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Obama Administration Seeks $58M To Put (Partly) Toward Fighting Ebola
The Associated Press reports (here, as carried by the Washington Times) that The White House is asking Congress for $58 million above current levels to speed the production of promising drugs to fight Ebola and additional flexibility for the Department of Homeland Security to cope with the thousands of unaccompanied Central American children still arriving at the southern border. ... [T]he $58 million request for the Centers for Disease Control would help the agency ramp up production and testing of the experimental drug called ZMapp, which has shown promise in fighting the Ebola epidemic in western Africa. It would also help keep the development and manufacturing of two Ebola vaccines on track. The White House request also seeks to use $10 million in unused balances at the Department of Health and Human Services to help with the Ebola outbreak in Africa. The scarcity of ZMapp, the most promising treatment known for Ebola, is such that the third U.S. doctor to have been returned after being infected by the disease will be treated without it.
And then, the only sane thing to do that is suspend commercial flights and quarantine people who are coming from that part of the world, is not done.
When you compare against all the other assinine things that $58 M have been spent on (to the tune of being merely a drop of the bucket in larger spending bills) within pork programs, we should be jumping to take advantage of helping in this situation. The level of waste in this kind of spending is close to zero.
A red carpet rolled out, you say?
From Africa to the United States, you say?
And the Americans who have been flown back are illegal, you say?
I am only giving you credit for having an IQ higher than asphalt because you posted as AC.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Despite what people think Ebola is not very contagious in the western world where personal hygiene is actually practised. Ebola requires prolonged exposure or direct contact with bodily fluids. It's not like a influenza which can easily spread around an office from a simple sneeze.
Personally I was more concerned about the SARS outbreak a few years ago than a few people coming and going from a "part of the world" which has an Ebola epidemic.
You people are horrible.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I dont know which part you havent heard about Monsanto buying shares...inside information about being subsided by government, maybe?
Given that it can only be transferred through bodily fluid I don't think it's really that big of a risk to treat patients in the states. We have isolation wards for a reason.
My impression is that the whole reason it's even spreading in Africa is because of the culture there -- people don't trust the doctors and bad burial practices and lots of ignorance and superstition.
Are you seriously trying to imply that the only reason to address an ebola outbreak is to score popularity points? Or are you saying that your personal bias is so strong that if Obama's name is on it, it must be bad? Even when it's as no-brain obvious as this?
Reporter: "Thousands of people are dying from a massive outbreak of a terrible disease."
Reporter: "Libya's health infrastructure has been completely overwhelmed. A number of hospitals, including their largest, have been closed and quarantined."
Obama: "Yeah, we should do something about that."
Mr D from 63: "Oh ho! Look who's jumping on the bandwagon!"
Sure Ebola /could/ mutate to spread easier... but the common flu could more easily mutate again to become more deadly, and it's already here.
Fast mutation does not equal fast evolution. RNA based viruses mutate a lot faster than DNA based organisms because single helix RNA has less error correction than DNA. Single celled organisns mutate more than multicelled organisms that can protect their reproductive cells inside their outher layers, cells with nuclei have lower mutation rates than un-nucleated cells, and there are several other changes in organisms that reduce the mutation rate further which I won't bother to go into. But that doesn't translate to the organisms evolving faster. Any organism that survives to reproduce is pretty close to being a perfect fit for its environment. That's why evolution isn't about big, sudden jumps, A big change positions an organism so that it is much farther from perfectly adapted, and only a small change has any chance of positioning the organism closer to perfectly adapted for its local conditions, without overshooting. Viruses are so simple that just about any change is a big change. If, just for the sake of argument, we say that only 1 in 100 mutations in an 'advanced' organism (i.e. flounder, oak trees or us) is an improvement, then only 1 in 100,000 or 1 in a Million or an even lower ratio of changes is similarly beneficial to a virus. ,where maybe 20% of each generation dies of that one mutation before final assembly, but no evolution happens at all.
Imagine a giraffe, that is within a couple of inches of being the perfect height to reach the highest branches it needs to eat from. Figure that if a single mutation made a difference of 12 feet to that giraffe's height, the mutants would all have tremendous problems with pumping blood up to their brains, and be very unsuccessful. but a girraffe may have 20 different genes that each affect height in a small way, so a mutation can occur that gets that giraffe's descendents those couple of inches that actually count as an improvement, without overshooting wildly. A virus, on the other hand, may have one short gene for making a simple repeating structure that tiles to make its whole outer shell, and any change makes a structure that won't tile at all. The virus can mutate a lot, but every single time it gets any possible mutation on that gene, it dies without reproducing at all. Huge amounts of mutation are possible
I do like the idea of people choosing to donate for various projects, if they can be confident the government won't transfer the donations to other areas. I think even a system where people have to pay a given amount of taxes, but get to decide how much they want to go to what government projects would be an improvement.
Who is John Cabal?
The only reason they attached these bills together is so that if republicans vote down the human trafficing, the democrats can complain that republicans want everybody to get ebola and die. Seriously... I know both sides play this game, but it's time we stop allowing spending bills to cover multiple, entirely unrelated projects no matter which "side" you're on, and dismanlte the whole system of riders that accomplish the same thing.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Yes... these are separate issues and should be voted on separately. I won't do the rant I did in response to an earlier post, but spending bills need to be for lone or related projects. They only do this so that when someone votes "no" because of the border issue they can be accused of wanting people to die from Ebola.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
ZMapp is not a mass-produced medication. It is an experimental treatment. Calling it "scarce" gives entirely the wrong impression -- it is amazing that it is available for clinical use at all.
It's certainly worth it to produce ZMapp in significant quantities -- people would rather take an untested drug than try to survive Ebola -- but there is no "scarcity" here. Perhaps if many people wish to try it we'll have a better idea if it actually works.
Disclaimer: I am not a citizen of the US, but I am in favor of any actions my government will take to help fight ebola.
Maybe you should think for twenty seconds before shooting your mouth off.
- It is still early enough that it is (relatively) cheap to contain the disease. If the disease is left to run amok, it is going to be astronomically more expensive to fight. When should action be taken? When the disease crosses into the Europe? Into North America? Into the US?
- This is a valuable opportunity to learn the most effective measures to fight a major epidemic. Americans seems to be take the terrorism threat very seriously, maybe you could simply see the money spent as part of that effort. The lessons learned here could be useful in case of a biological attack. It would be drop in the ocean of US defense spending, anyways.
Honestly, I find ridiculous (and abhorrent) your reduction of Obama's effort to political pandering. I sure hope the US Congress is more open minded than you, because nothing would ever get done if every Bill was turned down when it came from the opposing party. But from reading your post, that's probably what you want.
personal hygiene is actually practised
Quite right. Simple measures
Wash your hands, cover your mouth while coughing, seal the gloves of your suit with duct tape, stay home from work, use a glovebox, Get plenty of sleep and exercise, decontaminate yourself with a disinfectant shower, manage your stress, ensure that the air is filtered and sterilized,, drink plenty of fluids, decontaminate and sterilize your garbage, and eat healthy food.
a fraction of a fighter jet for that!
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
You want to shut down all travels from Africa when only 4 countries have a significant number of Ebola case? You have no idea of the size of Africa, do you?
outbreak and threat do not mean the same thing. Having an outbreak significantly increases the threat (if that is seriously all you care about).
null
You should have been around during the Bush administration. People took everything the man ever said, twisted it, and started frothing at the mouth condemning it. It was ugly - this is mild in comparison.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
ZMapp is produced by a private firm
If you follow the money, it'll lead back to a grant funded by the Federal government (in this case, both the U.S. and Canadian governments).
Ebola therapeutics were (and probably still are) anticipated to be a profit-less product segment, as far as the civilian commercial market is concerned. The affected population can't afford any resulting product, plus previous outbreaks were sporadic with small numbers of fatalities. The only potential "customers" -- at the time research was initiated over a decade ago -- were governments who might be interested in stockpiling treatments for future bio-defense use.
Now, a few of the large pharmaceutical companies still maintain and fund tropical-diseases divisions, despite the lack of profitability (for instance, Glaxo's division is largely a legacy of British Colonial days, which they've carried ever since). But I highly doubt a small biotech like Mapp Biopharm would ever do so without being paid most of the cost up-front.
Keep it up. More and more people will figure out what fever-swamp nuts you are. Keep damaging you brand and maybe we'll be rid of you soon.