Ebola and influenza: pale rider
This is not good news:
The Ebola virus is spreading exponentially in Liberia, the World Health Organization said, predicting thousands of new cases there in the coming weeks.
The agency said Monday the number of new Liberian cases is moving far faster than the capacity to manage them.
Liberia already accounts for about half of all cases and deaths of Ebola in West Africa. The disease has killed more than 2,000 people, spreading from Guinea to Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria and Senegal…
Obama told NBC News that U.S. military assets are needed to set up isolation units and equipment and to provide security for international health workers.
“If we don’t make that effort now, and this spreads not just through Africa but other parts of the world, there’s the prospect then that the virus mutates, it becomes more easily transmittable,” the president said.
Whether this is too alarmist or insufficiently alarmist I really don’t know. I’m not at all sure anyone does. As it is now, ebola only has traditionally spread to people in direct contact with the bodily fluids of patients, but there are worrisome signs and rumors that this could be changing. The nature of viruses is to mutate, and the possibility of airborne transmission is very real.
The whole thing puts me in mind of a pandemic from almost 100 years ago, the 1918 influenza horror if 1918-1919, which I’ve written about at some length before; one can only fervently hope that science has advanced to the point where such a conflagration will not happen this time, and that such a hope is not misplaced. I recently picked up a book on the topic of that earlier pandemic entitled The Great Influenza which, although quite long, is a good read.
That influenza epidemic has a special resonance for me because as a fairly young child I happened—in a moment of boredom—to have pulled a book called Pale Horse Pale Rider from my parents’ bookshelf and started reading the title story.
In my later, adult opinion, it is Katherine Anne Porter’s masterpiece. The subject matter, although fictionalized, was her own experience of wartime love and then near-death from the flu—although, at the age of nine or ten when I first encountered the story, I had no way to comprehend it and was extremely puzzled by what sort of terrible disease could possibly strike a young healthy person down so suddenly that way. Although the story terrified me, it fascinated me too, and I read it straight through despite the fact that it was opaque to my understanding.
The beauty of Porter’s language cast a sort of spell on me even as a child, and when I read it later as an adult and finally understood it, the story remained just as mysterious and just as beautiful. Here is an excerpt from the opening; the main character is describing a dream she’s having:
Where is that lank greenish stranger I remember hanging about the place…Now what horse shall I borrow for this journey I do not mean to take, Graylie or Miss Lucy or Fiddler who can jump ditches in the dark and knows how to get the bit between his teeth?…
Come now, Graylie, she said, taking his bridle, we must outrun Death and the Devil. You are no good for it, she told the other horses standing saddled before the stable gate, among them the horse of the stranger, gray also, with tarnished nose and ears. The stranger swung into the saddle beside her, leaned far towards her and regarded her without meaning, the blank still stare of mindless malice that makes no threats and can bide its time. She drew Graylie around sharply, urged him to run. He leaped the low rose hedge and the narrow ditch beyond, and the dust of the lane flew heavily under his beating hoofs. The stranger rode beside her, easily, lightly, his reins loose in his half-closed hand, straight and elegant in dark shabby garments that flapped upon his bones; his pale face smiled in an evil trance, he did not glance at her. Ah, I have seen this fellow before, I know this man if I could place him. He is no stranger to me.
She pulled Graylie up, rose in her stirrups and shouted, I’m not going with you this time—ride on! Without pausing or turning his head the stranger rode on. Graylie’s ribs heaved under her, her own ribs rose and fell, Oh why am I so tired, I must wake up. “But let me get a fine yawn first,” she said, opening her eyes and stretching, “a slap of cold water on my face, for I’ve been talking in my sleep again, I heard myself but what was I saying?
Slowly, unwillingly, Miranda drew herself up inch by inch out of the pit of sleep, waited in a daze for life to begin again.
I have quoted at length from the story because—well, because I like it. It still gives me the chills, and I don’t think it’s only because I know the rest of the story, all nearly-fifty pages of it. It’s partly because this is the beginning of the flu for Miranda, even though she doesn’t know it yet.
The Great Influenza, on the other hand, is a factual and scientific work, although it also happens to quote Porter’s story at one point. But here’s author Barry’s description of an outbreak towards the beginning of the epidemic, at Camp Devens in Massachusetts:
On September 24 [1918] alone, 342 men were diagnosed with pneumonia. Devens normally had twenty-five physicians. Now, as army and civilian medical staff poured into the camp, more than two hundred and fifty physicians were treating patients [two days earlier, about 20% of the camp had come down sick]…Yet on September 26 the medical staff was so overwhelmed, with doctors and nurses not only ill but dying, they decided to admit no more patients to the hospital no matter how ill…
For this was no ordinary pneumonia. Dr. Roy Grist, one of the army physicians at the hospital, wrote a colleague, “These men start out with what appears to be an ordinary attack of LaGrippe or Influenza, and when brought to the Hosp. they very rapidly develop the most vicious type of Pneumonia that has ever been seen. Two hours after admission they have the Mahogany spots over the cheek bones, and a few hours later you can begin to see the Cyanosis [blue color due to lack of oxygenation] extending from their ears and spreading all over the face, until it is hard to distinguish the coloured men from the white…
It is only a matter of hours until death comes…It is horrible. One can stand it to see one, two or twenty men die, but to see these poor devils dropping like flies…We have been averaging about 100 deaths a day…We have lost an Outrageous number of Nurses and Drs. and the little town of Ayer is a sight. It takes special trains to carry away the dead…An extra long barracks has been vacated for the use of the Morgue, and it would make any man sit up and take notice to walk down the long lines of dead soldiers all dressed and laid out in double rows…”
Barry’s book is also a history of medicine in this country, and doctors are the heroes of it for the most part. Not too many years earlier, medicine had been quite divorced from science. But by the time of the flu pandemic it was science that enabled doctors to finally figure out what was happening.
Not that it mattered much in terms of the victims; the disease had to burn itself out, and as time went on it became less virulent and finally disappeared, having run through those most susceptible in the population. In the meantime, it wreaked worldwide havoc, sowed fear, created many orphans (unlike in most flu epidemics, in that one death most often struck previously-healthy young adults), advanced our knowledge of epidemics—and helped inspire a small literary masterpiece from one of the people it nearly killed.
When I was in high school back in the early 1960’s I was with my mother helping decorate family graves for Memorial Day, even then we had a good number of dead family folks in our small town cemetery. That day my mom started showing me graves of classmates who died from the influenza the summer she was twelve years old and she described what it was like to go back to school in the fall of 1919 with about a third of her class dead and buried. That was the first time I had ever heard of that influenza outbreak.
Some members of her family of six children were sick and quarantined and her older brother lost a year of school and he was embarassed years later when mom skipped two grades ahead and they both graduated from high school the same year.
As for your story about Camp Devens, I spent almost a year staationed there in the late 1960’s and had no idea about the role it played after WWI. Thank you Neo for your insight and information and let’s pray that this Ebola does not mutate and burns itself out on those poor unfortunate people who have it now.
If it does become a worldwide outbreak I am afraid that we, the civilized world, will become humbled and devastated in ways we cannot imagine or comprehend.
With a sister (and her husband) in Mozambique and a son serving the State Department in North Africa, I have been following this story for a few weeks now. (Mostly by way of comments left by statisticians and the like.) I can’t believe the President’s response is to send in the military. I find myself wondering if it is meant to be a distraction from the real threat, Islamists. On the other hand, this administration does have a history of doing the exact wrong thing to exacerbate a bad circumstance. No matter what, it is crystal clear that one of the most fundamental roles of the federal government, to protect our way of life is not happening and for some time now. And this while collecting record tax revenues. Positively abhorrent.
Laurie Garrett’s 1994 tome titled The Coming Plague discusses ebola extensively as well as numerous other deadly viruses. The potential for a panademic that kills hundreds of millions, if not billions, is frightening to consider; but it certainly is possible in a world where hundreds of millions of passengers fly annually to all the corners of the globe. I think it is merely a matter of time before ebola comes to America.
If ebola becomes airborne it will overwhelm the medical systems of even the most advance nations. I wish I could have confidence in the coming global effort to contain the virus, but conditions in western Africa may present insurmountable obstacles.
It doesn’t even need to mutate to be a serious threat. The man who brought it to Nigeria was an American flying from Liberia. I emailed the Pastor of our church this week and asked what would have happened if at an earlier stage of his condition, he flew into Los Angeles instead and worshiped with us at St. John Eudes in Chatsworth, having dipped his hand in the font, exchanged the sign of peace and drank from the chalice? My husband and I are taking the necessary precautions at this point, because we can see that the measures that should be taken at this time, aren’t being taken.
I read the book The Great Influenza based on your recommendation Neo. What a fantastic read even though the firt few chapters were on the history of medicine in the US. I learned a lot from it.
It is possible that Ebola could mutate to a form more transmittable by contaminated articles, such as a door knob. In the history of viruses, there is no documented case of one like this becoming transmissible via air bourne droplets like the common cold or influenza. If it comes over here, there will likely be a run on disposable gloves and bleach.
What was so terrible about the great influenza epidemic was that flu usually kills the very young and very old, people with immune systems that aren’t fully functioning. This flu killed people in the prime of life, their 20s and 30s. It killed entire families.
Not that there is anything to worry about…
Smallpox vials being found.
Diseases becoming antibiotic resistant
Various scary versions of bird flu
Ebola.
Who knows what the Russians are still doing?
Yeah nothing. Whistling through the graveyard. That’s me.
“Men who never have had the experience of trying, in the midst of an epidemic, to remain calm and keep experimental conditions, do not realize in the security of their laboratories what one has to contend with.” — from Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis.
Imagine you are in west Africa, imagine temperatures in the 90s or above and similar levels of humidity, imagine the abysmal infrastructure, imagine a population that believes in witchcraft, imagine the level of 3rd world corruption, and imagine a multi-billion dollar problem requiring 50,000 soldiers and medical personnel, and the willingness to shoot down anyone who crosses a quarantine line. Then imagine your level of confidence this ebola outbreak can be confined to the countries where it presently exists.
Fascinating column. Although I’m a senior geezer, I only recently came to learn about the Flu. I recently started doing Genealogy. I came across my parents wedding certificate. It noted that the marriage was the second for each of them. While growing up and in my adult life, I had never heard that each had been married previously.
After a great deal of research, I found the answers. Each of them had married in 1917 in Boston. Both of the original spouses died in 1918, within a week of each other. Both died of Influenza. The earlier wife was pregnant; the earlier husband had been serving in the military at Fort Devens.
I had never heard the stories. Even though these events happened almost 100 years ago, I found myself thinking about who these people were. I had never heard either of the earlier spouses ever mentioned, for reasons I can’t fathom.
mousebert refers to “the history of viruses” and apparently takes comfort in it. That ebola is said to be not “airbourne” is an empty assertion. The bug exists in totally wretched west africa and has been quite insufficiently studied. Its reservoir is unknown, maybe fruit bats, so we’re dealing with humanoids who eat, yes eat, bats.
Viruses do not have winglets. The airborne packets of nucleic acids are present in airborne secretions; those same viruses are transmissible by contact. Ebola is tranmissed by contact with bodily fluids including sweat and semen and urine and nasal mucus. It is not a leap of logic to understand that ebola is transmitted or transmissible by the same “airborne” route.
We will catch ebola by eating too much of our own BS courtesy of our PC leaders in the White House, NIH, and CDC.
Typo alert: transmissed=transmitted.
Given the distribution system now available for nasty bugs I don’t see how sooner or later one of these Asian or African bugs doesn’t spread in a pandemic. Perhaps it will helped along by our good Muslim friends.
Since it takes about three weeks for Ebola to burn through an area it seems reasonable for everyone to stockpile that much food and water so that you can hunker down while the bug kills all of your friends and neighbors. Remember don’t touch the dead bodies.
Given modern transportation and the world’s interconnectedness it’s just a matter of time till another pandemic hits. This post prompted me to do a bit of research and it turns out that it takes about 6 weeks for an pandemic to blow through an area.
That in turn means that if you can quarantine yourself from contact with the general public for that 6 weeks, the odds of escaping infection are good. Obviously there are factors such as jobs that could make that difficult to impossible for many. But for those who can do so and who have the foresight to acquire a six week reserve supply of food and water (avoid using municipal water during that time) the chance of surviving a pandemic by isolating you and yours may be quite good.
If you do have to go out of the house having a suitable supply of face masks, ‘pit’ masks and nitrile gloves might be enough to keep infection at bay. Short of your own personal HazMat suit, I suspect this may be the best we can do.
You beat me to it Harold! But that chart I linked to appears to make six weeks more likely.
Dick Durbin says that an amnesty program would only help with this outbreak. I am trying to get my head around that statement.
The U.N. should be furnishing troops, not the U.S. In other words, all nations need to have skin in this game, not just the U.S. – in case harsh decisions become necessary.
I read a report a week or so ago where a CDC scientist had stated this Ebola could mutate into an airborne problem. I wonder, is this the mother crisis being waited for?
549
If anybody challenges Durbin on that bit of nonsense, the reply will probably be “racist”.
“Rats, Lice and History” by Zinnser was written just before the advent of penicillin. Covers the great plagues of millenia and their historical effects. Good read.
And “1492” by Mann tells us about pre-Columbian life and culture in the Americas, with emphasis on the great death fronts passing over the land from European diseases.
I have been hearing on talk radio that the respiratory
virus striking the young & putting them in ICU
is Endemic to Central America . States with the highest number of cases are where the border crossing kids have been sent. Also be alert for cases of TB showing up in school kids in a few month’s time.
And you may want to consider imbibing green tea,
it has been a *natural antibiotic* according to folk medicine practices in China. Actually it s a strong antioxidant that boosts your immune system allowing you to fight germs better & not truly an antibiotic.
I just checked on the web. Air France will sell me a ticket to fly from Conarky, Guinea to JFK (via DeGaulle and Dublin) next Thursday for about $1,900.
Good article here:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/09/16/can_the_us_army_degrade_and_destroy_ebola
neo…
As related previously, my grand-uncle survived Fort Riley Kansas — one (1) of the two (2) survivors.
His tale of woe is so bleak that I can’t bear to recount it here.
Suffice it to say that he was on burial detail — for weeks on end. To save on energy (his) most of the bodies were buried either right next to the barracks or actually underneath the floor boards. (!)
He and his buddy just tilted the dead into the earth.
No-one was buried six-feet deep.
Most of the burial details — obviously — just fell down into their own diggings.
He was fed by food thrown over the wire — at the point of bayonets. So the fort was transformed into a penal facility. No-one was allowed out to infect anyone else.
&&&
My grandfather served in WWI, too. He was held up in New Jersey for months on end — as the entire camp was under quarantine. Once that period passed, he was sent to Europe.
The Kaiser must have figured out he was coming, because the Germans surrendered while he was still at sea. The troopship turned around in the mid-Atlantic. This made him part of the American semi-Expeditionary Force.
####
The Spanish Flu was by far the dominant factor in early 20th Century politics. It’s the under story in Doctor Zhivago — who is heroic precisely because he was on the front lines of the pandemic — yet survives.
It’s the disease that largely destroyed the White armies during the anti-Leninist war. I strongly suspect that the Bolsheviks sent disease carriers into the White ranks. It’s the kind of thing Trotsky would do.
%%%
As previously posted, ALL of our Haz Mat suits are only suitable for temperate climates. They so restrain airflow that you quickly become parboiled!
This is why one sees countless snaps from west Africa showing medical workers wearing Haz Mat clothing like they’re a fashion statement — open at the top.
&&&
As for airborne…. a cough is more than enough to spray ebola three meters out.
It’s also apparent that ebola warps the mind.
Some notable early victims obviously lost their minds. Whether this was due to grief or mental infection is rather moot. The point is RISK.
We can’t count on victims calmly dying, or queuing up for treatment.
Instead, we’re hearing tales of mass insanity: families ‘rescuing’ the dead and dying from clinics and hospitals — rioting to do so.
Such total breakdowns in social order are TYPICAL of pandemics.
The US Army — indeed any military formation — is totally unprepared for ebola.
After a fashion Star Trek explored rapidly transmitted insanity:
“The Naked Time”
or drug induced irrationality:
“This Side of Paradise”
The point being that modern management — in theory and practice entirely breakdown when reality gets too abnormal.
The insane idea that ebola can be hazarded like it’s a human conflict can only lead to tragic outcomes.
GB,
We can easily stay in our home, sealed off from the rest of the world for many months. We have water, food, sanitation logistics, and sufficient ammo all in place. My childern and their families can say the same. Perhaps the future belongs to the well prepared. But that is just me and mine, a collection of members of the vast right wing conspiracy. I was raised to fear government beyond all other threats. I internalized that wisdom and passed it on to my children who also accepted that wisdom. Don’t tread on us.
mf…
That’s a great link.
It’s also an indication that at least one expert is in total denial.
Even as she runs down the realities… she can’t face the objective truth: it’s ALREADY too late.
She also does not address the brutal reality that we don’t have ANY Haz Mat suits that can function in west African temperatures.
###
The ONLY sane course of action is to admit one’s limitations.
1) We can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. West Africa is going to have to ride out the pandemic.
2) We are dealing with a pandemic level disease. It will go all the way, that is its character. Ebola has been recognized as a pandemic scale disease for years on end.
3) We have some prospect of containing ebola if a global quarantine exists around west Africa. The area does not produce anything critical to human life. Most live on subsistence agriculture, so imports are not critical.
4) We can easily quarantine anyone transiting the area, who is an obvious risk factor… if we begin NOW.
Towards that end, we should be setting up suitable quarantine facilities. The Sahara desert looks promising — for the short term. Temperatures in the Sahara will become quite practicable in the immediate weeks ahead.
Likewise, Ascension island seems practical.
Absolutely no-one should be allowed to exit west Africa without being quarantined. THIS is the policy that needs to begin.
During such a quarantine, the travelers can be monitored and treatment initiated before things get out of hand.
The infrastructure of west Africa makes modern medical procedures impossible. Isolation of the infected is quite impossible. It’s just too late.
The Atlantic ocean and the Sahara desert are barriers to transmission. The desert reaches essentially to the sea. So it’s practical to block transmission up the coast.
Some sort of fire break has to be PROMPTLY initiated in the sub-Sahel zone west of Nigeria.
In the meantime, some sort of animal baiting has to occur to stop bats from picking the disease back up from the human dead and vectoring it on over to eastern human populations.
If this fire break is delayed, the entire continent is at hazard. It’s in the very nature of the disease that it can shoot through dense populations.
Panic must ensue every single time ebola is evidenced. As has been shown in history, this pandemic can roll on for Y E A R S.
The Black Plague kept popping up decade after decade. These later outbreaks get no modern mention. You’d have to tear into highly specific, detailed, histories to find out that this or that community was laid low by the Black Plague – a century and a half later on!
The predations of Boko Haram MUST factor large. BK is an obvious social vector for transmission of ebola into the Muslim Middle East. This is another vulnerable population that is short on medical talent.
Warfare and pandemics go together like ham and cheese. It’s hard to see how the chaos of ISIS wouldn’t lead to total breakdown.
What with our southern border being flung wide open, with no attempt to screen anybody entering for disease–and indeed transporting them throughout the country–and sending American soldiers into an ebola-affected area, I can only conclude that somebody wants to deliberately bring it to the United States.
Sorry if that sounds tinfoil-hattish, but I can reach no other conclusion.
The African’s must kick the bushmeat habit.
Lurch:
You must have missed blert’s earlier comment in which he said his nephew in the Peace Corps couldn’t even get them to stop drinking from mud puddles.
blert:
You’re view needs to be out there. The fact that it’s not is the big story for which we will never know the reason.
I wonder of what use 3,000 US soldiers will be?
The best answer is enforcing quarantine zones with deadly force at distance.
Will we see any reporting on this?
rickl,
I have come to the same conclusion. They do not recognize that what comes around goes around.
Matt_SE,
That is what occurred to me. I see soldiers and I think quarantines enforced by men with rifles, to shoot from range.
The CFR link posted by mf, like Obama and the various other Dear Leaders, calls for a response similar to that for an earthquake. Get out the engineers and the dozers, build hospitals and schools and pure water sources.
In Liberia, this is nuts. Th ebola problem is orders of magnitude bigger than a Haitian earthquake The CFR writer seems to grasp this notion but has no solution: How will the bushpeople get educated? Who will speak their pidgin? Who will teach these ‘natives’ with their witchcraft belief systems, bat eating, and distrust of higher authority? Who will be the doctors and “healthcare workers” to run these new places to provide supportive care, which is all we’ve got? There is NO specific treatment for ebola, no antivirus or antibiotic, none.
This is nuts. Liberia ain’t Chicago. We’re fighting biology and we’re gonna lose unless we cut all ties. The age-old solution is quarantine, and it works; sickies die, but it works. The cry will go up: we can’t cut all ties. Well, we sure can’t beat ebola in real time either, so what you gonna do? Stimulate a global pandemic or leave Liberia to Liberians?
How it will spread short of quarantine: Apparently a French ‘volunteer’ sick with ebola is today being evacuated from the area, I guess to France. The deal should be what gets to West Africa stays in West Africa.
blert @618pm said:
“we’re hearing tales of mass insanity: families ‘rescuing’ the dead and dying from clinics and hospitals – rioting to do so.”
That might seem insane but it’s not. It depends on their Cultcha (as Bostonians say) and they probably have to send their dead off to the afterlife instead of leaving them ‘abandoned’ in alien hospitals run by people who are all masked up like Death On The Wing. It is an easy step for bushpeople to see people dying and conclude they’re being killed in hospitals by the weirdos.
nkbay99
Off topic but interesting genealogically.
Curiously, growing up the “family,” ancestors of generations past, their histories, stories, struggles and accomplishments, triumphs and tragedies, and their origins were just never mentioned or discussed in my presence.
As with many people, I got curious and started doing genealogical research in mid-life. But, unfortunately, by that time most of the older family members who might have had critical and presumably detailed information about prior generation’s family members and our family’s past–had they been willing to relate them, which, from what I had observed, wasn’t anywhere near a sure thing–were dead.
Moreover, what I found, when I questioned those few relatively younger relatives who remained, was that no one had valued or kept any records–virtually no pictures, and no diaries, no birth, baptismal, marriage, death records or obituaries, newspaper clippings, or other useful documents. Nor were there any discussions that they remembered of past ancestors more than a few generations back in time. Moreover, absolutely no discussions that any one remembered about any “old country” from which family members might have immigrated from.
It was like my ancestors just appeared out of the mist, two or three generations ago–originating from who knows where and determined to forget their origins–and there were no family traditions or reminiscences or even names of more than a handful of recent past relatives that I could start the hunt with. There was just a faint, and broken trail.
Twenty five years’ worth of research later, I can go back five or more generations of ancestors that nobody in my family had apparently even heard of or would recognize.
But, beyond just the bare bones of name, birth, death, marriage, occupation, residence, and some names of their family members, much as I have tried to reconstruct them and their times, these ancestors, their stories, histories, and struggles are essentially unknown to me and, given my age, are very likely to remain that way, still almost entirely lost in that mist.
Thought I’d throw together a quote from the article I linked above. It is a long article but it is informative:
I feel that time is running out. Unless Obama’s announcement can somehow include immediate measures that lead to long-scale escalations in supplies, logistics support, air shipments, and personnel on the group in West Africa, I fear dire consequences by Christmas. The need for speed is true not only of the U.S. government’s efforts, but of those promised by the United Kingdom, China, Cuba, France, and every other nation that has announced some form of assistance. The virus is well ahead of the game, holding the end zone in a game that finds the epidemic control efforts bogged down on their own 19-yard line. The game can’t even advance to the 20-yard line right now because airlines refuse to land in the afflicted countries, making delivery of personnel and supplies impossible until the Africom joint effort with Ghana brings a fully operational air bridge online through Accra’s airport.
Nothing short of heroic, record-breaking mobilization is necessary at this late stage in the epidemic. Without it, I am prepared to predict that by Christmas, there could be up to 250,000 people cumulatively infected in West Africa. At least 30 nations around the world, I dare predict, will have had an isolated case gain entry inside their borders, and some will be struggling as Nigeria now is, tracking down all possibly exposed individuals and hoping to stave off secondary spread. World supplies of PPEs (personal protective equipment, or “space suits”), latex gloves, goggles, booties — all the elements of protection — will be tapped out, demand exceeding manufacturing capacity, and an ugly competition over basic equipment will be underway. The great African economic miracle will be reversing, not just in the hard-hit countries but regionally, as the entire continent gets painted with the Ebola fear brush. Mortality due to all causes will soar in the region, as doctors, nurses, and other health care workers either succumb to Ebola, become full-time Ebola workers, or flee their jobs entirely. Women will die in delivery, auto accident victims will bleed out for lack of emergency care, old vaccine-preventable epidemics will resurge as health workers fear administering them to potentially Ebola-carrying children, and child malnutrition will set in. Lawlessness will rise as Ebola claims the lives of police and law enforcement personnel, and terrified cops quit their jobs. State stability for hard-hit nations will be questionable, or nonexistent.
I hope that all responding states and humanitarian organizations will manage to break records, getting supplies and personnel on the ground in spectacular haste. I hope that they will work under a command structure that is wise and pragmatic.
Most of all, I ardently hope that Christmas will arrive and my comments above will look like the nattering of a crazed Cassandra. I hope that presidents Xi, Obama, Zuma, and Hollande, Prime Minister Cameron, Chancellor Merkel, and their counterparts will have found a way in the next two weeks to vastly increase the global response to this epidemic, create a meaningful command structure to oversee and manage the entire effort, and then aid the beleaguered countries in their post-outbreak recoveries. And I hope that every one of you reading this will be able, as Christmas approaches, to justifiably denounce me as a fearmonger.
Your long quote is a good joke if the subject weren’t so awful.
The worldwide cooperation the quote writer seeks and calls for happens only in sci-fi movies from the ’50s and ’60s.
She holds out hope. Nothing wrong with that.
mf…
Actually, you are wrong.
It’s very much like telling a red shirt that he’s got a chance with Godzilla.
It’s not even in the script.
The very act of attempting to help them — will down the rest of the planet in death.
Ebola in the back waters of Africa is one thing.
Bringing jet borne vectors in and out of Africa is a wholly different situation — and SHE’S the primary voice agitating for same.
Too much heart, not enough head.
For west Africa, there is NOTHING that the West can do.
We don’t HAVE any medicine that can cure them.
We’re using up all of our resources handling the mere trickle of Westerners that stagger out of west Africa.
The scope of the calamity is ten thousand times greater than the highest estimate of Western capacity.
We CAN’T isolate medical talent from the disease. That’s been proven, over, and over, and over, again.
We don’t have any extra tricks up our sleeve.
Further, the exponential has already gone far beyond our ability to use known ‘trapping’ procedures.
We’re not talking about tracking down the clap!
Ebola is a biological equivalent to a hydrogen bomb.
You can’t stand close to it.
I fly the U.S. and Canada a half dozen times a year for business. By the time I get to where I am going, I have been on either two or three airplanes whose beginning flights for that day come from all corners of our country. Same for the return flight roughly one week later. I usually come down with a cold or similar. From the plane itself, or perhaps somewhere, somehow inside the airport – or both. I can not help but notice the sneezing, coughing and hacking always going on.
Hub airports, especially international ones, and airplanes, can be sickly places.
Oh. And I never carry cash any more. Credit or debit. Money itself is a depository of germs. If I sound a bit wacky, so be it. But I do not get sick anywhere near as much since I stopped handling cash.
Airborne virus infection with high letality is the most dreadful and also the most probable scenario of a world-wide catastrophe, much more probable than all other things people are usually afraid. For ebola virus it is also plausible, because many other strains of hemorragic fever are known to be airborne. In Gamaleya Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiologe where I worked 40 years ago there was a local epidemic of such fever, and everybody who worked in a two-storey building got ill. Some mice brought from Mongolia were infected, and laboratory rooms has common ventillation system with the room where animals were held. They leaked blood from all orifices, including ears and eyes, had very high temperature, inadequate agressive behavior, rage and hallucinations.
Vaccine and genetically engineered anti-serum will be produced in scalable quantities only 3 or 4 monthes from now. Before that only quarantine measures can limit the spread of infection, no matter how big money will be thrown at it.
We can’t use US soldiers to enforce a quarantine. The optics of our guys shooting, shooting at, stopping, fencing in, roadblocking the panicked refugees–all black, poor, terrified, all the characteristics the left loves–will be, within 24 hours labeled as murder, genocide, terrorism, and so forth and we’ll have to stop in order to ship whole battalions to the Hague for crimes against humanity.
Don’t bet the lefties haven’t got the paperwork printed, bound, and waiting on shelves.
Didnt any of the elite ever see mask of the red death?
No Trace Of Ebola On New Orleans-Bound Ship, CDC Insists
and if they are wrong?
their bad…
eugenics is ok anyway as they claim
so is euthanasia, post birth abortions, etc
I’m afraid that I must be soon fitted for a tinfoil hat myself, because I cannot see any good purpose in sending ordinary troops to Africa to fight ebola, other than the scenario RA has … or to deliberately bring the disease to the US. A mobile hospital unit – maybe. Engineers to build scratch facilities … a stretch. But ordinary ground-pounders? Perhaps the Champ was just talking big, and saying something because it’s expected … but his dislike, or even outright hatred of flyover country white Americans is pretty profound.
As for the 1918 influenza, that’s something that haunts me, as well. I put a bit of it into one of my books – Adelsverein:The Harvesting, where an elderly woman waits up for her middle-aged daughter, who has been volunteering as a nurse at an Army hospital in San Antonio. The daughter is very late at returning, and when she does, she says it is because she has been writing consolation letters to the mothers of dead soldiers.
My great-aunt caught the ‘flu, as a young teenager, and survived it. She was just barely well and strong enough to go down to the bottom step on the staircase of her parents’ home in Reading, England, and sit on the step and listen to the victory celebrations (what there was of it) in the street outside on November 11, 1918. Her mother, my great-great grandmother had trained as a nurse in the 1880s, and was volunteering at an emergency hospital set up in Reading for the flu victims.
My own work (and that of my daughters) is such that we can self-quarantine, in case of Ebola hitting here. I hope that it won’t – but as we used to say in the military; hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
Sgt. Mom: But ordinary ground-pounders?
ordinary ground pounders are picked becuase they CAN be ordered to go where volunteers wont go. you can literally order them to go die… you try to do that with a virologist from a top medical school… the term is “cannon fodder”, expendible, etc.
Cannon fodder is an informal, derogatory term for combatants who are regarded or treated as expendable in the face of enemy fire. The term is generally used in situations where combatants are forced to deliberately fight against hopeless odds (with the foreknowledge that they will suffer extremely high casualties) in an effort to achieve a strategic goal;
The idea of the Ebola virus becoming airborne is not far-fetched as its ability to enter cells that line the trachea and lungs has been shown under controlled laboratory conditions, a Purdue Univ. virus expert says.
“It is not unprecedented for a virus to change its mode of transmission,” he says. “Ebola does share some of the characteristics of airborne viruses like influenza, and we should not disregard the possibility of it evolving into something that could be transmitted in this way.”
Biopreparat
the Soviet Union’s major biological warfare agency from the 1970s on. It was a vast, ostensibly civilian, network of secret laboratories, each of which focused on a different deadly bioagent. Its 30,000 employees researched and produced pathogenic weapons for use in a major war.
The research at Biopreparat constituted a blatant violation by the Soviet Union of the terms of the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 which outlawed biological weapons. Its existence was steadfastly denied by Soviet officials for decades.
In April 1979, a major outbreak of pulmonary anthrax in the city of Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) caused the deaths of 105 or more Soviet citizens. The Soviets tried to hush things up, but details leaked out to the West in 1980 when the German newspaper Bild Zeitung carried a story about the accident. Moscow described allegations that the epidemic was an accident at a BW facility as “slanderous propaganda” and insisted the anthrax outbreak had been caused by contaminated food.
[the AIDS being created in a bioweapons facility was the soviet unions way of equalizing things by accusing others of doing what they do… a common tactic used in the US as well by their flunkies and follwoers]
I have been in one facility for working with Ebola, we have it where i work… cant say more than that…
Vladimir Artemovich Pasechnik
In 1974, at the age of 37, Pasechnik was invited by a general from the Soviet Ministry of Defence to start his own biotechnology institute in Leningrad and he was given “an unlimited budget” to buy equipment in the West and recruit the best staff available. The laboratory he created was in reality part of the countrywide Biopreparat program
The laboratory actually began operating in 1981, and over the next two years Pasechnik realized that, far from running a civilian research operation dedicated to vaccine development, as he had been promised, he had become part of a vast network of laboratories and factories involved in a massive BW program. According to Pasechnik, the Institute, which had a staff of about 400, did research on modifying cruise missiles to spread the plague.
though this kind of kills the ideas of the dreamers and otehrs who theorize and do not know much about the actual history and such of things like such pathogens.
The Biopreparat complex current state is unknown, however it is likely that Biopreparat and successor entities continued bioweapons research and development at least through the 1990s
Pathogens that were successfully weaponized by the organization included (in order of completion):
Smallpox
Bubonic plague
Anthrax
Venezuelan equine encephalitis
Tularemia
Influenza
Brucellosis
Marburg virus (believed to be under development as of 1992)
Ebola (believed to be under development as of 1992)
Machupo virus (believed to be under development as of 1992)
Veepox (hybrid of Venezuelan equine encephalitis with smallpox)
Ebolapox (hybrid of ebola with smallpox)
These were SUCCESSFULLY WEAPONIZED
Annual production capacities for many of the above listed pathogens were in the tens of tons, typically with redundant production facilities located throughout the Soviet Union
dont forget to look up Ken Alibek and Yuri Ovchinnikov as well
Ken Alibek become the First Deputy Director of Biopreparat where he oversaw a vast program of BW facilities. In 1992 he defected to the United States
Ebola has not been used as a bioweapon; however, bioweapon programs such as the former Soviet Union’s may have investigated weaponizing Ebola. Three incidents of research scientists becoming infected after being stuck with Ebola-contaminated syringes have been reported: England, 1976 (recovered); USA, February 2004 (recovered); Russia, May 2004 (died).
Russian Scientist Dies in Ebola Accident at Former Weapons Lab
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/25/world/russian-scientist-dies-in-ebola-accident-at-former-weapons-lab.html
The first public mention of the accident was over the weekend on Pro-Med, the informal Internet reporting and discussion network of doctors and other health care professionals, which posted the Vector account of the laboratory accident on its Web site (www.promedmail.org)
While officials at Vector said the scientist, Antonina Presnyakova, was working on an ebola vaccine, they have declined to identify who was financing the research or discuss its specific nature.
Vector is also one of two repositories of the deadly smallpox virus — the other is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Since the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States has spent millions of dollars to help convert such places to peaceful research, including an estimated $10 million at Vector.
Critics of the program have opposed expanding such aid because it is hard to verify whether former Soviet scientists are using the American-supported research for peaceful purposes. But the program’s defenders say it keeps scientists employed on peaceful projects and prevents them from working for anti-American states or terrorists seeking biological weapons.
State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology VECTOR is part of the system of laboratories known as the Biopreparat. The facility has, at least in Soviet times, been a nexus for biological warfare research, though the nature of any ongoing research in this area is uncertain
given i put this up, there will be new posts by neo later today to start new conversations… either i post too soon, and thats not liked, or i post too late and most miss the information..
Cheer up blert, things aren’t quite all that bad.
mf said: “She holds out hope. Nothing wrong with that.”
Plenty wrong with that. Hope is a really crappy substitute for realism. Hope often inspires passivity and dependence on a bailout by others.
Ebola has now occurred in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Senegal, Nigeria and Democratic Republic of Congo. Vectors have arrived in the USA and yesterday a French ‘volunteer’ with Ebola was evacuated, probably to France.
If we can quarantine West Africa, we can handle Ebola outbreaks in the USA, as long as the case load does not overwhelm our resources.
But if we continue to be PC, all bets are off. Yesterday three sick crewmen were offloaded to New Orleans hospitals from a freighter last in the DRC…they have malaria, tested negative for Ebola. Another crewman was dumped in the Bahamas two days previously, where he shortly died. There is no super facility in New Orleans for containment, much less in the Bahamas, unlike Emory in Atlanta.
did i call it??
LikeClockwork
i Post And new threads go up
Waste OfTime
Artfldgr:
This is the way it works.
Another good link from Wired. The math, it’s sobering:
http://www.wired.com/2014/09/r0-ebola/ Even if you don’t read it, just click to see the graphs. Sweet dreams.
Also, I have a friend, an engineer, on the ground in Liberia this week. They’re establishing a beachhead for clean water (WaterMissions dot org) and are blogging their journey. 50% of Liberia’s water wells are contaminated with eColi. It’s a petri dish of filth and plain ignorance.
Don Carlos:
Then we disagree.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/18/us-health-ebbola-guinea-idUSKBN0HD2JE20140918
“Eight bodies, including those of three journalists, were found after an attack on a team trying to educate locals on the risks of the Ebola virus in a remote area of southeastern Guinea, a government spokesman said on Thursday.”
This ^^^^ is the social dynamic that is TYPICAL of pandemics.
It is FOLLY to send in do-gooders.
Their role in the tragedy is to be vectors into the First World upon their inevitable infection.
I hope this event gets plenty of publicity — and stops do-gooders from flooding into the trauma zone.
The LAST thing the Africans need is a Power Point presentation squad.
All First World health norms are sure to be deemed cultural insults.
put this in genius category
Group of aid workers fighting Ebola killed by African villagers
http://nypost.com/2014/09/19/group-of-aid-workers-fighting-ebola-killed-by-african-villagers/
During cholera epidemics in 18 century Russia there were “Cholera riots”, when peasants killed doctors sent by authorities to eradicate epidemics believing that cholera was caused by doctors poisoning water wells. Government was urged to sell troops to quell these riots and arrest rioters. Many peasants were shot dead or sent into Siberia in chains for slave labor in mines as a punishment.
http://www.cave-ruthene.fr/ano/nike-huarache-og-size.html nike huarache og size
http://www.cave-ruthene.fr/ano/nike-roshe-run-jd.html nike roshe run jd