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.

Comments

What good is aid going to do

[kruach aum]

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.

Re:What good is aid going to do

[Anonymous Coward]

Different AC but a lot altruism is rooted in selfishness. I'm not saying what he is though, bear with me.

That doesn't devalue altruism, and sometimes that root can be simply feeling better about yourself for doing a good thing, or making sure horrible things don't tumble into your own comfortable life, which are ultimately good reasons to do good things and those reasons don't cheapen the fact that you did a good deed for someone else. But ultimately good deeds are still about imposing your will on the world, and that by it's nature is a selfish act.

Basically what I'm saying is in the end no one's completely selfless and even selflessness is rooted in a desire for something. That doesn't make it any less good to be those things. If anything it makes it all the more important and all the more obvious that altruism's the best way to go. If your will is satisfied and in the process you make someone else's life better, everyone wins.

Worse than it seems.

[Scottingham]

This pandemic is almost certainly worse than it seems. For every reported case there are now likely a dozen unreported.

I have a feeling that all this effort from the US and others is to make the folks back home feel safer in that we are 'doing something'. In all likelihood the only thing that'll stop the spread at this point is stricter quarantine around the infected countries(!). Refugees would need to go into quarantine to make sure they are not carrying the disease.

This disease, and the corresponding collapse of infrastructure, will likely kill hundreds of thousands of people before its over.

I hope I'm wrong.

Re:Worse than it seems.

[Charliemopps]

Don't fall for the media frenzy. Keep in mind they are making a lot of money off of all your panicked clicks.

This is certainly a tragedy for Africa. Just like the last 5 Ebola outbreaks were. This one's bigger but that mostly appears to be due to changes in culture and population than any change in the disease. But, by and large, Ebola is hard to transmit. It's prevalent in Africa because of poor sanitation. I've been to Africa (not this region, but others) The sanitation there is awful and even I, being careful, pretty much caught everything under the sun. There is no clean water to wash with. I bought bottled water and washed with that... didn't matter. The food is handled by dozens of people before you get it and there's no way to wash that either. The people that handled it clearly couldn't wash up properly either.

In regards to the medical facilities... they are woefully understaffed, under trained and short on equipment. The biggest difference the United States could make is to send over more of all of these. If the troops were sending are of this nature, it will certainly do a lot of good.

As far as a threat to us in the west though? No... short of it going airborne which, despite the soulless talking heads on TV are saying, is extremely unlikely. And if it were already airborne, we'd all already have it. Luckily, ultra deadly diseases like this burn out very quickly. It's hard to be virulent and deadly at the same time. The dead aren't that great at walking around and infecting people.

Re:It's not really that bad

[Irate Engineer]

It's not the total count (but thousands of people dead sucks) but the *rate* of infection that is freaking people out. It is picking up speed. That's bad.

We're looking at 10^3 *reported* cases, and this is currently uncontained, so who knows how many are bleeding out of their orifices in single apartments, unreported.

The bigger an infection gets, the harder it is to stop. So yeah, you want to freak out early and try to put the fire out quick by putting a lot of assets on the scene.

And, by the way, there are regions of the U.S. (yes, 'Murika!) where washing of the dead is a burial ceremony. Don't say that it can't possibly happen here. It can if you tempt fate enough times.

Re:Grim

[MisterSquid]

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?

Don't be daft.

It is impossible to quarantine an area encompassing Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Congo, etc. Furthermore, a quarantine condition would likely lead to a humanitarian disaster, which I'm guessing the US government foresees and wants to establish a presence on the ground to "assist."

As the days go by I can't help but think of the way in which the military was deployed in 28 Weeks Later (sequel to 28 Days). Let's hope treatment production can ramp up and get to the sufferers before a tactical military response is even contemplated.

Also, I suspect one reason why the US is out in front of this is that they've run epidemiological simulations on EBV and have found that the whole world, including the US, in a shitload of trouble in short time.

Re:so the story goes

[Anonymous Coward]

...

Dubya: What do you mean western union kicks ass their commercials are funny.

...

Get over your "blame BOOOSH!!!!" childishness, you ignorant twerp.

Eugene Robinson: George W. Bush’s greatest legacy — his battle against AIDS

This is a moment for all Americans to be proud of the best thing George W. Bush did as president: launching an initiative to combat AIDS in Africa that has saved millions of lives.

All week, more than 20,000 delegates from around the world have been attending the 19th International AIDS Conference here in Washington. They look like any other group of conventioneers, laden with satchels and garlanded with name tags. But some of these men and women would be dead if not for Bush’s foresight and compassion.

Those are not words I frequently use to describe Bush or his presidency. But credit and praise must be given where they are due, and Bush’s accomplishment — the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR — deserves accolades. It is a reminder that the United States can still be both great and good.

When the Bush administration inaugurated the program in 2003, fewer than 50,000 HIV-infected people on the African continent were receiving the antiretroviral drugs that keep the virus in check and halt the progression toward full-blown AIDS. By the time Bush left office, the number had increased to nearly 2 million. Today, the United States is directly supporting antiretroviral treatment for more than 4 million men, women and children worldwide, primarily in Africa.

...

Eugene Robinson and the Washington Post are hardly Bush's greatest supporters. Yet I bet you never even heard of what Bush did for Africa and AIDS, have you? Yet you felt qualified to make fun of what Bush knew about Africa. So that makes "childishness" and "ignorant twerp" quite accurate, aren't they? How about "arrogant", too, to go along with "ignorant"? It fits.

Meanwhile, Obama's poll numbers are worse 6 years into his Presidency than Bush's numbers 6 years in. Yeah, we know, all Obama's problems are because of "BOOOOSH!!!!".

Fucking baby.

Re:Grim

[Penguinisto]

Ye Gods... really?

If you're quarantined and you see neighbors dying of Ebola, for fuck sakes - do your rights demand that you escape by any means, carry it with you, and spread it to other areas?

I get individual rights over statism, and would be among the first to take up arms against a tyranny, but damn... think of your fellow human beings for once.

Re:Grim

[MisterSquid]

Sure, it won't be pleasant, but the "Western" world shouldn't take anywhere near the damage Africa is taking.

You're doing that thing some of us call "skating to where the puck was" rather than "skating to where the puck will be".

EBV has already manifested several versions, some airborne (not yet contagious for humans), others with lower lethality (which is why this recent outbreak is so much more severe than previous ones).

If EBV is not contained now and stopped in its tracks, it will mutate/evolve and eventually be "successful" enough that you, I, and everyone else in the Western world will wonder what the hell happened.

Re:Grim

[Rich0]

you're really excited to give your rights away, but I'm not going to let you take mine.

Uh, if you're in the one town in the US where there is an Ebola outbreak you're not going to be able to stop the rest of the country from taking your rights. There will be fences, tanks, armies, drones, aircraft, and the general works surrounding your town. Your stash of AR-15s in the basement aren't going to accomplish much except maybe to keep your neighbors from stealing your food assuming you have a stockpile so that you can stay inside and let the disease blow over. Besides, if you do have such a stockpile then just hunker down - you'll outlive the epidemic anyway, which is probably why you have that stockpile to begin with.

Well, that is if the rest of the country has the brains to set up a strong quarantine. There is a good chance that this won't look good in the polls so we'll just ask everybody to be nice and stay at home, and watch the disease overrun the country. Maybe I should work on my own stockpile... :)

But, if the government has any brains they'll put up a perimeter around the town, lock down all air travel into/out of the country, And burn down everything within 10 miles of the town to create a no-man's land. I mean, we are talking about a plague that could kill half the population here. Given a choice of raising taxes half a percent to rebuild the no-man's land after it is all over, or watching the entire country turn into a post-apocalyptic horror story, I'll take a bit of authoritarianism and call you in the morning.