Ebola and the great forgetting: the best of times, the worst of times
WHO director Margaret Chan said yesterday that the current ebola epidemic is “the most severe, acute health emergency seen in modern times.”
On the one hand, I’m happy that WHO is taking the outbreak very seriously. On the other hand, the statement puzzles me. It either indicates a problem that’s merely semantic and involves a disagreement over the definition of a historical term, “modern times,” or it could mean that Chan is ignorant of the history of one of the greatest pandemics the world has ever known, the 1918-1919 influenza strain.
If the problem is just a disagreement between Chan and me on what the term “modern times” means, than no harm, no foul, no problem. But if Chan actually considers “modern times” to include the WWI era, and is ignorant of the scope and course of the great flu pandemic towards the end of that war, it would be exceptionally troubling, since she is speaking in her role as director of one of the most influential worldwide institutions tasked with dealing with epidemics.
An early post I wrote on this blog was called “The tsunami and the forgetting.” It pointed out the tendency of humans to forget and ignore—or to only vaguely learn about—extremely cataclysmic events. The event I described the world as having “forgotten” was that 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, and I quoted the transcript of an NPR show that dealt with the forgetting and how it worked for that event. Whatever is the case with Dr. Chan, it makes sense right now to take another look, in light of ebola and what we fear it might do:
William Sardo: People didn’t want to believe that they could be healthy in the morning and dead by nightfall, they didn’t want to believe that.
Narrator: It was the worst epidemic this country has ever known. It killed more Americans than all the wars this century ”” combined.
Lee Reay: It was a phantom. We didn’t know where it was.
William Maxwell: In a gradual remorseless way, it kept moving closer and closer.
Daniel Tonkel: You never knew from day to day who was going to be next on the death list.
Dr. Shirley Fannin, Epidemiologist: There were so many people dying that you ran out of things that you’d never considered running out of before ”” caskets.
Narrator: Before it was over, it almost broke America apart….
Read the whole thing. I’m not recommending it because I think ebola is exactly like that or will be quite like that, either in its mechanism of spread or its ultimate death toll (although, worst case scenario, by the time ebola is through it could conceivably rival it or even surpass it). I’m recommending it because 1918-1919 is by almost any historical definition “modern times,” and because the pandemic represented an overwhelmingly “severe, acute health emergency”—more so than ebola, at least so far.
On the forgetting:
Dr. Alfred Crosby, author, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The first reaction of the authorities was, for many of the most important ones was just flat-out denial. They didn’t know what was happening, they didn’t know what to do and, therefore, they did the human thing which is to say it’s not happening.
Narrator: With the war escalating, federal officials continued to put Americans at risk. One September day, they called 13 million young men to register for the draft. The men jammed together in school houses, city halls, post offices.
Dr. Alfred Crosby, author, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: There were two enormously important things going on at once and they were at right angles to each other. One, of course, was the influenza epidemic, which dictated that you should sort of shut everything down and the war which demanded that everything should speed up, that certainly the factories should continue operating, you should continue to have bond drives, soldiers should be put on boats and sent off to France. It’s as if we could, as a society, only contain one big idea at a time and the big idea was the war…
The epidemic was now a national crisis: something had to be done. In many places, officials rushed through laws requiring people to wear masks in public. All of America, it seemed, put on masks. At last, many thought, they were safe. But masks didn’t help. They were thin and porous ”” no serious restraint to tiny microbes. It was like trying to keep out dust with chicken wire.
In Washington, D.C., Commissioner Louis Brownlow banned all public gatherings. He closed the city’s schools, theaters and bars. He quarantined the sick. He did everything he had the power to do. But the death rate in Washington kept rising…
Dr. Alfred Crosby, author, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: Science knew next to nothing about viruses at this time. The optical microscopes they had couldn’t show you a virus, virus is much too small for them. Nobody would ever see virus until the electron microscope came along and that was decades after that. These poor scientists were looking for a needle in a haystack, when they didn’t know it was a needle they were looking for and the needle was too small for them to see. No wonder they didn’t find it…
Narrator: In 31 shocking days, the flu would kill over 195,000 Americans. It was the deadliest month in this nation’s history. Coffins were in such demand that they were often stolen. Undertakers had to place armed guards around their prized boxes. The orderly life of America began to break down. All over the country, farms and factories shut down ”” schools and churches closed. Homeless children wandered the streets, their parents vanished…
Dr. Alfred Crosby, author, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The epidemic killed, at a very, very conservative estimate, 550,000 Americans in 10 months, that’s more Americans than died in combat in all the wars of this century, and the epidemic killed at least 30 million in the world and infected the majority of the human species.
Narrator: As soon as the dying stopped, the forgetting began.
Dr. Alfred Crosby, author, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: It is in the individual memory of a great many of us, but it’s not in our collective memory. That for me is the greatest mystery: how we could have forgotten anything so horrendous, so massively horrendous, as this, this epidemic which killed so many of us, killed us so fast and our reaction was to forget it.
Dr. Shirley Fannin, Epidemiologist: Why? Why wasn’t that part of our memory? Or of our history? I think it’s probably because it was so awful while it was happening, so frightening, that people just got rid of the memory. But it always lingers there. As a kind of an uneasiness. If it happened once before, what’s to say it’s not going to happen again. The more we find out about influenza virus, the more real that fear becomes.
The NPR show’s description of the horror wreaked by the flu was mostly limited to its effects in this country. But in many other areas it was even worse. To get an idea of the scope of the 1918-1919 pandemic’s global “severity” and “acuteness,” here are some figures:
Influenza may have killed as many as 25 million people in its first 25 weeks. Older estimates say it killed 40”“50 million people, while current estimates say 50”“100 million people worldwide were killed.
This pandemic has been described as “the greatest medical holocaust in history” and may have killed more people than the Black Death. It is said that this flu killed more people in 24 weeks than AIDS has killed in 24 years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century.
The disease killed in every corner of the globe. As many as 17 million died in India, about 5% of the population. The death toll in India’s British-ruled districts alone was 13.88 million. In Japan, 23 million people were affected, and 390,000 died. In the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), 1.5 million were assumed to have died from 30 million inhabitants. In Tahiti, 14% of the population died during only two months. Similarly, in Samoa in November 1918, 20% of the population of 38,000 died within two months. In the U.S., about 28% of the population suffered, and 500,000 to 675,000 died. Native American tribes were particularly hard hit. In the Four Corners area alone, 3,293 deaths were registered among Native Americans. Entire villages perished in Alaska. In Canada 50,000 died. In Brazil 300,000 died, including president Rodrigues Alves. In Britain, as many as 250,000 died; in France, more than 400,000. In West Africa, an influenza epidemic killed at least 100,000 people in Ghana. Tafari Makonnen (the future Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia) was one of the first Ethiopians who contracted influenza but survived, although many of his subjects did not; estimates for the fatalities in the capital city, Addis Ababa, range from 5,000 to 10,000, or higher. In British Somaliland one official estimated that 7% of the native population died.
Severe and acute, indeed.
And what of quarantines? Even then, it was hard to make them effective, because the world was “modern” enough that travel was common, especially with the war. But:
…in Japan, 257,363 deaths were attributed to influenza by July 1919, giving an estimated 0.425% mortality rate, much lower than nearly all other Asian countries for which data are available. The Japanese government severely restricted maritime travel to and from the home islands when the pandemic struck.
In the Pacific, American Samoa and the French colony of New Caledonia also succeeded in preventing even a single death from influenza through effective quarantines.
No man may be an island—but some countries are, and it can help.
[ADDENDUM: I’ve long heard that historians consider WWI the beginning of modern times (see this), but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there’s disagreement on that. Wiki seems to agree, however:
Our most recent era””Modern Times””begins with the end of these revolutions in the 19th century, and includes the World Wars era (encompassing World War I and World War II) and the emergence of socialist countries that led to the Cold War.
More recent events seem to be considered the contemporary era.]
It’s always about rousing the rabble to carry firebrands and pitchforks and unknowingly promulgate the Gramscian march.
Pick a crisis — any crisis in the past thirty years! Global warming, global cooling, peak oil,* population growth — the one thing they all have in common is the demand for immediate government action based on incomplete and inconsequential information.
” . . . one of the greatest pandemics the world has ever known, the 1918-1919 influenza strain.” To paraphrase the immortal words of Tommy Vietor: Dude, that was a hundred years ago!
I don’t think Obama studied the flu at Columbia. I don’t think he studied a thing but Marxism and Cloward-Piven.
With the Left, everything is politics. And not enacting a quarantine for travelers from West Africa due to racial politics is the absolute low for the medical profession.
And check out temporary Omaha resident Asoka Mukpo’s Twitter feed. Dedicated Leftist. Thinks we “stole” oil from Africa.
“Was Ebola Behind the Black Death?”
“Controversial new research suggests that contrary to the history books, the “Black Death” that devastated medieval Europe was not the bubonic plague, but rather an Ebola-like virus.”
“Ebola patient cared for by 70 hospital staffers”
” DALLAS (AP) — They drew his blood, put tubes down his throat and wiped up his diarrhea. They analyzed his urine and wiped saliva from his lips, even after he had lost consciousness.
About 70 staff members at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital were involved in the care of Thomas Eric Duncan after he was hospitalized, including a nurse now being treated for the same Ebola virus that killed the Liberian man who was visiting Dallas, according to medical records his family provided to The Associated Press.
On the day before Duncan died, records indicate that at least nine caregivers entered and exited the room.”
I tend to set my marker for ‘modern terms’ at WW2.
*
termstimes, of course.Webster’s first meaning for “modern” is “of or relating to the present time or the recent past : happening, existing, or developing at a time near the present time.” I think that’s the way most folks use it these days.
I meant to add that the sense of “near the present time” these days seems to be about 20 years ago.
I was born in 1955 and the farmer next door was a WWI veteran. Sure he was old but worked his ass off. Worked much harder and was more vital than most 40 years olds today. WWI is in the Modern era, for sure.
Regarding quarantines and ebola: in my opinion the CDC and politicians (especially Obama) care more about being PC than protecting our lives. I cannot express my loathing for all them right now. I do not have the words that many of you and Neo have in abundance.
“I tend to set my marker for ‘modern terms’ at WW2.”
Of course we, each, have our own definition. I tend to see “modern times” as the industrialized West v the former agricultural West. The founding fathers have a lifestyle more in common with their 14th century ancestors than they do with 1850. Likewise, WW I was the first industrialized war and has more in common with WW II, Korea and even the Gulf Wars than it does with the Revolution of 1776.
I’m recommending it because 1918-1919 is by almost any historical definition “modern times,” and because the pandemic represented an overwhelmingly “severe, acute health emergency”–more so than ebola, at least so far.
I don’t think the Roaring Twenties came to an end coincidentally. That much death and economic destruction due to contraction and government interference, inevitably would lead to FDR type solutions.
People will cry out for the Omnipotent GOv to “do something” about it, if only to prevent future occurrences. It offers a chance for organizations that want to push an agenda.
…in Japan, 257,363 deaths were attributed to influenza by July 1919, giving an estimated 0.425% mortality rate, much lower than nearly all other Asian countries for which data are available. The Japanese government severely restricted maritime travel to and from the home islands when the pandemic struck.
Tea drinking might have had something to do with that too.
Any situation where a population loses a large portion of its people, including WWI, creates gaps in the social harmony.
This is a human thing: history begins the day one is born.
Thus why every generation believes that they are the first to have sex for fun, and that their parents only had sex to make babies.
I’m sure she’s just talking about more recent days, although even so she’s leaving out HIV.
Still, if you are interested in the 1918 flu, you should read ‘The Great Influenza’. Fantastic book, which spends the first 100 or so pages on the history of modern medicine and devotes a great deal of time to the people working furiously to create vaccine.
On quarantines, one of the stories from the 1918 flu was a small town who basically shut its doors to everyone who wasn’t there already. No one in that town got the flu, no one died.
Modern medicine though is amazingly recent. We are miles ahead of where we were 100 years ago, and 200+ years ago were basically still the dark ages. And yet, we’ve apparently completely forgotten the lessons we learned about quarantine and preventing the spread of infectious diseases.
This all very interesting but everyone knows history began on Aug 4, 1961.
Speaking of great forgettings, does anyone else note annually the coordinated suppression of those horrifying but iconic photos and video from 9/11? “They” stopped showing these images within a few weeks of the event, lest the hoi polloi become upset or (as is much more likely) inflamed.
We’re already forgetting the outrage that was 9/11.
T Says:
October 14th, 2014 at 1:24 pm
ALL of the popular statistics that are kicked around about crude oil are totally off base.
1) All of the Communist powers and most of the despots have ALWAYS kept their national statistics back as state secrets. Even today the numbers from Russia, China and KSA are total lies.
2) The tabulators have ALWAYS used net, net, net, figures. So if a major field appears to be uneconomic to extract — its rating falls to zero — AND it is made to disappear, entirely, from the listings. It becomes a “non-field.”
One example out of many: Russia — pretty much from the Urals to its western border — sits on top of a thin super-deposit far, far, far, larger than the Bakken. (North Dakota) Should fracking and horizontal drilling be employed, this horizon would produce ten to 100 times as much oil as current Saudi Arabian reserves. (!!!)
In fact, 97% of all crude oil lies in thin, tight, rock formations. With rare exception, all of the crude oil reserves you’ve ever read about come from the 3%. Until modern, smart whip-stocking/ horizontal drilling, no-one ever imagined that these thin deposits would ever be economic.
The current oil price dip is being engineered by KSA to drive America’s frackers out of business. A collateral swipe at Putin is also underway. But, the PRIMARY enemy of KSA remains the fracking community.
Putin’s antics have caused Britain and France to open up their strata to horizontal drilling and fracking. This is a recent political shift — and totally against the push by Putin/ the SVR to restrict such activities.
I don’t think KSA can push oil down far or for long: its domestic budget requires export pricing at $90/ bbl. That’s what an exponential population boom forces.
neo…
Your stats — the national averages — hide the brutal reality: Spanish flu struck in ‘hot spots.’
While passing over many communities, others were pounded.
Worse: the Spanish flu struck down hale and hearty young adults. That’s atypical. Disease usually pounds on the old and the very young.
The cultural impact of such loses is extreme.
HIV also has that character.
When various religions said that the End was nigh for corrupt and evil towns, they weren’t kidding.
Half the purpose of the ancient monotheistic practices was to control human guilt for positive purposes. The other purpose might have been to prepare for the Fall, the Collapse, or what the moderns call the Zombie Apocalypse.
My grandfather, Steve Emery, was a US Army officer stationed at Camp Grant, Illinois, from September 1918 through January 1919 – the height of the Spanish Flu Epidemic. He commanded the unit responsible for notifying relatives, managing personal effects, and handling remains. At the peak of the epidemic his unit was burying 15 soldiers per hour, 168 on one particular day.
carl in atlanta,
How right you are. The images of 9/11/01 should be broadcasted on the 11th day of every month. The very idea that we do not so shows the depravity of our ruling class. It is a war between islam and western civilization, but we refuse to recognize the depths of their viscousness, their true intentions, and the weaknesses of western civilization. PC will be our demise.
An interesting article that discusses how Woodrow Wilson enabled the Spanish flu epidemic.
KLSMith: “This all very interesting but everyone knows history began on Aug 4, 1961.”
Was that Hawaiian time?
I don’t think it’s too far off the mark to consider WWI the beginning of the “modern era”.
It represented quite a break with what had gone before, technologically, intellectually, and spiritually.
More than anything, it shattered the self-confidence of Western civilization, and we are still paying the price for that today, as we sit paralyzed by guilt, watching the barbarian hordes infiltrate and take power.
Neo: did you see Dr Frieden on Megyn Kelly’s show tonight? He said that protocol is ONE pair of gloves. I thought it was understood that three pairs are needed. If there wasn’t cause for worry before, I think we can start now. God help and protect our medical personnel while these clowns are in charge.
Charles: exactly.
I was born in 1970, but I would definitely consider WW1 to be the modern Era. You had by then the early versions of many things we have in the present- Automobiles , airplanes, early electric grids in limited locales, radio, moving pictures , etc. I would consider the late 1800s to be almost modern.
It does appear that radio didn’t really take off well until after WW1, but the technology was there by the time the US got involved in WWI . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_electric_power_transmission
If you lived in an area that didn’t get hit hard, you were a lot more likely to survive to remember the epidemic.
Dorothy L. Sayers talks a fair amount about the effects of the epidemic in The Nine Tailors, a mystery novel partially set in that period.
For more on the definition of “modern times,” plus see the addendum at the end of the post.
Surburbanbanshee:
The greatest work of art inspired by the 1918-1919 flu was, IMHO, the novella “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” by Katherine Anne Porter.
Taylor’s Time and Motion ethos defines the Modern Era.
It has affected ALL that has followed:
Politics
Government (structure and ethos)
Manufacturing (mass)
Mining
Farming
Shipping
The most influential political figures — in the larger scheme of things:
Teddy Roosevelt (launched government over business which devolved into corporatism)
Herbert Hoover (the only three-term president — as he de facto took over Harding’s and Coolidge’s administrations from the Commerce department; then he ran for office in his own right)
Practically EVERYTHING we associate with big government tying up with big business was launched by Hoover while at the Commerce department. (1921-28) You have a hard time pointing to anything modern that is not regulated by a Hoover’d institution — or a clone of his earlier creations.
Federal Radio Commission ==> became FCC
Aeronautics Branch (Commerce) ==> CAB
FDR re-named every Hoover created entity in sight — hence “Boulder dam.”
The Roosevelt administration was a knock-off of Hoover’s, the very thing FDR ran AGAINST.
Now THERE’S another piece of forgotten history!
explosion
goo
amphibians
dinosaurs
africa
ancient
medieval
modern
postmodern
CERN/AI
star trek
(you imbecile, you left out s;lkjw=09 gd ssl alpha century)
If 1918-1919 was before “modern times,” was it part of the medieval times? Come on. Early modernity is considered by historians to have arisen in the late16th/early 17th century, and modernity proper to have arisen in the era of the American and French revolutions.
Of course, some people use “modern” to mean “contemporary.” That meaning seems to be used mostly to describe technology, as one would not describe the computer technology of the 1990s or the military equipment used to fight the Vietnam War as “modern.”
Carl–
Yes.
In literary circles, the “modern” era began with the death of Queen Victoria in 1901.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html
Now that it suits the Democrat narrative, suddenly the NY Times ‘discovers’ the chemical munitions that the US Army had been uncovering all along.
I’ve lost track of how many times I posted of such a reality: that discovered chemical ordnance was being held back as a highly classified matter.
NO WAY did the US Army want the opfor to know that they — with effort — could find serious quantities of lethal chemical warheads out in the al Anbar desert.
[ The Times omits it, but ALL of these nasties were discovered in al Anbar. Most were in the immense ammo depots of H2 and H3. These were ten miles on a side! That’s 200 square miles of stashed munitions.]
Each super stash should’ve had two combat brigades stationed around it. For a time (2003) these depots were guarded by a lone Iraqi with a rusty rifle and sandals. It made CNN. The censors cut the expose short. It was never rotated into the news cycle.
Now, with the worst of the worst roaming al Anbar, the NY Times just HAS TO GO PUBLIC.
Their news release is a direct threat to national security.
The author’s ‘logic’ is priceless.
After declaiming the abundance of chemical ordnance, he reasons that Saddam was no longer interested in chemical weapons.
Yet other detailed reports, heavily sourced, with interviews galore, establish that Saddam wanted to spool his chemical weapons production right back up the very second the UN would get off his back. All of the critical blueprints had been safely stashed away.
BTW, the author appears to not recognize the significance of 152mm binary nerve agent rounds. He can’t even correctly describe them. He terms them (the two chemicals) as merely ‘percursors.’
Well, DUH! That’s intrinsic to the weapon’s design. That’s why it’s termed a ‘binary’ round.
Reading the New York Times will make you dumber and more easily indoctrinated.
IF you try to quarantine the sick from entering the US, its racist and will make things worse, says the DEMS
if you quarantine guns from the public, its not racist and will protect everyone, says the DEMS.
A man transported from 1750 AD to 0 AD, or vice versa, would have little difficulty managing existence. Most everything in use in society would be familiar; pottery making, weaving, iron smithing, carpentry, farming, construction…
Watt’s steam engine and experimentation with electricity were the technological innovations that launched the modern era. Everything we think of as modern stems from those two paradigm shifting concepts; harnessing machines to transport people and goods and harnessing electrons to transport information and energy.
EBOLA STRIKES SECOND DALLAS HOSPITAL WORKER
http://www.breitbart.com/system/wire/ap_ab3cd5a9b32c450aa5a13e1a4a14c60e
guven that quarantine is so racist, and wont work, i am glad to hear that Obama will not quarantine himself and will go visit the patients in their hospital rooms…
I personally think the single most significant invention in human history was Guttenberg’s printing press and movable type (and, yes, I know the Chinese did something similar long before, but they did not exploit it for its true worth). That started the information revolution that ultimately led to the exponential explosion in the dissemination of technological advancements and wide sharing of knowledge and discovery.
But that’s not the question; the question is the beginning of modernity. As I wrote above; the steam engine and harnessing of electricity were the game changers there.
Oh, yeah! We’re in the best of hands.
Seeing how doctors are portrayed as dealing with very lethal and contagious diseases on TV, I had just expected that the Dallas hospital–supposedly the beneficiary of CDCs preparatory briefings and its wisdom–had probably set up some sort of sealed, high-tech, positive pressure containment unit for patient zero, with his care givers suited up in the latest in tough, multiple layered protective garments, looking like spacemen, with all medical waste very carefully and quickly disposed of, taking all precautions.
Now comes an article (see http://nypost.com/2014/10/15/nurses-cite-sloppy-conditions-in-ebola-care-at-dallas-hospital/) describing complaints by the Nurses Union, describing some of the “sloppy” conditions surrounding the care of patient zero in that Dallas hospital, things like some of patient zero’s caregivers working for days without even having a protective gown while caring for and being exposed to patient zero and presumably his “bodily fluids,” nurses forced to use medical tape to patch together and close gaps in the flimsy protective garments they were issued, protective gear that didn’t cover their neck and head area, soiled linens piled up to the ceiling, and patient zero’s blood samples being sent through the hospital’s pneumatic tube system, potentially contaminating other samples and the whole system.
Other complaints as quoted/listed in the article were that :
– Duncan was kept in a non-isolated area of the emergency department for several hours, potentially exposing up to seven other patients to Ebola;
– Patients who may have been exposed to Duncan were kept in isolation only for a day before being moved to areas where there were other patients;
– Nurses treating Duncan were also caring for other patients in the hospital;
– Preparation for Ebola at the hospital amounted to little more than an optional seminar for staff;
– In the face of constantly shifting guidelines, nurses were allowed to follow whichever ones they chose
If conditions at this hospital were as reported, we’re unfortunately probably gonna see a lot more hospital staff coming down with Ebola in the coming days.
.
I don’t blame the hospital. The CDC has been on the ground here from early on in the process.
From comments on the local news outlets it appears that the CDC expects many more clusters of Ebola in the USA. With open borders and no restrictions on travel from West Africa this is inevitable.
The CDC knows how to provide adequate protection in specialized settings with suits and respirators and negative pressure rooms. That will not suffice however since they expect many more future cases of Ebola than they can care for in those specialized facilities. Therefore, they need to perform experiments to find out the minimal protections needed to safely care for Ebola patients in non-specialized settings.
The hospital workers who have contracted Ebola are the necessary casualties while the CDC perfects their protocol to care for Ebola patients in hospitals which are not specially designed to handle Ebola or other highly contagious diseases. In other words the nurses are being used as experimental guinea pigs without their consent. The nurses went into this experiment with the assurances that the CDC was providing them with all the protection they needed and that they would not catch Ebola if they followed the protocols exactly. Not so. Now the protocols will be tightened slightly and the experiment repeated until the protection is adequate.
Fortunately, Ebola will probably not kill as many Americans as the flu pandemic. Unlike HIV the Ebola virus seems to elicit an effective immune response in a substantial portion of the people who contract it. There are already vaccinations which are being tested. Africa is another matter since Ebola already has such a strong start that even if a vaccine were made available it would take so long to vaccinate all the people who need it that many thousands would already be beyond help.
Contrary to lefty guilt mongering, it does Africa no good for us to spread Ebola among our own citizens. Not one African life will be saved by our own suicide. We need to shut down the spread of Ebola at its source now and then when the vaccine is ready instead of using it to fight our own pandemic we will be able to spend those resources helping the Africans.
right now the WHO is coming up wiht global taxes to control behavior, like smoking tobacco
ie. abusing tax code to control behavior opens or has already opened the door to be offended by lots of stuff, cause everything that one can find offense with becomes a money making machine, which is a lot easier than a company that earns it
on another note.. from us news and world report
Researchers predict more cases in the United States based on flight patterns. The last week has brought some unfortunate firsts for the United States
but quarantine will make it worse…
better to be a dead equalist than a live racist…
and its wisdom–had probably set up some sort of sealed, high-tech, positive pressure containment unit for patient zero, with his care givers suited up
you mean negative pressure… ie. air comes IN from leaks and through the heppa filters, not positive pressure where air is pumped in and finds its way out in other ways than the heppa filters..
such rooms are negative pressure…
they should have an extra outer room and showers.
but they are not following CDC or any realistic kinds of things, as the admins of most hospitals/colleges are liberals and they wont act in a way that contradicts their politics, or negates them.
so rather than do the right thing, they follow the, its minimal, hard to infect, this is just enough kind of thing.
it also takes time to build negative pressure rooms. though you can buy they pre made and they are in shipping containers for movement around the world.
but you see… to use one is to contradict their communist soviet(council) leadership. and gliechshaltung means not doing so, so that everyone doing the same thing has the social weight of everyone doing the same thing. that is, control by controlling the crowd and discouraging or forbidding outliers.
so… they wont violate the dear leaders lies and act in a responsible way, for their idea of responsible is to reinforce the message, not counter it.
There is one other possibility you didn’t enumerate.
Perhaps she knows more than she intended to let on and was accurate by way of a Freudian slip.
Lets hope that she is at least consistently an idiot, rather than intentionally deceptive.
illuminati: Fortunately, Ebola will probably not kill as many Americans as the flu pandemic. Unlike HIV the Ebola virus seems to elicit an effective immune response in a substantial portion of the people who contract it. There are already vaccinations which are being tested.
sorry.. this is wrong… the vaccines dont work
and the ebola being inthe US now offers an easy cover for a biowarfare operation by people who declared being our enemies ages ago.
that is, if they let out ebola from biopreparat, then what? its covered by what entered, and once again, its warfare by parasitical theory.
that is, what if you fight a war the way parasites do?
under the cover of the natural immune system of the state? attack banks with break in and steal money. why? because the state immune system that calls an act an act of war, will not do so. same with releasing something like ebola in another country, but a more virulent strain. then once that strain reaches the US, then release it here. why? cause once again, it leaves the state immune system no focii to act upon.
given that they moved tactical nuclear weapons into the crimea, among other things, this is just one more of the things that serves such a purpose.
at what point does Obama get to “temporarily” suspend the constitution and become a ruler to save us?
BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS IN THE FORMER
SOVIET UNION: AN INTERVIEW WITH
DR. KENNETH ALIBEK
http://cns.miis.edu/npr/pdfs/alibek63.pdf
excerpts for the sound bite low information types:
Given the behavior of our state and its desire to keep its cattle calm no matter what, there is no kind of idea of any kind of actual informing of people. that is, when the soviet union fell, the US came into a policy of not reporting anythiung that upsets the public to the point of wanting politicians to act in ways that didnt fit their future plans (of some sort).
so, instead of reporting the huge number of blacks attacking whites in groups, they suppress it, as the public would want a response and that would not be just to clamp down on blacks, but would also be to negate pc thinking which is what was being used by politicians to manipulate thinking and behavior.
same with reporting the events where guns saved people over those events which guns harmed people and crazies used them. the point was to paint gun owners as all crazy to manipulate people into becoming less able to oppose policy
same with allowing external entties like the who and un to make law as if they were somehow elected rulers of the world and the countries sovereign governments were like staet leaders under the feds.
well, with ebola, it will be a long time before we hear if the DNA of the strain matches prior strains, or has forked from that due to its being from someplace else. and thats assuming knowing at all in some form.
do note that such a break out fits the emergencies act that will allow suspension (termination) of the constitution and complete control over people, where they live, what they eat, and their media, and much much more.
the chess pieces are arrayed for such a move, all that remains is some piece taking up position to execute it with an excuse to supress reaction
I’m recommending it because 1918-1919 is by almost any historical definition “modern times,” and because the pandemic represented an overwhelmingly “severe, acute health emergency”–more so than ebola, at least so far.
To ge the record straight, it was called the SPANISH FLU at that time. Killed 50 to 100 million people worldwide in less than 2 years
The Smallpox Pandemic of 1870-1874
As recently as 1967, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that 15 million people contracted the disease and that two million died in that year. After successful vaccination campaigns throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the WHO certified the eradication of smallpox in 1979
the malaria pandemic is still going on, killing about 2 million people a year since silent spring ended the use of DDT.
AIDS is still considered a pandemic, but its death toll is small comparatively… only about 25 million since its start
Cholera pandemic is still on fire, as is the typhus pandemic… but their death tolls are small and so we dont see them as the pandemics they are (though typhus killed several million people in the same years as the spanish flu)
i notice we forget a lot
not only that, but if your like me, and try to remind people, they dont like it…
note that officially the modern era is (convieniently) 1946 – present
so technically these pandemics have not occured in the modern era, they occured in the era of the depression and WWII…
while the spanish flu occured in the great war and jazz age
before that was the progressive era…
Artfldgr Says
“sorry.. this is wrong… the vaccines dont work”
Perhaps I have missed something. Is there additional information available about the new Ebola vaccines, ie. the one by GlaxoSmithKline, which have only been tested on healthy volunteers?
The fact that a significant number of Ebola patients are able to develop an immunity to Ebola means that an effective vaccine is feasible even if it is not effective for 100% of the population. Once we develop a sufficient herd immunity Ebola will not be able to propagate widely in the community. In this aspect, Ebola differs from HIV which is almost custom designed to evade the primate immune system and which rarely confers immunity on those exposed to it.
“Fairness” isn’t about survival. It’s about the self-sacrificial thrill that runs up the leg of some masochists as they contemplate dying in solidarity.
Talking about vaccines, probably the main impediment to an effective vaccine is the fear of side effects. Once the Ebola pandemic is contained and people are no longer scared to death all we will hear for years is constant television adds about multimillion dollar settlements against the producers of the vaccine.
The GlaxoSmithKline vaccine contains only one Ebola gene so its effectiveness might be limited but its side effects will probably also be limited. If it is ineffective that does not mean that it is impossible to develop a vaccine, rather it means that it is impossible to develop a vaccine in our highly litigious society.
In my view, the modern world dates from 1865 and runs to the start of the post modern world in 1965. All the progressive garbage of the end of the 19th beginning of the 20th was fermented over several decades. It did not just spring forth from Zeus’ head. From 1965 on is the Twilight Zone where up is down, slavery is freedom and ugly is beauty.
Artfldgr:
Re definition of “modern era”—if you look at my addendum to the post, and the link therein, WWII does not appear to be the usual starting point, at least according to those sources.
In Russia 3 mln people perished in this epidemics – five time as much as in USA. Flu was brought into Europe by US soldiers. One can speculate that refusal of USA to send troops in Europe could have saved more lives that sending them.
Historically, the most effective vaccines have been based on live attenuated viruses. The classic vaccine is Edward Jenner and his vaccine based on cowpox. Lewis Pasteur developed the rabies vaccine by passing live viruses through eggs until it lost some of its potency.
Over time we have become more skillful in developing vaccines based on dead virus or even on small parts of the viral genome inside of an innocuous carrier virus.
If there really were a panic situation in which 70% of the population were at risk for death we might have to rely on an attenuated Ebola virus. The Reston Ebola virus apparently produces human immunity but does not produce illness in most people so far. It would be interesting to see if people who have antibodies to Ebola Reston are also immune to human Ebola virus.
https://web.stanford.edu/group/virus/filo/ebor.html
The Left does not engage in self sacrifice, they engage in human sacrifice. That means they don’t kill themselves, as a zealot might.
See, that’s how they multiply.
Their dupes do.
May be, it worth to remind that in its leading symptom – bleeding of lungs capillars – 1918 fly was a haemorragic fever. Exactly this made it so deadly.
Their dupes do.
Which ones?
Ben Afftick and William Maher-Mao, via instapundit, said on a show that they owned guns to protect themselves.
They will hire bodyguards to make sure theirs is taken care of. You, on the other hand, they’ll watch get killed with a big phat smile on their face like Hussein O does.
Maher’s concern for Islam doesn’t stem from his sense of justice for underclass girls like at Rotter or CPS Texas. It’s just to save his own stuff from the hordes. Your culture and people, he’ll gladly throw into the fire to buy himself some time.
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