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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.
U.S. lawmakers called for a government-funded "war" to contain West Africa's deadly Ebola epidemic...
"We need to declare a war on Ebola," Senator Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican, said...
It's good to see that word in a context that we can all agree on.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
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.
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.
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.
Rwanda was very different. It was a tribal war and not a medical emergency. Rwanda was much more complex.
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.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
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.
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Perhaps you are unaware of exponential growth - http://www.geert.io/exponentia...
It's going to be difficult enough to get the 1700 beds constructed quickly enough to make a dent in this problem, and the magnitude of the problem is approximately doubling every month.
From the comments I've been reading to most of the Ebola news articles these days, American's have been demonstrating their stupidity at a truly alarming rate.
Like this? http://www.google.com/imgres?i... Sorry, no chest hair.
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 ...
Guns? Yeah, we got 'em in spades. Good luck using one to stop an M1 Abrams, a Hellfire missile, an AC-130, or suchlike.
Yes, we also have rights, but... an extreme and obvious case such as an Ebola outbreak in the US will obviously trump those rights (hell, past presidents have suspended habeas corpus before in the name of extremes...)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The death rate for the first 1000 infections was around 75%.
So 750 deaths.
By the time we reached 2000 infections the overall death rate was around 65%
So 1300 total deaths, or only 550 of the second 1000, which is 55%.
and by the time we reached 3000 infections it was around 55%
So 1650 total deaths, or only 350 of the third 1000, which is 35%.
The actual death rate right now is more like 35-45%
Which is certainly an improvement, but it's still terrible.
I assume this is because the care is improving and more people are pulling through
They try to keep them hydrated and well fed so that they don't simply die from the vomiting. They also try to detect them as early as possible to prevent the disease from spreading, and that likely makes the treatment more effective. However, there isn't much they can do as the treatment doesn't attack the virus directly, but is merely focused on keeping the body as healthy as possible so that they don't die before the immune system is able to deal with it.
but outbreaks like this often become less virulent over time as well.
That's the nature of things that change. At first they get worse, then at some point they're as bad as they are going to get, then they get better. However, without hindsight, it's difficult to say where we're at on that timeline.
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.
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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.
There is some level of quarantine - the liberian government blockaded in the slum area where a clinic was raided, and sealed off about 50,000 people. That's probably about the limit of their efforts.
But frankly, you're also ignoring what's been actually happening: such an ambassador catching Ebola in one country, knowingly returning to another (via air travel), then staying in a hotel without telling anyone being treated in secret by a doctor, who also doesn't tell anyone, goes home, and spreads it to his wife.
Queue a couple 1000 potentially infected, by a vector which would be utterly missed due to plain old corruption and idiocy.
So what do you do now? Expand the quarantine? Do you even have enough troops to do that? And in the meantime, what about all the regular issues such as food and water, sanitation and normal completely curable diseases which will take hold.