Ebola in The USA

it is alarming how little the experts seem to know about this bug. The fatality rate runs between 50 and 90% depending on who is talking, the number of people infected are guesses, and we long ago blew past the worst case projections on how bad this outbreak could get. The experts might as well stop talking, at this point they are only embarrassing themselves. We first found this bug almost 40 years ago, and yet we are hopeless and clueless.

Also, the virus used to be more deadly, but quickly mutated to the point it wasn't dangerous. Kind of like Creighton's Andromeda Strain.

Maybe. but just a month ago most every "journalist" was going with the 50% rate and now WHO says 70% amongst those who get what ever passes for medical care in what ever passes for hospitals where they are, with some unknown but assumed to be large number of those never getting counted by the establishment for having ebola being assumed to have a higher death rate. Who knows what the death rate is. Wake me in about a year and then we can talk numbers with a little actual knowledge of the facts.

I was not aware of its mutation. (This is not an uncommon thing since most viral outbreaks eventually mutate into a chronic form). Someone said that's what ultimately happened to the Spanish Flu.

HAwk, your concern with our "cluelessness" must recognize politics and anthropology along with pure medicine and science.
I did a very brief minerals assignment in DRC during the 80's s a sabbatical work to help remap and quantitate some of Congos vast reserves of pitchblende and cobalt "Shows" (Congo always seemed to have a huge mineral wealth and an infrastructure like a totalitarian feudal state)
-Back then Mobutu Sesi Seko was "The man" and while I was there 75 dys of some of the most unpleasant existence-( I was professionally intrigued by the emplacement of the mineral wealth and alternatively disgusted and terrified at how the wealth was developed by humans ). The northern part of DRC(or Zaire in those days) was then, even more a virgin land with few roads. The rivers were the major travel links and the Ebola River , where the disease was first found, was a market route to the Congo (Zaire) River and to Coquillhtville at the frontier (where I was disembarked).
I recall, even back then, Ebola was well known to be carried by these big "Flying fox" bats that lived all over the place.The PSF doctors ere working with intial outbreaks and I think they needed some better help , not with medicine, but with stuff that anthropologists do, like assess customs that allow these diseases to spread. The cutom of washing the dead for burial was discovered to be a huge vector for thi disease. People don't change thir practices easily (IMHO). Ive been reading about how we are finally getting some native anthropologists in there to give help on getting people to avoid touching corpses of those killed by the disease (These Anthropologists re natives from those countries nd of the major tribes whove been trained in anthropology in Europe will be listened to (hopefully)).
I don't think anyones clueless, Its that the pread of the disease is gonna make a great movie some day when the full story of how"Bush meat" bats got awy and took the disease beyond the EBola River Valley and into West AFrica by flying foxes and fruit bats who are "subclinically infected" , got away from their rickety meat cages and had begun this latest spread f the disease.

Well, this is a bit alarming.

Hitting close to home.

http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2014/09/29/north-texas-hospital-evaluating-patient-for-potential-ebola-exposure/

without shutting down air traffic there is no hope of containing bugs. With all of the ship traffic in the global economy we are almost hopeless. This is in fact the likely route that we get to making a global government...a bug epidemic. One way or another global government is coming soon.

we don't have all the vectors and traditions that would promote the spread of ebola.
Im more worried about Hanta, because its a homegrown pathogen that's evolved to copy itself and move around by available means in this hemisphere

It means humans of course. lol

go seek your truth in a bowl of Krishna rice krispies. Try not to involve yourself with things of which you have not a clue

my vocabulary is adequate to demolish anything you've offered to date. When you extract your head from your anus maybe then youll be able to see straight and discuss intelligently.

I sorta doubt it.

You call me "farmergirl" and then in the next sentence accuse me of ad hominems. you apparently don't even listen to yourelf

Still, I imagine you wouldn't want a case to pop up in your neighborhood.

I haven't been following this closely lately, but I did read there is concern by US 'experts' about the matter of getting rid of medical waste (also not something I'm recently knowledgeable about).

Did I hear this right?
Case of Ebola in Texas?
http://www.9news.com/story/news/2014/09/29/dallas-hospital-isolates-possible-ebola-patient/16461533/

Confirmed by CNN.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/30/health/ebola-us/index.html

Sing it with me (with apologies to John Mellencamp)
E-bo-L-A in the U-S-A! ♫♪

I shouldn't joke.

Oy.

From Dallas:

Authorities have begun the task of tracing the infected Liberian national to identify all those with whom he may of come in contact with since arriving in the US. Three Dallas rescue workers and several ER workers are currently under observation.

I imagine that the folks who have figured out they were on the plane with this guy are scared silly. I would hope that by now they have all been contacted by the CDC, and been examined by doctors.

Fortunately the virus can't go airborne as easily as others, so just breathing the same air as this guy isn't going to put these people in serious jeopardy, but I would not want the be the person or persons who came home after the trip and said "Honey, I sat next to a most interesting guy from Liberia on the plane, and we had a interesting but chilling discussion about ebola.Thank God he didn't show any signs of being sick so I wasn't worried."

Now when we meet anyone on the street or in a public place, before we shake hands or give a hug, we ask "Meet anyone from Liberia lately?" (only kidding)

It doesn't appear that the people of Dallas and surrounding areas are all that stressed about this case. I know I'm not, but if a second one pops up as a result of contact with this guy, I think the level of concern will rise considerably.

My daughter works in an Apple store and so she comes into contact with a lot of different people every day. If it's really as tough to catch this as the experts tell us, she and her co-workers should be fine, but the store has laid out copious amounts of hand sanitizer.

Apparently a lot of foreign national have come to the US to buy as many IPhone 6"s as they can so they can bring them home with them and sell them for two to three times the price. Apple has a policy of selling only 2 phones to a customer at a time, but these people buy their two and then return to the end of the line.In the past Apple has had a policy of allowing their store managers to refuse additional sales to people they believed were resellers. Apparently they did away with that policy for IPhone 6. My daughter doesn't know the specific reason, but the general consensus among the store managers is that Apple doesn't want to risk public or legal attention for what might be considered discrimination. Most of the resellers (in Dallas) at least appear to be coming from North African and Middle Eastern nations.

I've no idea why the infected Liberian man came to Dallas, and am not suggesting it was to buy an IPhone, but just pointing out how one person with the disease could come into contact with a whole lot of people in a single day.

If ebola can come to our shores, then any virus can, and if it's a highly contagious one, we could have a very big problem. It's sobering.