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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
I heard the woman on the radio yesterday. Seemed like a sweet woman, but sounded very much like that Aunt we all have whose mind cannot be changed by anything, and who speaks in nothing but implication. "Wellll, she WAS in Uganda, and she DOES have these red bumps. I don't THINK it's monkeypox, but I'm going to keep saying monkeypox until you believe it's monkeypox and overreact, and then I can say that I told you it certainly wasn't monkeypox. Monkeypox."
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
Addressing the points you raised...
1, "Potential" daughter, because she was adopting the girl. Maternity is not a factor here; it's an adoption. I'm assuming it's pretty rare for maternity tests on adopted children to come back positive, but maybe I'm just stupid that way...so I figured we'd pass on the test.
2, It doesn't matter where the daughter was during the phone call. My point is that the phone call happened (to quote myself) "after I've already come back to the United States," which is the problem. If you go to a third world country and pick up a disease, look into it before you walk around the main terminal, eh?
3, No, it doesn't. But someone doesn't go all the way to Uganda NOT to see the child they are thinking of adopting there. I don't think I'm reading too much into it by assuming there was contact of some form, especially since she knew the daughter's symptoms, ya know?
4, The problem is that a person who had been exposed a disease in a third world (and, if the term existed, fourth world) country was already walking around in public when they first started questioning it, AND they were fuzzy on the details of the symptoms. This is, as epidemiologists, say "very bad."
But hey, maybe you're right...maybe it's not the adopting mother who is stupid here. There is something odd about posting a comment that amounts to "why don't you read it first" without really understanding the comment you were referring to.
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