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Monkeypox Scare Grounds Flight In Chicago
Hugh Pickens writes "AP reports that when a Delta Airlines flight touched down at Midway International Airport in Chicago, the passengers looked out the window to see the jet surrounded by fire trucks, police cars and ambulances. Health officials came through the door wearing facemasks and other protective gear. As it turns out the bedbugs that infest hotels appear to be the source of red marks on a 50-year old Minnesota woman that prompted health officials to quarantine the jet for fear they were dealing with something much more serious: monkeypox. Lise Sievers called her mother during a layover in Detroit and told her that one of the children she visited and is trying to adopt in Uganda had some pus-filled red bumps and also mentioned she had some small bumps of her own, a rash that she suspected was the handiwork of bedbugs. Those two very different bumps — one with pus, one without — got jumbled up in Siever's mother's mind, and she called a hospital near her Indiana home to ask about treatment for her daughter. 'She told them her daughter is on a flight back from Uganda and has some red bumps which are pussing and what should she do to treat them,' says Roger Sievers. 'She was looking for some general advice.' Health officials feared they were looking for monkeypox, a rare and sometimes fatal disease mostly in found in central and western Africa. After the passengers waited on the plane for a couple of hours, officials brought good news. 'They came back down and told my mom it was bed bug bites and they started releasing people.'"
Well, the alternative is monkey pox!
Somebody needs to find that monkey paw. No doubt some shyster's put a pox on Delta for their dastardly short-sell scheme.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
So, your "privacy" is more important than the risk of carrying a highly contagius and painful disease that could very well require quarantine? Because that's what monkeypox is. I've helped treat people who have it, it spreads quickly as hell, and the enclosed nature of an airplane means that you need to check them out like this.
If you really think that your "privacy" or convenience is more important than the risk of spreading a disease like that to 10, 100 or potentially thousands of people, the world is better off by putting a bullet through your head.
"Hey, I just wanted to ask about treatment for this disease that my potential daughter has in FUCKING UGANDA that I've been exposed to, but I'm not going to really be clear in my mind as to the symptoms, especially after I've already come back to the United States and am walking around in a large metropolitan airport."
Can we start imprisoning people for being idiots yet? Please?
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
As a follow-up, I should point out that TFA saying it is rare is a bit of a misnomer: It's rare in Europe and North America. In Africa, it's not very rare.
She knew it was bedbugs you half-witted retard.
This attitude is exactly why the world is going to be horrendously screwed when the next super flu breaks out. Wild overreactions to highly contagious diseases are the only appropriate reactions. Its one thing to queue up and get groped by the TSA to protect us from the terrorist boogeyman, but quite another to be inconvenienced due to a credible possibility that everyone on the plane may need to shortly check into a hospital along with everyone they've had contact with.
Let me guess, your kids don't get vaccinated either?
by the time you hit the age of 18 then it is unlikely you will live a long and free life here
Citation, please. Or at least some non-rabid babbling, if you can muster it.
One way to avoid a premature death is to make sure that you don't die of a horrible tropical disease you've picked up from someone spreading it around in an aircraft on their way back from Uganda. But thanks for the really insightful perspective.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Seriously, you guys either need to stop posting his spam as stories or just give him the keys to the store and get out of the way. Why is this even considered for a Slashdot story? There's no News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters angle AT ALL. And that's typical of the spam from Hugh Pickens. You ban other spammers, now do the same for him.
a highly contagius and painful disease that could very well require quarantine? Because that's what monkeypox is.
Highly contagious - er, no. Person to person transmission is RARE. So long as infected monkeys or prairie dogs aren't on the plane, the passengers should be pretty safe. Go read up on it again, nurse. It's ignorant people like you that cost a LOT of money. There is nothing worse than an idiot with initiative. Love - a doc.
The good news is the person next to you on the plane does not have monkeypox. The bad news is that person's clothes, and now the plane seats, are infested with bed bugs. Thanks for sharing.
There is no protection from the inconsiderate behavior of your fellow traveller.
The description is incorrect, possibly because it's written by worthless, status-obsessed docs in shiny western offices, where they rarely encounter it.
However, if you had been lessed obsessed about artificially propped-up status and wages, and instead worked on the ground for a year or two in, say, Sierra Leone, or Congo, empirical evidence down there would tell you it's NOT rare, it IS highly contagious. But *fatalities* ARE rare.
Those passengers were lucky they weren't tased, pepper sprayed and dragged off to jail.
This is incredibly cheering news. There are still people in government capable of responding quickly and effectively to try to corral a potentially devastating epidemic.
After all the news about the TSA saving us by groping four year old girls, this is practically redemptive news. Not everyone in government is a fool, even after the thirty year decline.
Still, his point is well taken.
"She told them her daughter is on a flight back from Uganda and has some red bumps which are pussing and what should she do to treat them," Roger Sievers said. "She was looking for some general advice."
I don't know wtf she expected to happen making a report like that to a public hospital. Saying something like that in the US has very obvious and somewhat ridiculous consequences which would be unlikely to occur in most other countries. Despite what many Americans seem to believe there is such a thing as an over-reaction. Based on an unverified, second hand report, the health authorities acted as if there was a confirmed Ebola Zaire infected passenger. Just because someone has red spots does not mean they have Monkey Pox or Ebola FFS. Is it that everyone is terrified of being sued that makes Americans so easy to rile into hysterics? The motto of 'better safe than sorry' is the real infection in this country.
An intelligent response would have been to first verify the symptoms. Hell, they could have called the passenger herself to ask about her symptoms. I think people need to start getting fired for being overly cautious from time to time and not just for erring in the other direction.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
An intelligent response would have been to first verify the symptoms
Which you would have done how ... by preventing people from leaving the plane until you could check her out, right? Right. That's what they actually did.
Hell, they could have called the passenger herself to ask about her symptoms.
So, you're will to risk a big outbreak of a very nasty tropical disease by gambling that the passenger in question will answer her cell phone once they touch down, but before anyone else is allowed to leave the plane, and that if it sounds like the pox in question, that in the five minutes or so you have left before they deplane, you're then going to scramble the authorities to contain the problem?
consequences which would be unlikely to occur in most other countries
So, most other countries, finding out that a passenger on an inbound flight from Uganda is exhibiting signs of what could be the highly contagious monkeypox ... just shrug their shoulders? You know that's not true.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The description is incorrect, possibly because it's written by worthless, status-obsessed docs in shiny western offices, where they rarely encounter it.
It would have been best if they had qualified "Rare" with something like "in the west" or "outside of endemic regions". But textbook descriptions are written by western docs, for the use of western docs, who have enough problems as it is with students/patients who hear hoofbeats and think Zebras.
Bedbugs used to be a thing of the past thanks to the wide spread use of DDT in the 50s. Their reemergence was only a matter of time now that it was banned. But, New York is a melting pot for people all over the world, and someone brought the bugs with them. Eventually they spread like wildfire and the rest they say is history.
Life is not for the lazy.
Oh please, take a real look at how kids waiting for adoption in the US live vs kids in Uganda.
The child in Uganda actually has the symptoms of Monkeypox, right? How do we know the mother doesn't have it and just isn't showing it yet? How is this child not going to infect others when he is bought over to America?
It's funny how all Doctors/Lawyers/"OMG I"M CETIFIEdEd PROFESSIONAL"s seem to post as Anonymous cowards. BTW you think a real doctor would show a "nurse" professional courtesy, instead of using the term disparagingly. It leads me to believe that most ACs are just twelve year old trolls.
If there wasn't a threat why were crews brought in, why were they not letting people off the plane? Ask yourself these kind of things before ever posting again. Be sure to log in first.
Humbly I modify a quote from the parent. "There is nothing worse than an Anonymous Coward with initiative and time." Love - AtomicAdam
They were clearly wrong to make a diagnosis of monkey pox.
They didn't make a diagnosis of monkeypox. They reacted to a hospital employee's considered opinion that it might be monkeypox, and did the standard thing you do to see whether or not it is. It wasn't. They didn't diagnoise it as such.
.. "It's a shame that now hundreds of thousands of people are scared by an actual very contagious disease that is actually spreading from the passengers on that plane, but at least we didn't scare only the passengers on the plane when we heard a report of a person covered with pussy sores flying out of Uganda.
What would you be saying if a planeload of people who did have monkeypox were busy spreading it around all of their familiy members, coworkers, fellow students, bus passengers and everyone else because the very sort of conjecture you think was lame at the hospital was lame in the opposite direction at the CDC? You'd be saying, what
Even a first year med student should have been able to do better than this.
What would they do better? Conclude that pussy sores on a person leaving a tropical area known for monkeypox are just nothing to worry about? Because that's all they had to go on until they could see the person in person. In a big metal tube that person had just been sharing for hours with a couple hundred other people.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
American orphans aren't good enough for her? Pathetic.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Sorry, but no. There are certain criteria under which a quarantine is entirely justified, and due to the mother's (accidental) conflation of two people's symptoms, this appeared to fit these criteria. The fact that the flight originated in Uganda is very important, as there are quite a few endemic pathogens present with which most American doctors could never have anything beyond a textbook familiarity. Anecdote: a coworker of mine and his girlfriend lived in Uganda for several years; at one point she wound up with an infection that required a top-tier medical facility to fly in a specialist from South Africa. Granted, she was a chimp researcher, but the disease was human-transmissable.
I will agree with you on one point: the CDC did f*** up. If they checked enough of the boxes on the "quarantine" matrix for this particular plane, every passenger on that initial flight from Uganda should also have been tracked down and quarantined as they were rather likely to be further transmission vectors.
Again, while an epidemiologist may very well be a doctor, very few doctors are epidemiologists.
Perfect captcha: monkeys.
The best way to puck up a drug resistant flesh eating infection is in the hospital.
They could have taken an hour and 55 minutes off of the hold time with one question: "Does anyone here have a fever?" The fever comes before the bumps.
So they let her off the plane and onto the streets to spread more bedbugs.
This city astounds me sometimes.
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If there wasn't a threat why were crews brought in, why were they not letting people off the plane? Ask yourself these kind of things before ever posting again. Be sure to log in first.
Apparently you've never heard of swatting and the tendency in the US of over-reacting to any simple event.
But the answer was that there wasn't a threat. (Bed bug bites, while unsightly and disgusting are not a threat.)
Nor would real Monkey pox be that contagious requiring full quarantine. It is not spread by casual contact. Even under their own protocol, it was an over-reaction.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I understand the quarantine and think it was justified, but if this was a simple symptom mixup, then why did it take a couple of hours to clear it up?
CDC's quick response: good. Slow follow through: bad.
It's not often that it's good news that it's "just" a bunch of bed bug bites!
I hear it also hurts when meteorites fall on one's head. I suggest wearing a helmet 24/7.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
> the world is better off by putting a bullet through your head.
I find this attitude interesting, albeit somewhat hypocritical. You'd happily help people treat a physical disease, but argue in favor of killing somebody because of their opinion. And if somebody disagrees with that, should they also call for your execution? Taken far enough, that has potential to lead to a lot more deaths than the people who got sick from the bedbugs. We'd all be better off with a bit more tolerance, no?
Actually, it's not that unlikely someone will speak up if asked. If not, they do have these amazing space age thingamajigs that can confirm it in a couple seconds.
Yes, but substantially higher when it a bunch of people in a tight metal tube for hours.
If you are a doc, please stop practicing. You lack the ability to take situations into account before rendering an opinion.
How do people get monkeypox?
Monkeypox can spread to humans from an infected animal through an animal bite or direct contact with the animal’s lesions or body fluids. The disease also can be spread from person to person, although it is much less infectious than smallpox. The virus is thought to be transmitted by respiratory droplets during direct and prolonged face-to-face contact. In addition, it is possible monkeypox can be spread by direct contact with body fluids of an infected person or with virus-contaminated objects, such as bedding or clothing.
These factors mean that while on the craft infection probability sky rockets, and it[s a risk to the next passengers.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Experts are well away of exactly how contagious it is. You are an idiot and know nothing about the medical community in the US.
It's slightly less contagious the small pox. You're problem is you aren't an expert, you don't understand the verbiage, and don't understand what rare means.
Fatalities are 1 to 10 percent.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You're bad karma is from posting ignorant hyperbole like that.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
in pretty much any civilized part of the world, if you report someone is coming into the country with pussing red spots, there going to want to contain.
" Just because someone has red spots does not mean they have Monkey Pox or Ebola FFS"
correct. You seem to be missing the puss bit.
No one is in hysterics. A proper response isn't hysterics.
"An intelligent response would have been to first verify the symptoms."
ah, so you haven't actually studied this sort of thin, have you?
There is a good chance people will down play what they are seeing. Bring in a disease that spreads to people and animals so easily would be a significant problem.
These disease are hard enough to shut down, giving people a chance to depart to the 4 winds before doing and verification would have been irresponsible.
Of course, if they didn't do this an it turned out to actually be monkeypox, you would be talking about incompetence of Americans and stupidity. Cause people like you are fucking twats always looking for some reason to whine.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
..... If there wasn't a threat why were crews brought in, why were they not letting people off the plane?
Corporate PR, legal liabilities/regulatory compliance, international diplomacy -there are a host of legitimate reasons why the events should have unfolded just as it did. Having said that, the explanation FTFA is that some misinformation was communicated that lead the folks at the CDC taking a "worst case scenario" approach.
========== "Hello World" in my programming language of choice: ATG - LET THERE BE LIFE - TAG ==========
Ok, so all they have to do is check 200 people. Say, one every 30 seconds?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
It's entirely feasible using ear thermometers with disposable cones and more than one person taking readings.
Keep in mind, the longer and more intrusive such checks are, the more people will try to avoid them.
by the time you hit the age of 18 then it is unlikely you will live a long and free life here
Citation, please. Or at least some non-rabid babbling, if you can muster it. One way to avoid a premature death is to make sure that you don't die of a horrible tropical disease you've picked up from someone spreading it around in an aircraft on their way back from Uganda. But thanks for the really insightful perspective.
This article is really all the citation I need to prove my point.
And you trust a plane-load of tired, usually dehydrated, and currently alarmed passengers to accurately gauge and honestly report their own body temps? It's a good thing you don't handle events like these for a living.
Just out of curiosity, why do you say airplane passengers are usually dehydrated?