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.
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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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.