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

I only have a near-zero chance of catching Ebola because it hasn't spread here yet. The same cannot be said of areas of Western Africa that just one year ago were also Ebola-free.

Canada's response to the 2003 SARS outbreak provides some useful lessons on rapidly quarantining people who might be exposed. After they thought they had the outbreak defeated, they lowered their guard, not knowing that five more people had been exposed. So the outbreak is called SARS I, which they had no way to prevent, and SARS II, which they could have avoided. SARS isn't much easier to spread than Ebola, requiring droplet transmission, but what worried the CDC were 5 super-spreaders who infected 10 or more people, perhaps just because of the way they coughed.

SARS? Didn't that shit have a mortality rate of two percent?

I will say that I agree with gturner that the 21 day quarantine really shouldn't be waived, but other than that...the time away from family can be a bitch. It's not much different than what I dealt with while being stationed in Japan dealing with a 13 to 18 hour time difference depending on which part of the country one was from. That, however, was nowhere near the nightmare of the pre commissioning tour that saw us pierside working well past the time the Post Office closed, and the majority of us were without vehicles to get anything accomplished of the rare day we had off. I spent my birthday (which i had to take leave for to get off) mailing out gifts for my niece's birthday....in October.

SARS had a fatality rate of about 10 percent. It was engineered by angry civets that were pissed off about being caged up and fed coffee beans so that their poop could be sold at Harrods.


Plotting the extermination of humanity - a coffee shitting civet.

You mean the way we've been doing since 1973?

Yeah, whenever we declare war we tell the captains and sergeants to encourage their men to find an overseas flight, swipe their credit card, and find their way to the fight, using Priceline to find someplace to stay and hitching rides to the front in taxis. That's exactly what we did in 1973, yesiree bob.

Governors have the power to order doctors and health care workers into any outbreak area in the US, but they can't order them to go overseas. Congress and the President can.

So, another triumph for socialized medicine. If we're going to quarantine healthcare workers coming back from areas where there are Ebola outbreaks, then we need to quarantine healthcare workers in the US who treat anyone in the States who has Ebola, as two of them have come down with the disease already, and they didn't even leave the country.

It's quite revealing just how quickly some of the "conservative/libertarian" types have embraced a powerful central government. Goes to show that they are chameleons at best, probably motivated less by what makes sense and more by how make political gains. It is despicable.

Bad cup of coffee this morning, huh?

It had nothing to do with socialized medicine, it had to do with invoking emergency powers for pandemic control, the same mechanism that any US state would use. Interestingly, in the Canadian SARS outbreak, the vector was the health care workers and the hospitals. The Dallas outbreak was belatedly contained by putting all the health care workers who treated Duncan, including the director of emergency response, into isolation (home quarantine). Mexico and Costa Rica refused to let a cruise ship dock because one lab worker from the Duncan case was on board. Central America does not need Ebola.

We're not embracing a powerful central government, we're trying to work around a powerful central government that seems to be dead set on killing us with a variety of plagues - out of arrogance or stupidity. But fortunately, disease control powers are left to the states, and the states where the federal government funneled west Africans went and instituted quarantine policies. Obama was shocked and angered, probably because he had no idea that states could do that. Of course states shouldn't have to be using such work arounds to stop people arriving from west Africa. You'd think it would be simpler to have the State Department just stop issuing travel visas in the affected areas, but that's dismissed as reactionary and racist, even though Canada, the land of socialized medicine and multiculturalism, did exactly that.

Ebola is spread by body fluids and droplets, just like the flu, and is temperature sensitive just like the flu. It's barely transmissible in Africa - just like the flu. In the 2009 worldwide flu pandemic, the US saw over 5,000 deaths. That pandemic also swept through Africa, where it only killed 108 people (a handful in each country) because droplet born, temperature sensitive viruses are so hard to transmit there. Ebola in Canada or Wisconsin might not behave exactly like Ebola in the tropical rain forest. We don't know because it's so deadly that we haven't done all that many studies on it.

Anyone want to chip in and buy gturner a one-way ticket to Omaha? He could hang with Uncle Albert!


Tenth Ebola Patient Headed to U.S. for Treatment

Maybe Marso will agree to let him in his doom bunker?

So we have another active Ebola patient in the country, a Liberian who is in very bad shape. If he dies, will it just prove to the protesters in Ferguson that Ebola is a tool of the white man to kill the black man?

In other Ebola news, tge Democratic Republic of Congo is now ebola free
http://m.bbc.com/news/world-africa-30068324

I'm still waiting for that outbreak to kill us all here.

A three-month Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has ended after claiming at least 49 lives, the country's health minister says.

That's what's happens when they successfully isolate and quarantine from the first onset. The outbreak never went anywhere and didn't spread. With the governors and state health departments on board for that here, and new restrictions placed on returning health-care workers, a significant domestic outbreak has become highly unlikely. In a month or two we will hopefully have a working vaccine that can finish off the outbreak in west Africa.

The first batch of 400 doses of vaccine that Canada shipped to the WHO was sent to African countries that didn't have any Ebola cases. Maybe next time the Canadians will try shipping it direct.

You realize that once an outbreak hits, its kinda too late for the vaccine?

And that handing out vaccines in places that don't have it yet killed outbreaks before they begin?

Also, the video journalist speaks on his time in the ebola ward:
http://m.wsj.com/articles/i-got-ebola-and-survived-1415894355?mobile=y

Vaccinating 400 random people in countries where there isn't any Ebola isn't preventing anything. The importance of even small amounts of an Ebola vaccine is that with it, instead of monitoring people who were potentially exposed as part of contact tracing, you just vaccinate them. Then instead of each victim infecting about two people out of a hundred possible contacts, each victim will infect nobody, or at least nobody that's going to come down with full blown Ebola, hopefully, depending on how soon after possible exposure you got there. Even if there are subsequent cases among the same small group, most of them will have already been vaccinated because of their earlier potential exposures.

Hes dead. http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN0J11D020141117?irpc=932

Sooooo, for American treated patients, we've got a 20 percent mortality rate; one from a case that no one was expecting, and one from a doc who was probanly pretty sick before he flew in.

Still feeling safe, myself.

Btw the doctor who did wasn't just pretty sick when he got here, he was already more or less on life support. His kidneys had shut down with zero function, he couldn't breath on his own, and he was in a coma. That is why he did slightly more than a day later. He was just too far gone by the time they got him there.

The lengthy process just to get him here was too long.

gturner can commence to fapping now, ebola has shown up in India.

Now we must face a world without call centers and cheap app developers.

They have him quarantined, and he's already past the highly infectious stage. If he was in the US at this point, we'd see a picture of him hugging Obama in the oval office.

Hopefully, African aid workers traveling to help in Norway won't be prevented from entering the country where their donations are so desperately needed.

Ebola vaccine passes the first human trial.

CDC workers accidentally exposed to ebola in Atlanta this week. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/12/2...posed-technician-to-virus.html?_r=0&referrer=

And yet, as tafkats just posted, it's at least ten times deadlier than the flu, which based on the bit tafkats just posted has a less than 2% kill rate. Statistics!