Barry Soetoro’s ‘take’ on the situation — as always — is totally wrong.
Afflicting the First World with ebola will cause all attempts at a cure to crash. I give you the history of the Spanish flu and the Black Death.
All research into the Spanish flu was entirely abandoned. No laboratory would touch it. All eyes turned towards how to conduct quarantines. The infected were given strictly palliative care.
Barry actually thinks that he’s speeding up a cure.
Now that’s REALLY scary!
Malaria was never cured by bringing it to Washington DC. Get a clue.
I agree we are talking in circles here. I already alluded to the parsing issue, and the lack of a past perfect tense on the relevant question, and lack of the use of the term “corpse” as opposed to body. What do you touch when you touch the flesh of another living but ill person, but their body?
Was she recently deceased? Yes.
In addition the copula used is a disjunction “or”; not a conjunction “and”. However quasi-literate one might be they will usually understand the difference between the questions:
“Did you go to the park or out for ice cream” and “Did you go to the park and have ice cream?”
He therefore touched the body of a deathly ill woman in an “area”. i.e., Monrovia and environs, with ebola, just before she died.
News reports to which you referred us, also say that while doing so, he and his helpers were directed to ebola treatment units.
Your response to that point I take it, is that that particular point is an unsettled matter as to fact. Why it should be less settled or more suspect than any of the rest of the so-called facts reported, is unclear to me. If X is taken at face value in source Y, then what is the basis for discounting Z? Lack of specificity?
Whether he actually handled a corpse, and whether his “neighborhood”, whatever that means, is what is meant by an “area” is another matter.
There is no objective information on the first, and apparently you understand “area” to mean “neighborhood”, and “neighborhood”, to imply some particular cluster of dwellings, or a number of what we would normally call city blocks.
You will however I suppose, finally concede that the particular question does not stipulate only the handling of the “corpse” of someone who had died of ebola, but is more generally framed; and not just: “Have you handled the corpse of someone who has recently died of ebola?”
My personal opinion is that he had determined to get his ass out of Dodge earlier as the plague developed, and figured that he had recently been dragooned by his landlord into a seriously iffy situation; hoping of course that he had not.
We may find out more, one way or another, yet; if the reportage is not all put out by those who have a vested interest in the unstated political or moral implications readers will take away.
OK, this just gets worse and worse.
I’ve done some basic reading directed at ascertaining whether Duncan could have had a reasonable assumption relating to whether he been exposed to ebola.
But first, did he know he was or had been in an “area” which had active ebola?
Well, he was working in Monrovia proper, which is apparently about 5 square miles in extent.
Furthermore, and more precisely, he worked at Safeway Cargo on broad street; which appears to be about 600 yards, (less than half a mile, the length of my vacation farm field) from the West Point slum which the Government of Liberia had quarantined and where rioting had broken out on August 22.
Half a mile? I can see deer across the property for a good 3/4s of that half mile length.
“Mr. Brunson [of the company] said that Mr. Duncan quit abruptly on Sept. 4, giving no reason. ” NYT
So there is no doubt that Duncan knew he was living in the cockpit of the infection. And little doubt to my mind that soon after the quarantine riots took place half a mile from his place of employment, he was making serious plans to decamp.
Now the question remaining of course is whether Duncan could have had reason to suspect that he had himself been directly exposed to the disease.
And I think that not only the Los Angeles Times article, but the early October New York Times reports indicate that he had to have known if he placed any credence in medical directives whatsoever. This, since, unlike the unnamed “ebola treatment units” which various sources have reported Duncan and the Williamses were directed to, the NYT has rather more specific information.
At first we get the usual vagaries, which seem almost intentionally deflective.
But lower in the article comes this passage, naming names and locales:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/world/africa/ebola-victim-texas-thomas-eric-duncan.html
So now there is a cite to the “ebola treatment unit” which Duncan had been directed.
He was employed by a facility half a mile from where the quarantine riots were taking place. He had been handling and transporting a woman around who they were trying to get admitted into the JFK Hospital ebola unit.
They could not get her in there, and possibly failed in getting her into another. So they took her back a few miles along Tubman Boulevard to SKD Boulevard, which is apparently a local connector or loop road between Taubman Boulevard and Somalia Drive. And there she died some hours later.
He had to have known he had been in such an “area” and that he was now likely exposed to someone who had died after he and her parents had tried and failed to get her admitted to the JFK Hospital ebola treatment unit.
What’s left to wonder about concerning his state of mind or motivations?
DNW:
I’ll be relatively brief, because I’m not going to reiterate a lengthy argument, most of which I’ve said before.
What you know about ebola, what you think you would have known about ebola under the same circumstances (which is not necessarily what you actually would have known, because hindsight is 20/20), what you think he knew (or should have known, or would have known) about ebola, what he in fact suspected about Williams, what he should have (or what you think he should have) suspected about Williams, what he at one point suspected but rejected about Williams, and what he in fact knew about Williams or ebola when he filled out the questionnaire, how you would have interpreted the questionnaire, how authorities meant it to be interpreted, how Duncan interpreted it, and how a reasonable person would have interpreted it, could all be different things—and most of them probably are different things.
The question on the questionnaire very obviously refers to a dead body and not a living one. According to all the information we have, he did not touch a dead body.
When he touched the living body of Marthalene Williams, who was ill with what was considered malaria or pregnancy complications, he was not in an ebola area. He was in his neighborhood, which had not seen any ebola yet.
I’ve already dealt, quite exhaustively, with the matter of the ebola clinic, and given you the link. I’m not going to repeat it here. I will just reiterate the following point: do you know that he knew the medical scope of each medical facility (and there were many such facilities) to which they were taking her each time the cab drove somewhere during a long, hectic, frantic night, with an ill woman, where the cab driver was driving and the relatives of the woman were in charge, and Duncan was basically a helpful porter? I guess you know that he knew the medical definition of every single place they went.
Having read tons of articles on the subject, it appears clear to me that they were taking her everywhere they could, trying to get help, rather than starting with a diagnosis (ebola) which they clearly did not have, and taking her to specialized places that dealt with it. They went from place to place to place to deal with what they saw as a crisis, and in a situation where the only medical opinion they’d gotten is “malaria.” One of the facilities turned out to have been an ebola clinic. Who directed them there, and why? A cab driver? We don’t know. But it tells us nothing about their state of mind and knowledge of what she had (nor is it alleged that at any time that evening, any medical person told them “ebola” was her diagnosis). In fact, all their actions that evening and subsequently indicate they did not know she had ebola, not then, and not till a bunch of them had come down with it, over a week later. Including Duncan, who by that time had been in Dallas for quite a while.
There’s much more, but as I said, I believe I’ve engaged you enough on this. We’re obviously in disagreement.