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Texas Ebola Patient Dies
BarbaraHudson writes Thomas Duncan, the ebola patient being treated in Texas, has died. "It is with profound sadness and heartfelt disappointment that we must inform you of the death of Thomas Eric Duncan this morning at 7:51 am," hospital spokesman Wendell Watson said in an emailed statement. If he had survived, he could have faced criminal charges in both the US and Liberia for saying on an airport screening questionnaire that he had had no contact with an Ebola patient. UPDATE: Reports of a possible second Ebola victim in Texas are coming in. From the article: "The patient was identified as Sgt. Michael Monning, a deputy who accompanied county health officials Zachary Thompson and Christopher Perkins into the apartment where Thomas Eric Duncan stayed in Dallas. The deputy was ordered to go inside the unit with officials to get a quarantine order signed. No one who went inside the unit that day wore protective gear."
The conservatives seem to want to turtle and ban all travel from those nations ... which would, of course, be a death knell for any aide workers traveling there to help out. They seem to think that will prevent it from spreading when, in fact, that's just increasing the odds that ebola spreads more rapidly inside Africa and ensures that it becomes a global catastrophe. But that's pretty typical of conservative ideals. I'm still waiting on those 'trickle down' economics to get to me.
Some of the conservatives in the South are real dirtbags. It's really quite ridiculous.
There's a lot of high-tech going on wrt ebola. Just look at the efforts to predict its spread using different models. These models could eventually bias the debate over whether extreme measures such as total border closures should be taken. Then there's the race to test different medications, and as was pointed out in an earlier article, the ethical questions surrounding control groups, with only a partial solution being the step wedge (giving different people the same treatment at different times).
Only 774 people died in the last SARS epidemic. We're already way, way beyond that, with no end in sight.
This is a human disaster unfolding as we watch, and at least a few of us here are still humans.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Someone should do a FOIA request on the amount of money that was spent at the hospital and for cleanup... I assume the public taxpayer is footing the bill, we should be able to know how much one patient costs. Then we can compare that to the cost of keeping our borders open to vs. restricting some "tourist" visas.
Wait, the best part of this sad and frightening story of Ebola in Texas is that the second Ebola patient was one of the sheriff's deputies who was the first to enter the house of the first patient. When offered protective gear, he declined, and entered the man's apartment without gloves, or even a facemask. Being Texas, he probably had his gun drawn, figuring that if he saw any Ebola he'd just shoot that sumbitch.
The over/under on when Texas goes full Walking Dead is now Thanksgiving. If there's one place that's not going to do will in an Ebola outbreak, it's a state where no goddamn government scientist is gonna tell me I gotta wear a facemask. Plus, post-Darwin biology is not really their strong suit, so it's doubtful they even believe there's such a thing as a "virus". I'm betting the churches and gun shops are gonna be doing big business in the coming weeks. Well, they're already doing big business, but you know what I mean.
I understand that (and I'm not joking) that in the past days Alex Jones has been talking about home remedies for Ebola that the government doesn't want you to know about.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Did you read TFA? This deputy walked into the apartment after the patient had left, in order to get a decontamination warrant signed. Without protective gear. And he caught it. Apparently it's significantly more contagious than HIV. When's the last time you heard that an HIV victim's apartment or ambulance had to be completely decontaminated by people in level 4 bio-hazard gear?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
It's pretty damn unlikely for Ebola to ever become "airborne", as a virus- it's too damn big. You just can't fit enough of them in an aerosol-sized droplet to stand much of a chance at infection.
The "mutation" required to make it an effective aerosol pathogen would shave off 90% of its genome.
That isn't to say that it can't be transmitted by a good sneeze or a cough over the air, but even in those cases- it's not so easy, as again, the virus is rather large, and it takes a certain amount of viral load for an active infection to actually occur.