Ebola in The USA

Finally, you're making some sense.

It is alarming to find out that my town has only 1.8 hospital beds per 1000 people. In 1970 the national average was more than 9 per 1000, but it has been steadily shrinking. If anything ever did happen hospitals would be instantly overwhelmed.

http://www.beckershospitalreview.com/capacity-management/308-stats-on-acute-care-beds-by-hospital-referral-region.html

Why Ebola triggers massive right-wing hysteria
http://www.salon.com/2014/10/09/why_ebola_triggers_massive_right_wing_hysteria_partner/

Researcher Jonathan Haidt is the architect of the “moral foundations” theory that suggests that political inclinations, at least in modern times, are rooted in five different foundations: harm, fairness, ingroup, authority, and purity. Liberals and conservatives weigh these five considerations very differently. For instance, liberals are more likely than conservatives to factor in whether an action causes harm when deciding if it’s wrong or not. Liberals also worry more about fairness and have more regard for people that are outside of their “group” than conservatives. Conservatives, on the other hand, put far more trust in authority. Conservatives are also far more obsessed with “purity” and far more likely to get hung up on the idea that the body “is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants,” as Haidt explains.

You can see these differences play out with the response to ebola. For liberals, the proper response to ebola patients is to reduce harm by caring for them and to treat the people who got it fairly, by understanding that they didn’t do anything wrong to get it.

But ebola touches, for conservatives, two big, red buttons. First, it’s a disease, so of course it’s going to set off the fears of contamination that Haidt demonstrates plague conservatives far more than liberals. Second of all, conservatives associate ebola with people who are different from them—from different countries, often of different races—and they have little regard for people in “out groups”, which is Haidt’s term for people who are different. And because conservatives are less worried about harming others or being fair, it becomes easy for them to demonize people with ebola, demand that they be left to die without care, and simply kept from “contaminating” the rest of us.

You see this tension with many other issues. Abortion? Conservatives are grossed out by women who gave up their “purity” by having sex, but liberals are more worried about the harm done women who lose abortion rights. Gay rights? Conservatives see gays as impure and different, but liberals are worried about treating them fairly. Ferguson protests and the Mike Brown shooting? Conservatives love authority and support the police, especially against black protesters that are seen as an “out” group. Liberals worry about the harm done to Brown and the protesters and are angry about the unfairness of a policeman shooting an unarmed man or attacking unarmed protesters. Indeed, the ebola panic quite resembles the way many conservatives reacted in the early days of AIDS, demonizing sufferers as disgusting people who should be isolated and left to die.

Once you know these patterns, the conservative reaction to ebola—to panic, to treat the people who have it like pariahs, to demand that we shut off all contact with outsiders, and to even reject the idea of caring for the afflicted—was entirely predictable. Even if they didn’t have cynical political motivations, which many clearly do, their worldview makes it nearly impossible for them to react with compassion instead of fear.

Are you talking about "acute care" beds? Are you using "acute care" to mean"intensive care"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_care

AKA normal hospital beds, not nursing homes.

Nope, that 's not it of course.
You are , finally, 'getting it' . Took some time though.

There is a difference.

Americans are soooo stupid

sow how is extreme caution a sign of stupidity?
Id think a continuation of my tribal customs of washing afflicted corpses by family members as an act of stupidity.

ANYWAY, I know my Halloween Costume

What is your point? What is Scott Walker doing about it? Is there Ebola in Madison?

Not at all. You've been singing through the wrong orifice until that particular post.

What exactly do you mean now? I am very curious.

I did some digging into the rRT-PCR assay that was referenced earlier in this thread. The lower limit of detection (analytical sensitivity) of the assay is 7500 viral copies per mL (page 63 of the package insert. This is the same insert that was being quoted in a previous post (intended use section, page 4). Previous viral quantitation studies have shown that ebolavirus clinical virology typically results in early symptoms (fever, chills, other flu-like symptoms) at about that same viremic load. Patients presenting at the onset of symptoms (day 0; 2-21 days after contact, typically 6-8 days) demonstrated 8K-1M copies/mL (figure 2 for data junkies). In other words, doing a PCR on an asymptomatic individual could potentially result in a false negative result. PCR reduces the window period of detection by 24-48 hours over antigen assays (same article as above). Those data are from ebola outbreaks of the Sudan ebola virus strain and it is currently unknown if the same is true of the ebola Zaire strain.

From the EZ1 package insert (previously quoted)


Package insert language is carefully selected and pre-approved by the FDA. This is an investigational use assay that has not yet undergone rigorous field trials (it is now!). The intended use verbiage and the clinical sensitivity will be amended once the results of the testing of the current outbreak are analyzed. I've written many package inserts for viral diagnostic assays in my career. There is nothing untoward in this insert at this stage of development in the assay.

One reason that the number of beds are down is because how rapidly the number of days for in patient treatments have decreased. My wife's surgery had her out of the hospital in one day, not the week as it would have even ten years ago. I've had two bladder cancer surgeries to remove tumors and I was out of the hospital the same day. And I've heard that maternity patients are regularly sent home the next day now.

For one thing you brought out facts in that post without outlandish conclusions.

Just because they aren't outlandish to others doesn't mean they aren't outlandish.

http://www.chron.com/opinion/outlook/article/Dragsbaek-Five-preventable-threats-more-menacing-5812548.php

There's no doubt about it: Ebola is scary.

The disease has a high mortality rate and no known cure. No vaccine is available to halt its spread. And now it has arrived in Dallas - the first confirmed case in the U.S.

A media firestorm is brewing, and the public is understandably concerned. But the threat of Ebola spreading in the U.S. is nominal. Highly advanced disease surveillance systems, well-developed quarantine and isolation laws, adequate hygiene and sanitation, and top-notch medical services will keep the U.S. from facing a crisis like the one sweeping through West Africa.

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be worried about infectious diseases. In fact, there are at least five other preventable threats right now that are far more menacing - and Texans would be wise to pay close attention to them.

1 Influenza: Last year, widespread influenza in Texas led to the deaths of 20 children, most of whom were unvaccinated. The flu vaccine is widely available, but influenza vaccination rates among adults in Texas remain low. In Texas, only one in three young adults (who are most likely to have small children in the home and to transmit the virus to them) were immunized against influenza last season. Children died not from a rare infectious disease, but from a vaccine-preventable disease that we didn't protect them from.

1 Pertussis: In 2013, Texas reported 3,985 cases of pertussis, or whooping cough - more than any other state in the U.S. This disease is particularly dangerous for infants, which is why the vaccine is recommended for pregnant women and caregivers. Yet only about one in four adults who live with infants have been immunized against it.

1 Neglected tropical diseases: Chagas, Chikungunya, dengue and other so-called neglected tropical diseases, or NTDs, are all circulating in Texas. Several of these diseases cause long-term disabilities and even heart defects. Yet despite their potentially devastating impact, NTDs are not always diagnosed properly, and many cases go unreported due to inadequate surveillance and a lack of funding for vaccine development. To determine the true burden of disease, the Legislature should appropriate funds to expand the capacities of existing clinics to detect a host of NTD threats.

1 Measles: So far this year, 595 cases of measles have been reported nationally - as many as the previous five years combined and the highest number in 20 years. Texas has seen its share of cases, with outbreaks in Tarrant County and a few cases in Houston. Unlike Ebola, measles is an airborne disease and is highly contagious. Simply being in the same room with someone who has measles can - and almost always does - cause an unvaccinated person to be infected. A highly effective vaccine once nearly eradicated the disease, but it has recently made a comeback because of a surge in the number of children who are not fully immunized, which brings us to the fifth threat.

1 Vaccine refusal: Texas allows parents to opt out of vaccines for their children based on personal beliefs. This means that your child could be in a school with unvaccinated children, who would present a significant risk of spreading diseases like measles, chicken pox, meningitis or some other vaccine-preventable disease if there were an outbreak. In 2011-12, nearly 30,000 children in Texas schools were unvaccinated, most of them for nonmedical reasons likely due to fears about vaccine safety that have been thoroughly refuted by the medical community. But due to regulations about how data are collected and stored, Texas parents don't have access to any information about the immunization rates in their children's schools. The parents of a child with an immune-suppressing illness have rights, too. The virus of vaccine refusal is based on pseudoscience, but it's spreading every day in Texas, and we're poised for a preventable tragedy.

Having spent six years living and working in Sierra Leone in a rural missionary hospital and later as a relief worker during the civil war, I've been watching the spread of Ebola in my former home with a heavy heart and a deep understanding of the overwhelming challenges facing the country. Given Sierra Leone's brutally hot climate and lack of resources and public health infrastructure, it's no surprise that the epidemic has quickly escalated to a public health emergency and humanitarian crisis.

But we can and will avert a widespread outbreak in the U.S. The real threat is complacency and a disregard for the scientific evidence of vaccine safety. Texas must increase funding to fight vaccine-preventable disease, reform our laws to prioritize public health, and respond to constant threats that jeopardize our community's health.



Anna C. Dragsbaek is president and CEO of The Immunization Partnership, a nonprofit organization based in Austin.

Nope, made scary!!!

No doubt? get real, mate!

That's been my point all the way along. Ebola has been over-hyped. Where I have problems with your cant is it basically seeks to replace one over-hyped scare with a plethora of other scary undocumented hoo-ha.

You need to get a grip, chief. Tone down the wild eyed undocumented conspiracy poop.