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

[Charliemopps]

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.

Re:What good is aid going to do

[Penguinisto]

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?

so the story goes

[nimbius]

researchers in 1973:Jesus christ we've just found a horrible disease in africa!
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 ....seriously....
Congress: LOL y u mad bro?

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:so the story goes

[Tailhook]

From UT Austin: On the Cusp of an Ebola Vaccine

Bush built that lab (Galveston National Laboratory) as part of the $5 billion Project Bioshield Act of 2004, one of two, the other being at Boston University Medical Center. These are the places where actual research on ebola, dengue, hemorrhagic fever, SARS and others has been happening for years while you perfected your Bush derangement syndrome narrative.

Ass monkey.

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:Worse than it seems.

[david_bonn]

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.