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

Meanwhile New York says it's now tracking over 350 people for Ebola, and the AP admits that they and several other press organizations agreed to quarantine Ebola stories last week.

The election is over so the Republicans have stopped with the "OMG! YOU ARE ALL GOING TO DIE, LIKE DIE UNTIL YOU ARE DEAD, FROM EBOLA AND IT IS ALL OBAMA'S FAULT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

I mean, if they kept it up after the election they might be forced to actually pass a bill which allocates some money for fighting ebola and they don't want to have to do something like that.

By the time Republicans take over the Senate, it will probably be too late to keep Ebola out of the US.

The Texas "outbreak" is officially over.

Ah, but we got the zombie apocalypse to look out for in NYC.

Dr. gturner told us so.

If only...

If Ebola gets into any other third world country, this video will live on forever in infamy.

Enterovirus D68 in the United States, 2014

Number infected: 1,116
Number of deaths: 11

Rate of gturner's concern: <0.

Bush pays visit to nurse who recovered from ebola.

That's another case of the federal government actively spreading a fatal disease through the population.

Ebola vaccine completes successful trial.

More at the link. Perhaps if more white people get sick, they'll get the funding they need.

Heck, in desperation to get any traction, Mary Landrieu started a hashtag "Where was Bill?" about her opponent Bill Cassidy's non-response to Hurricane Katrina. She even made signs.

They call it scoring an own-goal, as Bill Cassidy replied "Mary Landrieu wants to know where I was during Hurricane Katrina? Setting up a surge hospital for refugees."

And he did

From Money Magazine, Nov 1, 2005.
With a little help from a lot of friends, a doctor turned an abandoned K Mart into a field hospital for victims of Hurricane Katrina
By Ellen McGirt
November 1, 2005

(MONEY Magazine) – BY DR. BILL CASSIDY, 48, BATON ROUGE AS TOLD TO ELLEN MCGIRT

Ouch!

Meanwhile, one of Wendy Davis' campaign directors is blaming Wendy's humiliating defeat on Ebola.

The Hurricane was in Aug and he didn't set up this refugee help cebter until Nov? Even if he was doing it in October he is two months late.

That is certainly NOT what he was doing during the hurricane or even for the first month after it.

Um, no. The article about what he did during the Hurricane was written in November.

Cool article, demonstrates one of Bush's more attractive traits, and also confirms that the US approach to Ebola is effective.

Actually, it shows the opposite. During Bush's tenure as President there were 10 Ebola outbreaks. Not once did President Bush have a chance to hug anyone who'd become infected while within the United States, much less in Texas, because he didn't let people with Ebola come over here. In contrast, Obama is having to hug US Ebola victims left and right.

So Bush issued travel bans during those ten outbreaks?

He didn't have to, because back then he had his health authorities contained the outbreaks at the village level, and small African villages don't have international airports. Now we have new thinking among the elite educated health experts, which is that Ebola should be allowed to spread naturally - because we have science and shit.

He did? Our health authorities contained them?

And now small African villages do have international airports?

We need to rename this smilie gturner:

And I thought JohnM was nutz...

Okay, let's go back over the idiocy, starting with the clip I posted above.



0:00 - The travel restrictions are something we've worked very hard to, um, encourage the international community to avoid. We've worked very hard to ensure that travel flows remains open and that travel bans are not, um, the alternative to having a strong public health infrastructure and a strong preparadness, uh, capacity.

That's from the State Department, and they're saying they're working very hard to make sure the international community (which includes a bunch of other nations that can't handle Ebola any better than Sierra Leone or Liberia) doesn't restrict travel of potential Ebola carriers out of the hot zone - because it's better to have a strong public health infrastructure. Ebola could spread through everyone in Bangladesh in two years. It will be fifty years before Bangladesh has a prayer of having a strong public health infrastructure. She's substituting wishful fantasies about public policy instead of thinking about the dangers of a contagious viral hemorrhagic fever in a third wold country. But she doesn't stop there, oh no.

0:24 - And the reason for that is that exactly as you said. It's about moving health care workers. It's about being able to get goods and services into the region, and it's also about stigma. So as you raise the points about thinking about the stigmatization of individuals as they're being screened, there's also the stigmatization of a region that would be cut off, and isolated from the rest of the world when they need us the most.

But Canada, Australia, and almost all of Africa have already cut off travel from the afflicted countries, so by her logic health care workers and supplies can't get in there anymore. Yet the people and supplies are still flowing in, so her logic must be wrong. It's wrong because she, like the rest of the Administration (including the CDC and NIH), seem to think that a travel ban means that airplanes can't fly in and out. That's really stupid. Aircraft are immune to Ebola. Don't let Ebola victims onto the airplanes and the airplanes stay just as Ebola free as our Antarctic research stations. The airplanes can still fly in and out, carrying supplies, aid workers, and anything else that airplanes carry, as long as you don't fill them with people who have Ebola. In fact, one of the earliest life-saving uses of airplanes was flying doctors and vaccines into areas hit with epidemics, areas that were under quarantine. As long as you don't let people from the infected areas onto the airplanes and fly them to some other city, the quarantine holds.

Some airlines did cut off flights, but that was because governments were still issuing travel visas to people who had Ebola, or who had been exposed. If we stop issuing the visas, then the travelers can't get a ticket to an uninfected destination, and without a ticket, they can't get on an airplane to another country. But the airplanes can still fly in and out. Our military transport aircraft, for example, don't sell tickets to civilians, nor does Fed Ex, yet they fly in and out of airports around the globe. Is the State Department unable to comprehend how the DoD and air transport companies pull off such an impossible feat, time and time again? All we have to do is stop issuing travel visas, and monitor returning health care workers for the incubation period. It would have exactly the same effect as west Africans simultaneously canceling all their Disney vacations.

Of course, she follows up the stupidity with some whining about stigmatization. Who gives a fuck? We have to take off our shoes and get our privates handled just to get on an airplane these days, which is a heck of a lot more intrusive than a forehead scan, and I have yet to be able to tell who has been felt up at the metal detector and who hasn't, much less care who might have failed screening. West Africans are living on $500 a year and dying from Ebola. I think they have much bigger worries than having a Harvard graduate feel offended on their behalf. But she continues:

0:48 So for us it's been, how do we actually do the key pieces of prevent, detect, and respond. How do we ramp up screening measures? How do we take that 6 percent that was going to other airports and funnel them to the five airports where they need to be, so that we can do the adequate screening, as opposed to cutting off a region of the world that we're trying to assist.

So they're still letting potential Ebola carriers come over here when they're still trying to figure out how to keep them from infecting Americans with Ebola, and these people are challenged by the task of figuring out how to funnel some passengers to only five airports. I'm not sure these people are bright enough to lick a stamp. We might as well give a Rubik's cube to a macaque as to expect rational policies from this crew.

1:11 There's also a really important piece to consider around the cost of the response. This is a very expensive logistical undertaking. It gets much more expensive if commercial air flights are cut off, because in order to move health care workers, in order to move goods, then we no longer have commercial options at our disposal. So there is also a pragmatic consideration around the cost of the response, and cutting off airflows, commercial airflows, would dramatically increase the cost of the response as well.

Again, if west Africans cancel their Disney vacations, what are we going to do? Our people will be stranded! The geniuses in Canada realized that all they had to do was have their embassies in the hot zone quit issuing visas. They didn't have to do anything about commercial travel because they'd magically just solved the problem - with a memo! How disruptive was that?

She's also an idiot for misusing the word airflow - which has but one meaning - the flow of air, not people through the sky. It's one of those science terms you learn when you figure out how airplanes work, which the Administration obviously hasn't.

No changing smileys to people's usernames until : tantrum : is

Yes. The CDC and various European health agencies used to go in on the ground at the first word of an Ebola outbreak, isolating it in one or two villages, which is why no outbreak has ever grown beyond about 500 fatalities. In terms of logistics, they'd have to supply their own transport or hitch rides on trucks, jeeps, or boats just to get to the epicenter. This time the WHO dragged their feet (which they have apologized for), and admitted that many of their local field operations were staffed by incompetent bureaucrats. The CDC wasn't called in until the outbreak had been growing out of control for almost four months, and Ebola had never before been allowed to spread into a city. So they failed to contain it, and continue to fail, insistently allowing Ebola to spread to other continents. If it gets established elsewhere, then we'll have new places where we have to try and contain it. The world has very little trade and travel with west Africa because they're very poor, so containment at this stage should not be very difficult or economically damaging. If Ebola spreads into Asia (Southeast Asia, China), Central or South America, etc, the affect on trade could be catastrophic and containing it becomes more difficult by an order of magnitude.