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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."
Whether he lied or not, some accounts say that he believed the woman he aided had malaria, not Ebola. And the woman's family themselves may have lied to the people aiding them.
Ultimately, the biggest breakdown occured with the hospital, which was told twice that he had just traveled from Liberia on the first visit, and has since admitted this information was available to all providers. This has caused the tilt to the other extreme, with even the most innocuous cases of fever, adominal distress, and similar, with no travel or other history that would point to Ebola, being handled as such "out of an abundance of caution".
Keep in mind that viral hemorrhagic fevers (VHFs) are nothing new in the US. what happens in the United States with other fatal VHFs, that, like Ebola, are only spread via direct contact with bodily fluids and can be easily addressed in first world nations:
Hanta: http://www.cdc.gov/hantavirus/...
Marburg: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/previe...
Lassa: http://www.cdc.gov/media/relea...
Hanta is especially on point, as the US typically has dozens of cases -- and dozens of deaths -- each year, all of which are rapidly contained. The cases of "imported" VHFs, like has occurred with Marburg and Lassa, result in identification, isolation, and either the recovery or death of that person -- and that's the end of it.
Also, Ebola is NOT airborne. Ebola researchers will AT MOST say things like:
Peters, whose CDC team studied cases from 27 households that emerged during a 1995 Ebola outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo, said that while most could be attributed to contact with infected late-stage patients or their bodily fluids, "some" infections may have occurred via "aerosol transmission."
"Those monkeys were dying in a pattern that was certainly suggestive of coughing and sneezing â" some sort of aerosol movement."
"May". "Suggestive". "Some sort".
Even if we change all of these statements to absolute certainty, it still does not translate to, "Ebola is airborne," in the meaning of "airborne" in the context of disease transmission.
Airborne transmission occurs when a droplet nuclei containing a virus (or bacteria) is small enough (10 μm) occurs when droplets of saliva or mucous (or even blood) containing the virus are projected during a sneeze or cough and and projected directly onto someone's eyes, mouth, or mucous membranes. This kind of transmission is usually within 3', and is NOT considered "airborne" transmission.
"Droplet" transmission can certainly occur with Ebola -- or any disease that spreads via bodily fluids and is present in saliva or mucous. VHFs are not airborne diseases, and a study of one strain where monkeys in adjacent cages sneezed on each other and passed the disease does not make it "airborne".
Being able to get something from having someone sneeze or cough droplets onto you and airborne transmission are very different things.
The quickest way to have a threat of possible airborne transmission of Ebola via mutation would be to not aid Africa in this fight, and let Africa fend for itself, creating an environment where the cases could skyrocket into the millions (due to Africa's infrastructure and inability to deal with the onslaught), thereby increasing the statistical likelihood of the feared airborne mutation -- which, if a foothold were to be gotten in the West as an airborne disease, would truly be a catastrophe worthy of fear and panic.
In reading much of the news coverage, online commentary, and this thread, this article struck me as very relevant:
http://www.nationaljournal
Wrong. Aid workers from the US could return if they go through quarantine. And throughout that process they would receive our best medical care. However, having unrestricted travel between countries when there is a plague on the loose is moronic.
Moronic... an opinion morons have.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
...when trying to use the carat symbol. Fix here:
Airborne transmission occurs when an droplet nuclei containing a virus (or bacteria) is small enough (under 5 um) to travel on dust particles, and can invisibly hang in the air or travel on air currents in large spaces long after someone has sneezed or coughed, and travel great distances, and can infect when breathed in.
There is NO EVIDENCE that Ebola is, or has been, spread in this way. In fact, the evidence is that Ebola is almost exclusively spread via direct contact with bodily fluids.
Droplet transmission (over 10 um) occurs when droplets of saliva or mucous (or even blood) containing the virus are projected during a sneeze or cough and and projected directly onto someone's eyes, mouth, or mucous membranes. This kind of transmission is usually within 3', and is NOT considered "airborne" transmission.
"Droplet" transmission can certainly occur with Ebola -- or any disease that spreads via bodily fluids and is present in saliva or mucous. VHFs are not airborne diseases, and a study of one strain where monkeys in adjacent cages sneezed on each other and passed the disease does not make it "airborne".
Being able to get something from having someone sneeze or cough droplets onto you and airborne transmission are very different things.
M-O-O-N ... That spells Ebola!
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.
A deadly plague is a small price to pay to be able to say we're not racists.
Some have wondered why President Obama is sending 3,000 American troops to Africa, when it would make more sense to send 3,000 medical workers instead.
Troops are being sent because unprotected aid workers are being butchered to death. Also, troops are really good at logistics, like setting up field hospitals - something desperately needed in the rush to try to contain the spread of the disease.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Troops are being sent because unprotected aid workers are being butchered to death.
In addition, many of those troops are medical workers.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Wrong. Different strain, VERY bad source, did not happen through ventilation system. It happened to monkeys in adjacent cages without direct contact, through "some sort" of aerosolized transmission in very close quarters. I.e., droplets.
Fearmongers or people who think "the government" is "lying to stem panic" always trot out this story. It does NOT mean "Ebola is airborne".
It took Africa, with some of the worst healthcare, sanitation, and infrastructure in the world, 10 MONTHS to get to the ~7400 cases there are now. If it were airborne, it would be much, much worse. Ebola is not airborne; stop spreading your bullshit.
Thank you.
Thus other countries establish quarantine procedures.
Are you literally slower on the uptake here then an ignorant medieval city state prince? Because even they were able to connect these dots.
The whole region needs to be quarantined.
The issue is not travel restrictions to the US, though that is of course relevant as well. The issue is rather controlling population into and out of the hot zone to prevent the further spread of the infection.
Yes provide assistence. Yes aid workers. Yes work on a vaccine.
However, in the meantime do not fuck around with this disease and just assume you can kiss it on the mouth, give it tongue, and then expect to not die horribly shortly there after.
This disease is a proven killer. Show it some respect. That is all I am saying here. We are dealing with something dangerous. Like dealing with fire arms, explosives, toxic chemicals, or psychopaths. There are protocols. Please follow a couple.
What I am seeing is people play hackysack with granades and occasionally blow their fucking legs off... And that would really be just fine only that analogy ultimately includes my legs and the legs of my friends and family. The disease has not spread much beyond west africa at this point. We have isolated incidents beyond that but very few incidents of the disease actively spreading outside of west africa. That is good.
We cannot help the west africans if the disease spreads in the US or infects south america. If that happens our resources will focus internally. We will abandon the west africans entirely.
If you care about them you will first ensure that our own safety is secured. If our safety is threatened we will turtle and anyone that says otherwise will not be able to sustain their position politically.
You do not have a choice here. This is another lead/follow/get out of the way situation. You can either take the issue seriously. Follow the direction of those that wish to take it seriously. Or stand aside. One of these three things is happening.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
No mod points, or I would have modded GP up.
An Ebola outbreak in the US is undesirable by pretty much everybody here, except maybe for people with stock in the companies producing cures and vaccines.
Travel bans seem entirely reasonable to me. If aid workers want to go over and help, then by all means we should have some sort of quarantine procedure in place so we can get them home. But we don't need Joe Schmoe going over there, getting infected, and bringing it back with him. It's an unnecessary risk, just as it is unnecessary to take a leisure trip to Liberia in the middle of an epidemic.
I am a little surprised that noone is fear mongering about someone intentionally spreading Ebola. It seems like the perfect thing to let loose in a country you are at odds with, whether you are another country or a terrorist organization.
On average, 12.5% of the US population will get the flu in a year. That amounts to 39,500,000 individuals getting the flu. 50,000 people means the mortality rate of flu is 0.126% of cases. We have had 1 death due to ebola with 1 case of infection that was not intentionally tranfered to the US for treatment. That's a 100% mortality rate with current non-intentional US cases. Ebola's average mortality rate is 50% though it varies between 25-90% depending on the outbreak studied.
I think a little perspective is certainly justified.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Um, yes. That's because it's not been able to spread here until this man was allowed to fly across the Atlantic carrying it.
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/07...
It is nearly impossible to estimate how many U.S. citizens have dual -- or even triple -- citizenships, says Michael A. Olivas, an immigration professor at the University of Houston Law Center.
[...]
The number is likely well over 1 million, he says, and is probably several times that.
So, I can use one passport to go in and out of Cuba, Africa, Iraq, or wherever, and use the US passport for going in and out of the USA. How would they track that?
Learn to love Alaska
The incredibly high case fatality rate.
That tends to get one's attention, it does.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
When it comes to life-threatening problems, 90% solutions are great solutions. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Yes and more people have died of heart disease then were killed in WW2. So if there is a world war... just keep that in mind... we can ignore it and just focus all efforts on heart disease.
I'm not sure if you're a chat bot pretending to a person or if you are really that stupid... either way... you're a one man example of how easy it would be to replace some people with machines. Less because the machines are so clever and more because some people are so fucking stupid.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Just to play devil's advocate here for a moment:
This guy knew he had been in the hot zone and may have been exposed, and was trying to get back to the US. So his options were
Now, if he had not actually contracted ebola, he was likely to live in either case, (a) just would have been more inconvenient. But if (as was the case) he really did have ebola, then he would have seen (a) as suicide, and (b) as a small but measurable chance to live, given the quality of health care facilities in the US.
So, he had quite an incentive to lie about his exposure, didn't he? I'm clearly not condoning it, but... that's quite a catch, that catch-22.
Who said anything about forcing other countries to do anything? And as to burning bridges, do you really want to get into the whole "democrat vs republican" thing in this thread?
I mean is that all you political tools are able to do at this point? Are you brains so hardwired into this pathetic US vs THEM mentality that EVERYTHING turns into a proxy fight in your pathetic struggle against your very similar rival?
This has nothing to do with the ongoing joke which is the Obama presidency or the ongoing joke which is the republican party. It has everything to do with there being a "plague".
What is being asked here is nothing extreme. Just basic quarantine procedures. You know, the things we learned to do with diseases when we stopped being ignorant savages that didn't understand microbes.
If this breaks out the aid the west Africans are currently getting will be GONE. It will all shift to internal defense faster then you can snap your fingers. Gone. So if you want to help these people as I do... first make sure we don't have cause to refocus those resources.
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We cannot help the west africans if the disease spreads in the US or infects south america.
Certainly not true. This means we would spend more resources on a cure.
Location of infection.
Lack of control of infected population.
Number of people killed.
Mortality rate of those infected.
Basically everything is different. I'm struggling to understand why you think they're the same.
Bird flue has killed fewer then 200 and is contained. Ebola has killed more then 3000 and is not.
Math is hard.
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In the US, more poeple have died of gunshot wounds in the last month than have died from Ebola since it was discovered. Let's not talk about rational, effective responses from conservatives.
Yes, and far more people die every in the US from being beaten to death by killers using fists and blunt instruments than have died by killers using rifles of any kind, let alone the small number that involved scary looking rifles with black plastic parts on them. So what? Someone deciding to kill someone else - with a knife, a pipe, a gun, or their bare hands - isn't nearly as common as stupid kids killing themselves and others in cars, but mostly: it's an active decision. There's no comparing that to an outbreak of an ugly infectious disease, especially one with a high mortality rate that can kill you weeks after pick it up from someone's spit on a doorknob.
You want rational responses to both topics? OK, don't let violent criminals out of jail. Don't tolerate the existence of violent gangs like MS13 in our cities, and stop making it so politically incorrect to lock up crazy people who are plainly dangerous. And of couse, find ways to reduce one of the largest sources of death-by-gun stats, which is suicide - like, make Oregon's option more widely available. And in the meantime, work globally to stop travel out of West Africa until their outbreak problem is under control.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The problem with Ebola is that at best it's a geometric expansion, worst, exponential, and has a minimum 50% fatality rate. Right now it's still relatively contained, and we should ensure it stays that way.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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.
The TSA actually has a chance to be useful and humane at the same time, and instead we come up with crap to argue about. Behold the uselessness of Washington D.C. and nearly every "solution" it comes up with.
Step 1: Track all travel paths. This already happens. Did somebody's travel originate in a high-risk place for ebola?
Step 2: Take them from the airport to quarantine if they manage to make it to the states. Hopefully that won't happen because...
Step 1.5: They will have been denied boarding without medical clearance or quarantined at a layover.
Some will argue that the region should be locked down. It should. Others will argue that free enough travel is necessary to provide aide and let people escape before they're infected. It should. These are not mutually contradictory options. Nobody goes into those regions except medical personnel and nobody comes out without being cleared. This isn't rocket science, and it shouldn't take an event of black plague proportions to make obvious decisions.
If people could cut the crap and use their heads instead of seizing on opportunities to argue for their ego's sake in just one instance for our entire lives, then this needs to be it. And if people have complaints about being told rudely that they're thinking like morons then maybe they should stop thinking like morons. Politeness exists so that undeserving insult or correction doesn't happen, not so that people can't be told when they have body odor (so-to-speak).
If I'm being a moron, please let me know so I can correct that. When it comes to mass life or death, it's more important to actually BE correct than to enjoy warm fuzzies and self-congratulation for looking correct. This isn't a damn game of "Let's see who looks smart on the Internet." This is a matter of, "Let's see if we can stop being morons long enough to stay alive."
He never lied about being in the hot zone, and it's being said that he answered honestly, even if incorrectly. The infected he had contact with weren't diagnosed at the time, and he may have never known they were ever officially diagnosed. He told the hospital he was in the hot zone, when they turned him away. Before later accepting him. The great health care service in the USA doesn't help people (especially blacks), hence why there is such a stink over this. He should have been admitted the first time, and wasn't.
Learn to love Alaska
When trying to "close the borders" a 90% solution is not much better than a 10% solution.
Actually, it dramatically is. Eliminating 90% of a risk is better than eliminating 0% of a risk. Approximately 8000 carriers (though about half that number are dead) in a large population covering several west African states. If you eliminate 90% of those traveling to and from west Africa (only about 1/3 of which travel to the United States) back down to 0.1 persons infected. I'll take a 10% risk that ONE person with Ebola manages to get through. With no meaningful procedures in place we already have 10x that rate -- or precisely what a quarantine or travel ban is set to eliminate.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
Once you go raven, you come back nevermore.
Not true. Ebola is not infectious until it is symptomatic. That, with the long lead time to becoming symptomatic makes it easier to contain. Just monitor anyone who was in contact with a sufferer for at least 21 days. if they become symptomatic, then quarantine else leave them be.
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.
All the internet Einsteins said, as with the government's statement, Ebola simply couldn't reach America. Then, that even when it reached America, we had the means to keep it spreading to anyone, because the only way to get it is to basically give a victim a blowjob and swallow at the end, because it's very difficult to contract and those filthy heathens that aren't in America only spread the disease, because they liked to drink and bathe in the bathwater of dead Ebola victims and that every precaution anyone might suggest in this country was just the result of ignorant fear-mongering. Are you telling me all of these junior-college keyboard-geniuses are *gasp* possibly wrong?
So you'd have to somehow engineer a way to walk around in public bleeding, puking, ejaculating, and defecating on people around you - all without it being obvious that you were very unhealthy.
So.....basically you should attend burning man?
Monstar L
He didn't lie at the airport. At least according to the news reports.
Learn to love Alaska
US doctrine on the intentional use of biological weapons of mass distruction is to respond with the only WMDs in our arsenal - that is Thermonuclear Devices. Anyone deploying such a biological would presumably kill a similarly large number of Russian, Chinese, Indian and Western European citizens, and all those governments have roughly similar doctrines, (except for the story I can't confirm that a Soviet era ambassador once claimed to his Chinese counterpart that official doctrine of the USSR was to make any language group or religion that released such a bio-weapon literally extinct, down to bayonetting individual 1 year olds). The US cold war era Project Pluto was only seriously considered as a response to some projected Bio-weapons and not just nukes, Israel was rumored to have developed cobalt jackets for a few of its warheads in response to rumors of Iranian bio-labs (although that rumor may just be something started by a Tom Clancy novel). Presumably anyone funding ISIL (or whatever they are calling themselves this week), does not want to risk every nuclear armed state in the entire world going literally ballistic.
One point in all this that few get. The researchers and theoreticians discussing a weaponized version of Ebola or Smallpox were postulating an airborne hardened virus with such lethality that they could stop saying Megadeaths and start using the Giga- prefix. Current research shows pretty clearly that such a weapon is very unlikely. Ebola isn't the type of virus that's close enough to airborne to make the jump, and getting a smallpox variant that overcomes the existing vaccinated population's resistances seems equally a very hard problem. I doubt such an attack as you're suggesting would kill more than, say 300 million, world wide, tops. Maybe the various nuclear armed nations wouldn't go to a nuclear response, or even conventional full scale war (yeah, right!) It's not like the US got all stirred up about the "mere" 2,996 casualties of 9/11, right? The only real risk of ISIL (or whatever) doing anything this totally insane is if they somehow believe the great powers would all limit themselves to careful, deliberate, reasoned responses in the face of an indescriminately inflicted act of total barbarity that killed the elderly and young disproportionately and destroyed the world's economies and afflicted every nation of that world regardless of whether they were on ISIL's enemies list or not. My own bet is the UN resolution would pass unanimously among all members not implicated, and start with "Purge the sub-human scum with cleansing nuclear fire, unto their last generation", and go to STRONG language from there. The NATO powers would jump the gun before the resolution was finalized, only to find out that Israel had already launched against everybody else in the Middle East, India had already moved against Pakistan, and the Russians had already gone to war against every adjacent "stan" they suspected of harboring ISIL sympathizers. (And the Republican party would blame all of this on Obama).
Who is John Cabal?
Imprisoning people in with those wastes without cleaning it up or moving them is a poor refection on everyone involved in attempting to contain it and just asking for an outbreak. Those Africans we like to look down on were far more professional about it before they got overwhelmed. Meanwhile - one case in Texas, one of the richest states of the USA, and there's a long string of fuckups such that it's amazing luck that we don't have dozens of other cases yet.