It's not like there isn't a doomsday prepping thread already. Let's keep this on Ebola and the D68, shall we? As for Ebola, here's something that bugs the fuck out of me; they sent the initial vectors home to the States like it was no big deal. Why not treat them there for Ebola, get them nice and healthy, then port their asses back home?
Re: Keep moving, nothing to see here. He went in, during intake said he'd come in from Liberia. That got lost in the shuffle. They sent him home. I feel like Texans won't 'fight ebola' the way our government does.
I have a better question: why do you believe it was dangerous to bring back known-ill patients, taking correct precautions, whose disease is not airborne? The chance that these patients become a "vector," given their quarantine protocols, is virtually invisible, and yet the chance of them surviving in the US with the quality of medical care available is drastically higher. There's also a far better opportunity to study the illness than doing it from Africa.
Theres nothing to worry about at all with this. If there was any risk of an outbreak, this guy would be quarantined and on lock down in a CDC bunker somewhere. People should be way more concerned about getting something like Lyme Disease than Ebola.
http://news.discovery.com/animals/ebolas-deadly-jump-from-animal-to-animal-140730.htm Some further reading, for those of you who might be interested in virus-viral vector evolution.
Really, it's just another thing for the 24/7 news cycle to panic over. Unless someone with active Ebola infection manages to infect blood supplies for transfusion, spit in a bunch of food or get himself covertly ground into mass-distributed food and somehow never found by the USDA or plant workers or whatever, we're unlikely to have some civilization collapse from a fruit bat and monkey virus spread through fluid transmission. Toxoplasmosis, a mutant strain of rabies, something like a 'new' Spanish flu, all more likely to start a plague. Hell, the bubonic plague still exists, some people catch it every year by fucking around with some rodents and getting the illness from their fleas.
That's not quite sound. There's no reason to think that "if it was going to happen it'd have happened by now." That's the worst sort of rationalization. It's not backed up by the viral math at all. Ebola has never had the size of outbreak we're seeing now. It's never penetrated larger urban areas the way we're seeing now. It certainly never hopped on a plane to the USA before now. So yeah, this is zero comfort. The Congo and Nigeria pretty much have Ebola under control. Of course, that's only because they had much more experience with it than anyone else. It's West Africa which is flailing. Yet Saudi Arabia is still struggling with their outbreaks, even though they have better healthcare. But soon after Ebola has made its way into more urban and globally connected areas, we've seen a rather stark rise in infection rates. Just look at the doubling rate now. More people have become infected with Ebola since I wrote my posts than were known to be infected before then. That's not something to be comforted about. Before last month there were zero Ebola cases in America, ever ever ever. Now we've had our first directed cases and now our first un-directed case. That's sort of the difference between there never having been a man on the moon and then there being a man on the moon. It changes the equation. Before 2014 the closest uncontrolled Ebola came to my house was THOUSANDS of miles from here all the way to Africa. Then it came to Emory. Much much closer. Now it's in Texas. Heck, the distance to me has just been halved again. I'm not saying it's not easily controlled and treated at this point, but still, it's not a negligible threat.
Some medical jargon; http://depts.washington.edu/brtc/files/Bohus et al 2007 BSL.pdf Ebola is a BSL4. There aren't 25 BSL 4 treatment beds in the entire country. The notion that we just automatically have the infrastructure to contain and treat Ebola is just nonsense. Even a small outbreak would saturate our current capacity of true BSL 4 beds and possibly the dozenish more BSL 3 beds. It's entirely likely that flu will continue to kill more people year in and year out than any BSL4 disease and heck, all of them combined. This is already a calculated risk people have accepted and it mostly kills those who are weakened. Plenty of people don't have much to fear from flu that they don't already know and the notion of dying from consumption is unpleasant but it's nothing compared to the sheer visual of bleeding out and the current lack of treatment and the lack of protection for (non-child) young healthy people.
Plus let's look at how horribly this was handled by the superior health care providers you guys are touting thus far. The guy goes to the hospital with signs of Ebola and says he just traveled from a country fighting Ebola. Then he is sent home with a z-pack (I don't know what antibiotic so speculation). Let's not get cocky about our superior medical prowess quite yet
I was more just following up with more input, no offense intended, good sir. Sorry if I sounded ass-ish.
Okay, gotcha... That really wasn't the issue I was addressing, though. I completely understand that an outbreak here would be terrible. Far more easily contained than in Africa, but still terrible. You suggested that it was somehow dangerous and enough of a threat to bring them back that we should have decreased their chances of survival by leaving them there. Obviously the threat bringing them back is non-zero, but for a disease spread through bodily fluids and since there's no surprise that they're infected, it seems like it's close enough to zero to warrant trying to improve their odds and be able to better study the disease process. I know what is required of a BSL4 pathogen and did not suggest that we have the ability to control a full-blown epidemic. Just that there are known protocols and facilities for handling the known infected workers who were brought back, and the reality is that they're probably less likely to spread the disease than your average TSA employee or airline stewardess.
What I think is fascinating is that it only very recently has infected primates such as ourselves when you look at the evidence and viral history, it's probably entered primates via first some monkey chomping up a fruit bat carcass or killing an infected bat and eating it, or eating a fruit bat-infected fruit covered in the bat's saliva, and then of course said infected monkey had sex and fluid transference with other monkeys, and finally some human eats a monkey infected, and suddenly we have it. It's really ill-adapted, in terms of virology, to be an effective contagion to wipe us out as it currently is. It's weird how many viruses entered humans from non-human primate vectors, like HIV-AIDS (Probably bushmeat transferred it to humans, not sex as one urban legend would have it) or SFV. (Bushmeat, again) It's highly fascinating there are also so many illnesses that "dead end" at humans. Toxoplasmosis finds us an unsuitable host for propagation yet lives in us just fine and does alter our brain chemistry just as it does for rodents to find predators like cats attractive to them and thus increasing their likelihood of getting ingested by the carnivore, and thus the carnivore acts as an incubation host. Of course, toxo is a protozoan, not a virus, but still. In other weird viral news: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2012/02/14/mammals-made-by-viruses/#.VCyHI0pX-uY
So Dr. Oz was the medical "expert" on the Today Show this morning saying this is exactly what happened. Then he goes on to talk about "what if" Ebola mutates so it spreads through respiratory contact like the flu. Cue the panic! by the media.
I looked on Wikipedia to inform myself about this Dr. Oz character, I didn't know anything about him other than he has a show that I've never watched. Apparently he is the recipient of the Turkish-American of the Year Award for the year of 1996. I'd say that makes him legit and someone to be listened to.
As somebody who IS aware of Dr. Oz, I would say that he has lost some credibility and sacrificed a bit of his medical ethics in the 18 years since.
He was/is a highly respected cardiac surgeon. But ever since Oprah turned him into stay-at-home-mom Jesus and started giving women magical weight loss advice and just generally becoming a complete hack, he's lost most of his credibility in the medical world.