Ebola in The USA

A pandemic could kill hundreds of millions of people in a few month, climate change not so much. Beside, we know very little about the effects of humans on Earths climate, certainly not enough to do anything about it.

Louie Gohmert suspects ‘undocumented Democrats’ are bringing Ebola across the border

By David Edwards

Thursday, August 14, 2014 13:22 EDT



Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) warned this week that refugees — who he called “undocumented Democrats” — fleeing violence in Central America could be bringing diseases like Ebola into the United States.

“This administration doesn’t have the desire, doesn’t have the will to actually stop it,” Gohmert told radio host Tim Constantine on Wednesday. “Because they see people coming across as undocumented Democrats. And so, they want to keep the surge of people coming in illegally, even though it includes a big spike in Other-Than-Mexicans, OTMs as we call them.”

“It includes a spike in people from countries where terrorism abounds,” he continued. “We have people coming in from countries where Ebola is located.”

“And, gee, since they’re coming across our border, and you know, they don’t get checked, and most of them don’t get really thoroughly checked, they could be coming in with disease that we simply do not need.”

The Texas Republican insisted that he was not “fear mongering.”

“It’s silly not to be more careful,” he said.

Gohmert’s remarks begin at about the 11 minute mark in the following clip from TPNN, broadcast Aug 13, 2014.

Clearly these two displayed considerable bravery in risking their lives to treat people infected with the disease, but as CNN reported, administering the experimental serum was a "last ditch effort" to save them. When you're on death's door, it's not courage that is required to accept the only chance you have to live.

my god but your a sarcastic asshole

Ha Ha. Maybe... but at least my grammar is generally pretty good.

Personally I'm more worried about the article I posted previously. That idiotic slum in Liberia is probably about to explode with tens of thousands of cases of Ebola.

so, you take nonsense serious, or what?

it is a gross exaggeration that resonates because of the kernel of truth. Obama cares not at all about personal liberty, he will advocate for more government power in almost every circumstance, and he has no trouble employing manipulation to get what he wants sometimes even on trivial matters.

Ok, sorry, didn't understand then.
I am 100% with what you wrote here.


sorry for the misunderstandig.

Good news, it seems -

http://www.sfgate.com/news/science/article/Monkey-study-Ebola-vaccine-works-needs-booster-5739839.php

Monkey study: Ebola vaccine works, needs booster
By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer
Updated 11:31 am, Sunday, September 7, 2014

WASHINGTON (AP) — New monkey studies show that one shot of an experimental Ebola vaccine can trigger fast protection, but the effect waned unless the animals got a booster shot made a different way.

Some healthy people are rolling up their sleeves at the National Institutes of Health for the first human safety study of this vaccine in hopes it eventually might be used in the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

The NIH on Sunday published some of the key animal research behind those injections. One reason the vaccine was deemed promising was that a single dose protected all four vaccinated monkeys when they were exposed to high levels of Ebola virus just five weeks later, researchers reported in the journal Nature Medicine.

Is five weeks fast enough?

That's in line with other vaccines routinely used today, and fortunately it didn't take multiple doses to trigger that much protection, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whose employees led the work.

The bigger challenge is that the protection wanes over time.

Researchers exposed monkeys to Ebola 10 months after vaccination, and this time only half were protected.

Partial protection is better than none, Fauci said. But the goal is long-lasting protection, so it was time to try booster shots. The vaccine is made with a chimpanzee cold virus, used as a delivery system for pieces of an Ebola gene. The researchers tried simply giving another dose as a booster two months later. That didn't work well enough.

So they tried a different approach called "prime-boost." The first dose, to prime the immune system, was that original chimp virus-based Ebola vaccine. But for the booster two months later, they made vaccine a different way. They encased the same Ebola gene pieces inside a poxvirus that's used to make a vaccine against smallpox. (Neither vaccine type can cause Ebola.)

This time, all four monkeys still were protected 10 months after the initial shot.

With the Ebola crisis rapidly worsening, the World Health Organization said Friday that it would try to speed the use of certain experimental products, including two vaccine candidates. The WHO said that in November, it expects early results from first-stage studies to see if the vaccine appears safe and triggers an immune reaction in people. That would help determine whether to test the shots' effectiveness in health care workers in West Africa.

Small animal and human safety studies cannot guarantee that experimental vaccines really work in an outbreak, Fauci said. That's why he emphasizes public health measures such as isolating the sick, quarantine and, especially for health workers, using personal protection equipment.

"Make sure people do what works," he said.

The booster-shot findings illustrate an added complexity to speeding an experimental vaccine into the field. The initial first phase study results would shed light only on that "priming" vaccine made from the chimp cold virus, Fauci said. The poxvirus booster step would be tested later only if scientists decided the initial vaccine was promising enough.

Still, manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline has said it plans to begin manufacturing up to 10,000 doses of the initial NIH-developed vaccine.

Canadian researchers created a similar Ebola vaccine that works in monkeys. Manufacturer NewLink Genetics of Ames, Iowa, said first-stage safety testing in healthy volunteers is set to begin in a few weeks.

It's wonderful that the two US healthcare workers repatriated to the US have recovered, and it's wonderful that there were no "accidents" with the virus.

My point in starting this thread was not to protest the decision to bring these two back home for care, and, in fact, I acknowledged that the risk involved wasn't great enough to prevent them from returning.

If I was protesting anything it was not only the clearly wrong claim by at least one "scientist" that there was "zero risk," but the general over reliance we have on the claims and assurances of "scientists" and especially those employed by the government.

This is hardly a salvo in the GOP "War on Science." I have an enormous respect for and "belief" in the value of science, and, in general, scientists, but it is foolish to think that scientists are significantly less afflicted with the foibles of human nature that the rest of us.

Shortly before the two healthcare workers were returned to the US, the head of the CDC testified before congress about the number of "accidents" at his facility and the fact that the its culture was not sufficiently safety focused. This is a facility that houses samples of the deadliest diseases known to man, and while it may be overstating the risk, there have been numerous novels and movies made about apocalyptic results of "accidents" at facilities like the CDC.

Our expectations are that in dealing with such dangerous killers, for their own protection if not for the protection of the rest of us, workers at CDC would be the most safety conscious people on the planet, but obviously not. Familiarity breed contempt and complacency, and the latter is definatly a problem if you are dealing with extremely dangerous organisms.

There probably never was a serious threat of the ebola virus finding it's way into the general public, but I'm sure that the publicity around it reduced that threat even more, which is a good thing.

There are reasons why people have reacted differently to the statements made by "scientists," about ebola and global warming, and one of them is a healthy lack of trust in what we are being told. Just as there was no rational reason to panic over ebola, there is no rational reason to panic over global warming.

There is nothing inherent in scientists to engender distrust by the public, but there is in government workers and those funded by the government.

Scientists suffer from unintentional bias, and from the pressures and urges to achieve fame and funding, which puts them in the same place as most of the rest of us. Generally, an adherence to the scientific method make them more objective than the average person, but this, obviously, isn't to say that they are perfectly objective.

Introduce politics and ideology into the mix and scientists can become less objective that the rest of us

If global warming is as dire a condition as some say, it still won't lead to the destruction of the world or the eradication of the human species. It won't even lead to the end of civilization.

There also isn't really anything we can realistically do about it. If everyone in the US and Europe reduced their carbon footprint to zero, the threat would not be eliminated although the economies of these nations would be in ruins.

Whatever the worst of it may be, it will also take a long time for it to materialize fully. People don't respond well to threats that are decades away.

I'm very skeptical of the global warming predictions. Maybe in some important way they are different than all the dire predictions of scientists before that didn't materialize, but I'm not aware of what that important way is. However it is not an extraordinary mistrust of scientists that motivates my skepticism, it is an extreme mistrust of politicians and ideologues, and like it or not global warming is as politicized and ideological a matter as anything we've seen.

I'm open to the possibility that some of the predicted effects will actually transpire, but am not willing to see our economy trashed for a quixotic effort to prevent them. Our time and money will be better spent on how to adapt to a possibly changed world.

My count is that we have brought the virus here three times so far.




Not sure about that but politics and ideology make it almost impossible to run effective quarantines in the USA. When we do get hit with a bad bug we are pretty surely fucked.

And people still take ths hoax seriously????

A bug with a historical 90% kill rate, one that is currently mutating extremely quickly....ya, we take that bug seriously.

Com'on now, do you really take this that seriously?

Be more critical about this nonsense!!!!! And PLEASE put some logic in it!
In stead of scare mongering!!!



anyone believing this hoax is very very mad! Ah well, the whole world is mad, so....

I see your point....the experts are pretty sure that this bug can only spread in warm places like Africa, and so long as it stays in Africa who cares. Just so long as there are enough healthy africans to do the mining all is fine.