Slashdot Mirror
Obama Presses Leaders To Speed Ebola Response
mdsolar writes with the latest plan from the U.S. government to fight the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, and a call for more help from other nations by the President. President Obama on Tuesday challenged world powers to accelerate the global response to the Ebola outbreak that is ravaging West Africa, warning that unless health care workers, medical equipment and treatment centers were swiftly deployed, the disease could take hundreds of thousands of lives. "This epidemic is going to get worse before it gets better," Mr. Obama said here at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he met with doctors who had just returned from West Africa. The world, he said, "has the responsibility to act, to step up and to do more. The United States intends to do more." Even as the president announced a major American deployment to Liberia and Senegal of medicine, equipment and 3,000 military personnel, global health officials said that time was running out and that they had weeks, not months, to act. They said that although the American contribution was on a scale large enough to make a difference, a coordinated assault in Africa from other Western powers was essential to bringing the virus under control.
When the populace actively attack medical workers, violently disrupt quarantines, and engage in ebola spreading funerary customs? 3000 soldiers seems hardly enough to combat that level of ignorance of how disease transmission works.
When medical workers take your relatives away, lock them into camps where the litteraly die from either the disease or starvation, then refuse to let you burrie your relatives... you might react rather violently when they came for you as well.
Logically we in the west can think about this and say that all of those things were required to control the outbreak. But now think of it from the perspective of a villager that has never set foot in a school and the only news they get is via word of mouth and text message.
It is grim because we don't want to "offend" anyone with the proper response (quarantine the zone) . Political Correctness run amok is going to kill people.
How many dead or sick people before we stop worrying about feelings and sensibilities?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
researchers in 1973:Jesus christ we've just found a horrible disease in africa! ....seriously....
Nixon: lol africa.
researchers in 1995: jesus guys this outbreak just killed 250 people in the congo.
the clinton: but i dont play the congo.
researchers in 2007: guise this deathtoll is over 1000 so far and Western Uganda is looking pretty bad.
Dubya: What do you mean western union kicks ass their commercials are funny.
Ebola 2014: remember me? LOL KILLSTREAK=4000 and i took a few medics too u mad?
Obama: I'm dedicating 175 million dollars to fight this horrible disease
congress: nope.jpg
Obama
Congress: LOL y u mad bro?
Good people go to bed earlier.
You might have a point there. If this happened in the US, people would perhaps really go nuts, many would likely panic and do all kind of crazy things, and some of them would shoot around like mad men, killing their fellow citizens, doctors, nurses and aid workers, and then infect 20 other people ... and then refuse to get vaccinated even tough a vaccine was available ...
I see you're still stuck in that Party vs. Party trap. ...need help getting out of that, or do you wish to continue laboring under the delusion that either of the big two political parties actually give a damn about anything beyond the continued acquisition of money and power?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Best article I've found on this topic (they are estimating between 77000 and 278000 cases by the end of the year):
http://www.eurosurveillance.or...
And the wikipedia page on the outbreak is also quite good:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
This is an extremely scary situation. We have a 77% fatal virus with the caseload doubling roughly every three weeks. We might get lucky and this might burn itself out before it goes airborne or global some other way. Then again we might not.
My concern is what we are sending to Africa is probably not going to be nearly enough. And by the time it all gets there we might be looking at 10000 or 30000 cases, not the few thousand we have today. I also agree that it is very likely that the official figures substantially understate the number of infected.