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Ebola Does Not Require an "Ebola Czar," Nor Calling Up the National Guard
Lasrick writes: David Ropeik explores risk-perception psychology and Ebola in the U.S. "[O]fficials are up against the inherently emotional and instinctive nature of risk-perception psychology. Pioneering research on this subject by Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff, and others, vast research on human cognition by Daniel Kahneman and colleagues, and research on the brain's fear response by neuroscientists Joseph LeDoux, Elizabeth Phelps, and others, all make abundantly clear that the perception of risk is not simply a matter of the facts, but more a matter of how those facts feel. ... People worry more about risks that are new and unfamiliar. People worry more about risks that cause greater pain and suffering. People worry more about threats against which we feel powerless, like a disease for which there is no vaccine and which has a high fatality rate if you get it. And people worry more about threats the more available they are to their consciousness—that is, the more aware people are of them."
If having a Czar will concentrate more power in their hands then a Czar is what they'll create. We already have the CDC. If this were about solving disease problems then the President would give the CDC more funding if they needed it. This is not about solving problems but about power.
Look, every idiot out there wants to see a "response". Take anyone below the 90th percentile a they won't have the intellectual ability to process any probability less than 1 in 4. It's like the entire airline screening process - people feel safer if they see someone doing something. In reality it does little or no good, but until you figure out how to instantly make people smarter and less gullible you will get irrational panic and calls to "do something."
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
More americans have married Kim Kardashian than have died from Ebola.
And what is the land of the free creating more czar's for? a czar answers to no one. Instead how about we make the people in charge responsible for their actions. oh wait congress can never take responsibility for their failures.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The most effective counter to the epidemic of fear this article talks about is for the government to convince people that it is following an effective policy to address the dangers. Unfortunately, our politicians have gotten the idea that the best way to do that is to manage the "optics" of the situation. As a result, people are convinced that the government's responses to this danger are designed more to convince people that the government is doing the right thing that to actually DO the right thing.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The Obama Administration (and Bush / McCain / Romney would have been no better) looked around and were thinking ... hmmm... who could we appoint for this? An expert in epidemiology? Somebody with experience in coordinating the logistics of an emergency response? A useless public relations shill? Or an even more useless lawyer crony with connections to that epic success Solyndra?
Yeah, that last one sounds about right. We'll go with that.
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Fear is relatively easy to manage if you actually have, you know, the peoples' trust. Imagine that. Why, if the public was actually used to the government telling the truth (including telling them when something was actually potentially detrimental to national security, rather than using that as an excuse to obscure _everything_) I'll bet you could just be honest with them and people would be rather rational about the whole thing. Lie through your teeth and then blame it on your predecessors or people you have appointed and you get the current situation.
Then again, who among us today has any experience in an environment where people were actually being honest, even a majority of the time, and especially in any governmental context? The closest you'd get to that today would be certain military units and small teams at companies.
The fools are yelling for an Ebola Czar.
Perhaps filling the position of Surgeon General would be simpler. Controlling the spread of disease is one of the functions of that office.
But, approving the the candidate for the office would require the Senate to actually do something.
You don't have to be a risk-perception psychologist to get what's going on.
Nutty people said, "Do something!!!!"
So we have a czar.
FTFY
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
While this is a Fox News topic, the comments are not as bad as what you would get there.
For example not one reference to Obola yet.
Would all of this talk about a Czar be an end run around the current problem of the Repubs blocking all nominations for a Surgeon General? Maybe that's the only way the administration feels they can have a real working department head?
We assumed we could easily handle Ebola if it came our way, because we are the most powerful and richest country on Earth. What we should have done is asked, "What are our weaknesses? Where is our medical system likely to fail?" Unfortunately we tend to suck at this kind of introspection. If we had asked, the most glaring weakness in our system, "Not everybody has medical coverage", might have been considered. Then when a sick black man recently arrived from West Africa came to the hospital without medical insurance we might have thought "EBOLA" and treated him right away, instead of thinking "poor Nigger, not gonna pay his bills" and sent him home with some Tylenol.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
While you are correct that the airborne vector isn't significant need I remind you that Ebola is not a disease whereby the person infected with it gets a mild fever and minor headache and the cure is two aspirin tablets?
Sure, but that has zero bearing on the degree of concern people should have about the epidemic potential of Ebola in any country with a first-world health care system (Nigeria, say, or parts of the US outside Texas.)
The thing fearmongers like the GP are all about is the attempt to create a sense that Ebola could actually be spreading like the flu, which is so trivially false it isn't even worth mentioning. Yes, PPEs that include good respiratory protection should be part of the standard patient-handling protocol, and all due care should be taken to avoid droplet transmission, but Ebola's almost complete lack of aerosol transmission is and will remain a substantial barrier to the population risk the disease poses: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=...
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
The funny thing is it's the cut in NIH funding that means we don't have vaccines, not the cut in CDC funding, which only manages it after it spreads.
CDC means Center for Disease Control
NIH means National Institute for Health
That and the cut for health care in Texas that increased the risk factors.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
or you were a health care worker caring for Duncan. Or happened to live in the apartment complex where Duncan stayed. Or you happened to be on a flight from Texas to Ohio. Or on a flight from Ohio to Texas. Or one of those within 2 degrees of separation of any of these.
Read what I said.
Billions of people on this planet. Hundreds of millions in the US.
More people die from heat stroke in Texas than are even remotely considered "at potential risk".
It's like you worry about being attacked by Martians while crossing a busy highway.
Pay attention to the cars and trucks in the highway.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I wish they'd focus more on things like MRSA and KPC which kills far more people in this country and are far more deadly. These diseases are easily spread and there is no cure for them. While not trying to diminish the cause to fight Ebola, frankly there are a lot of things far deadlier in this country that people should be worried about.
The cases in Texas I think can be squarely blamed on incompetence from the Dallas hospital.
In the case of KPC, Congress has basically put their head in the sand and handtied the CDC and FDA from effectively studying and fighting it, thanks to the livestock lobbies Frontline has a good episode on this. It doesn't help that congress has cut the budget of the CDC significantly over the last decade and played politics to make it difficult to study and fight the causes.
As it is, the CDC had to cut back on their research on Ebola due to the budget cuts and the delays in the worldwide community for fighting and funding the fighting of Ebola aren't helping matters either. If the Dallas hospital wasn't so incompetent, there's a good chance Thomas might have survived and nobody else would have become infected.
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The US military personnel sent to Liberia are there to build some treatment centers and to expedite logistics for materials to fight the epidemic. They are not treating or even being exposed to the people who are contagious with Ebola. Your post is just more fear mongering.
I was just arguing that this is pointless. When I traveled to Israel, I requested that my visa be stamped on a removable sheet of paper to be stapled into my passport. I did this because I didn't want evidence of a trip to Israel when one of my next stops was Malaysia. If someone is trying to get from Liberia to the US, they will do so with no evidence of recently having been in Liberia.
It's not as if there are huge numbers of flights to and from Liberia.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The thing is, what you're saying there is just plain implausible unless the air itself kills the viruses with remarkable efficiency, in which case it would survive for only minutes on a hard surface (like HIV), rather than hours (like influenza). From what I've read, it survives for hours on hard surfaces, which lends serious doubt to any claim that Ebola exhibits an "almost complete lack of aerosol transmission".
Just to be clear, I'm not saying that Ebola is airborne. It currently is not (or at least it is not currently believed to be). However, it is unsafe to assume that the way a virus behaves in Africa (hot weather, high humidity, little use of HVAC, mostly rural, families that stay home to care for the sick) will match the way it would behave in the United States (highly variable air temperatures, potentially low humidity because of the use of HVAC, heavily urban, people who go to work even when sick). Such a conclusion would be fundamentally invalid because it doesn't control for an absolutely insane number of variables.
In particular, with airborne diseases, propagation by aerosol transmission increases rather dramatically when the air is cold and the humidity is low (particularly when it is insanely low because of HVAC). That's one reason why the cold and flu season in the U.S. spikes markedly during the winter. In the parts of Africa where Ebola is currently found, the hot air temperature and relatively high humidity don't lend themselves to aerosol transmission. So there's a distinct possibility that the exact same strain of disease that is not airborne in Africa would be airborne in the United States.
Such temperature-dependent and humidity-dependent behavior would also be consistent with researchers' conclusions after an October 1989 lab incident in which the closely related Ebola Reston virus spread rapidly among physically isolated populations of lower primates. "Due to the spread of infection to animals in all parts of the quarantine facility, it is likely that Ebola Reston may have been spread by airborne transmission." (Beltz, Lisa. Emerging Infectious Diseases. 253)
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In a country like Liberia with its poor transportation systems I think the 101st Airborne Division with their helicopters and skilled pilots is one of the things you need to deliver material and personnel in the area. From the Whitehouse Fact Sheet on the response:
Scaling-up the DoD presence in West Africa. Following the completion of AFRICOM’s assessment, DoD announced the planned deployment of 3,200 troops, including 700 from the 101st Airborne Division headquarters element to Liberia. These forces will deploy in late October and become the headquarters staff for the Joint Forces Command, led by Major General Gary Volesky. The total U.S. troop commitment will depend on the requirements on the ground;
So out of at least 3,200 troops only 700 of them are from the 101st Airborne and the other units are yet to be specified. It makes sense to jump start the transportation system so the guys that follow can hit the ground running (or at least jogging ;). If there are 100 choppers and pilots it probably takes the other 600 to support them. You need mechanics, airfield personnel for things like fueling and air traffic control, a kitchen to feed 700 people or more, a medical unit and the officers to manage it all.
Not true, when this site started I was a professional engineer - it's only now that I'm a wannabe technician with an inflated sense of self importance.
It almost certainly does only survive for minutes on hard surfaces. The surfaces it survives on longer are those which are literally covered in blood and bodily fluids for it to reside in.