Ebola - slow to spread, hard to catch. So something like AIDS?

She has no symptoms. Even if she has it, she is not infectious. There is no medical reason for quarantine. It is health theater, similar to shoe inspection at airports. I didn't realize you were such a sucker.

So you would wait until she infectious before quarantining her?

How dumb.

What is wrong with a voluntary quarantine? At her house.

Nothing's wrong with voluntary. She is objecting to involuntary.

Pay attention Gul.....

She's no longer in the involuntary quarantine in New Jersey.

She is refusing to follow the voluntary quarantine in Maine.

Yes, I know. But there is talk among fools such as yourself and sterner about changing that to mandatory, something that is not indicated by her medical status.

Yeah. Look at how many people Thomas Eric Duncan got sick that wasn't changing his bedpan.

Turns out the doctor in New York lied about self quarantining himself.

Okay - a nurse who's going stir-crazy and demands to be freed (not a lot of leverage to negotiate here sweetie) a doctor who self-quarantines
which involved going out bowling and who knows what else. Being in the medical field you would think that they would be more cooperative.

Obama wants to bring thousands of Ebola victims here for treatment. Fuck it, I say bring them! They would probably be more grateful than
our own local yokels. My main point here is "you were exposed to Ebola bitch.....and I have a demand too.....shut the fuck up!"

And look at all the people he got sick!

HA! I got it. Ebola, not the joke. Excuse me while I go plug up another toilet.
False alarm! It's just the Taco Bell food I had earlier today.

So you'll be joining Dayton on his mission to Syria to find those missing WMD, huh?

Yeah, it's just a lethal communicable disease. No reason to take precautions.

Panic =/= precautions.

All you and gturner and FOXNews are doing is .

If you want something real to worry about, try this Contagion scenario:


Lab Revives History's Deadliest Flu Virus

If you want to seriously talk about this, what I'm seeing re: ebola is reminding me a great deal of what happened when HIV/AIDS was first becoming a Thing. AIDS was mysterious at first, unlike the well-documented ebola, but it was a lethal communicable disease that was spreading at an alarming rate. BUT, because it was mostly hitting the homosexual community, it was not taken as seriously as it should have been AND the most effective measure that could have been taken, the quarantine of infected individuals, was ruled out due to concerns about violating rights and stigmatizing victims (as if in the late 70s/early 80s they could have been stigmatized much more than they already were). As a result, the disease rampaged largely unchecked for years.

Looks a lot like what's going on now with ebola.

Except, you know, all the massive precautions which actually are being taken.

The real issue here is one side believes the precautions selected should be based upon actual science and should pass a basic cost to benefit examination while the other side is reacting on emotion, thinks actual scientific finds should be ignored, and that looking at things like costs or the negative effects of proposed policies just isn't worth the bother.

Um, no. One side believes that political correctness trumps science, and that truth is whatever a scientific appointee says it is, and that people suspected of carrying a deadly communicable disease can't be quarantined because it violates their rights.

First, scientists aren't sure of all the ways Ebola can be transmitted because they've haven't been able to study the outbreaks very much. Whenever there is an Ebola outbreak, nearly all the efforts are at containment, not research. They don't do live experiments on people, for obvious reasons. What they have determined is that Ebola is present on the dry skin of Ebola victims (so science refutes the blood and body fluid story). They also did one experiment where they infected pigs with Ebola and put them in a room with rhesus monkeys housed in cages high above the pigs. The monkeys caught Ebola, and they don't know what the route of transmission was. What the CDC and NIH seem to be doing is stigmatizing all the doctors and nurses who died from Ebola, essentially blaming them (as they did the nurses in Dallas) for not following procedure. Yet their procedure are based on the idea that there's no way the rhesus monkeys could have caught Ebola from pigs - which they did.

Second, it doesn't matter why the state thinks a person is a risk that's carrying a deadly communicable disease, we've given them the authority and responsibility of protecting the rest of us from such risks. As individuals, we are free to shout and cry about being isolated, and to protest our innocence through channels, but we are not free to disobey the authorities that have placed us under some kind of arrest to protect the public. If the nurse is free to ignore quarantine orders, then squeegee men are free to ignore state quarantine orders simply because they don't believe they have smallpox, TB, whooping cough, H5N1, or MERS. We couldn't even hold their dogs for a rabies test. When the police detain you as a suspect for murder or manslaughter, or decide to hold you for a mental health evaluation, you can't just flee because you're convinced you are innocent, babbling that they have no power to detain innocent people.

What this nurse, a narcissistic, irresponsible, arrogant CDC employee is doing, is establishing that the state has no right to stop the spread of an infectious disease. If the state doesn't have the power to quarantine someone the state suspects has Ebola, then they have no right to quarantine anyone who has Ebola.

GT, that is just a lie. We know exactly how ebola spreads and we have known this since the 1970's.

I don't know, it could be that just looking at a person with ebola causes you to catch it.

Oh, wait, I forgot I'm not living in the middle ages.

Indeed. Ebola is mostly spread through contact with improperly disposed corpses and sewage. People aren't significantly infectious until they're symptomatic, and once they're symptomatic they're generally too sick to go anywhere on their own. The chance of an Ebola outbreak in the U.S.--as opposed to the chances of isolated cases--is zero. There is absolutely no need for quarantine because there is no risk of a public health crisis. Passive monitoring of people who've had contact with an Ebola carrier combined with reasonable safety protocols at hospitals where Ebola patients are treated is more than enough to keep isolated cases at a minimum.

The chance of an Ebola outbreak in the US can't be zero because we already had an outbreak in Dallas. The New York doctor was so sick that he used every form of public transportation available while he was sick.

If Ebola is soooo hard to catch, why have over 200 health care workers died from it, including 5 of the 58 Ebola scientists who published an August paper on the genetics of this current outbreak? Do you really think they were playing with corpses and poop? Now, if you do play with corpses and poop, your chances of getting Ebola are probably near 100 percent. Sharing a needle with an Ebola victim, again probably near 100 percent transmission. Beyond that things get sketchy, because doctors and scientists who followed all the protocols still caught Ebola.

What the New York and New Jersey governors no doubt found doubling alarming is that the New York doctor initially lied about exposing the public. He initially claimed that he'd self-quarantined at the first sign of symptoms (go doctor!), but then the NYPD pulled up his credit card transactions and metro pass and found out he was lying. That's the behavior of an Ebola doctor, so what behavior do you suppose they'd anticipate for random idiots who might be running around with Ebola in their cities? Africans are on edge and taking precautions. They're not shaking hands and kissing people on both cheeks, but New Yorkers are. We don't prepare and cook all our own food, we generally have restaurant people doing that for us, and those people are preparing food for hundreds of people a day. We don't know how transmissible Ebola might be in our cities with our modern lifestyle, We do know that it's easier to catch Ebola than hepatitus C, which the CDC says requires blood-to-blood transmission, yet we have 16,000 acute cases of hepatitus C per year.

We've also never seen Ebola outside of Africa, where it can only survive on surface for a few hours. At 39 degrees F, typical winter temperature up north, it can survive on surfaces for two months.

Fetch me lance, squire. The Duke requires the mentally infirm be quarantined lest their hysteria spreads.

We have not had an outbreak in dallas. Stop misusing terms.

That's the term the CDC and everyone else uses when there's an outbreak, whether in one of their labs or in a small African village. In the 1980 and 1987 Marburg outbreaks in Kenya, only three people caught it. Note that those are called the 1980 and 1987 Marburg outbreaks.

The reason we've used quarantines to stop communicable diseases for over 2,000 years is that quarantines in many cases work. Currently about 75,000 Liberians are quarantined against their will. They're not allowed out of their slum. There are guards to keep them from spreading the infection through the rest of the city. If we're not allowing potential Ebola carriers into different neighborhoods in Monrovia, why are we allowing them to ride New York subway trains?

Where is the science in quarantining US service members from the hot zone who haven't been in contact with potential carriers, while we're not quarantining people who've been working in the isolation wards for Ebola patients? Do you think that's science or something?

I really don't like psycho babble from people who aren't qualified to make diagnosis. Not even a trained professional is qualified to claim the nurse is a narcissist based upon a 30 second video clip on tv much less you, GT. Hell, everything I have seen this nurse say has been reasoned and responsible. She has said that medical responses should be decided by trained medical professionals based upon actual scientific findings instead of the idiotic whims of politicians up for reelection in one week.

For that you call her a narcissist. I'd put more money on you being mentally ill than her but really I don't think your problem is that complicated. It is just old fashioned ignorance.

BECAUSE EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM HAD DIRECT CONTACT WITH THE BODILY FLUIDS OF INFECTED PATIENTS.

And because you've been loitering around schoolyards again.

Judging by the comments posted at all the news articles covering her statement, most people concluded she was a self-centered narcissist who used the words 'I' and 'me' 60 times in her statement, while only referring to the rest of us 3 times. And the Maine health officials insisting on the quarantine are medical professionals. The Maine Department of Health and Human Services and the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention are seeking a court order to keep her in quarantine. That will probably happen tomorrow, with a hearing scheduled Monday. Meanwhile there is a state trooper posted outside her house. The Maine CDC director said the the nurse was tested very early and the early tests often show a false negative for Ebola, and they're not willing to put the citizens of Maine at unnecessary risk.

The nurse is obviously in total denial about the threat she may pose to the public. Almost everyone we have to quarantine for a disease is likewise in denial, which is why our government has extensive powers to force people to obey quarantine orders, and if necessary we put them under arrest. The nurse claims it violates her constitutional rights. Well, under the Constitution, a state can take very extensive measures to ensure public health and safety. It can even order some of its citizens to crawl through artillery barrages and mass rifle fire, and summarily execute them for desertion if they refuse. Many of our states have done just that in the past.

But that's how you catch hepatitis C (direct contact with blood and body fluids), yet the rate of hepatitis C infections in health care workers is only 21 per 100,000 per year. If Ebola was like that, there statistically shouldn't be any African health care workers who have caught Ebola this early into the outbreak.

I thought it was fairly well known by at least the mid-80s that it was passed primarily through sex and swapping blood samples (hence recipients of blood transfusions and drug users were also getting it). Plus, by the time the gay community began to die en masse from HIV, it had most likely been in their system for years or even decades before it turned into AIDS. Quarantine wouldn't have done a damn thing against HIV/AIDS, which is far more of a lifestyle disease than ebola is.

What part of "Early detection" "first world country" and "Americans aren't in the habit of eating bushmeat and washing their dead by hand" do you not understand?

Sorry, but four cases is no more a mass outbreak than Edward Cullen is a real vampire. Our tracking system is not perfect, but then no one's is. When patient zero in Nigeria was forcibly restrained from hopping into a plane, this guy was pretty symptomatic. When the nurses caught the virus, Duncan was pulling Linda Blairs and even the two people he was living with when his fever first appeared did not catch the virus. You can pull your Chicken Little routine all you want, but the great thing is facts remain true whether you believe them or not.

Yes, in a first world country like ours the dead person's apartment is cleaned out by people wearing T-shirts (a news chopper caught that on film), while in New York City the authorities take all the infected items from a person's apartment, including the protective gear they wore, and dump them in a public trash can on a crowded sidewalk.

Did you know that in the US, when police and other crews come to pick up a dead body found in an apartment or elsewhere, they don't put on bio-hazard suits like they do in Africa? Other than not washing the body, we don't do anything differently here than they do there. We still handle it like any other dead body, and bodies of Ebola victims are highly infectious. If we lose track of one Ebola carrier and a few people get infected who don't go to the hospital, their bodies will just become one of the 150 people who die in that city every day. They'll slip through the cracks and the infection could spread, especially among the poor, drug using, or homeless populations.

Doctors Without Borders has had 24 of their staff members contract Ebola, and 13 have died. Yet only three of those deaths were from handling Ebola patients in treatment. The rest were apparently from casual contact in the hot zone. The first doctor flown to the US says he's certain he didn't contract Ebola while treating patients in isolation, where he always wore full protective gear and never came in contact with any fluids. He says he contracted it from evaluating patients to see if they might have Ebola, which is done without the need to wear bio-hazard gear because in theory, you can't catch Ebola from casual contact. He apparently did. Similarly, you don't catch smallpox from casual contact because it requires fairly high-dose droplet transmission, but if you spend your day talking to people who have it, you're likely to get it too.

Keeping all that in mind, the State of California's Department of Public Health, no slouches when it comes to science, has now instituted a 21-day quarantine for those who've treated Ebola patients. Their order also says: