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Pentagon Builds Units To Transport Ebola Patients
First time accepted submitter halfquibble52 writes As more U.S. troops head to West Africa, the Pentagon is developing portable isolation units that can carry up to 12 Ebola patients for transport on military planes. The Pentagon says it does not expect it will need the units for 3,000 U.S. troops heading to the region to combat the virus because military personnel will not be treating Ebola patients directly. Instead, the troops are focusing on building clinics, training personnel and testing patient blood samples for Ebola.
Oh look, a freaking moron came out of the woodwork. I love how you skipped over mass exploitation, aparthied, segregation, slavery, and all the other shit that caused the issues you highlight so.....offensively
Redirect all international flights from risky nations to a small number of quarantine zones
When I flew to and from Ghana, I went through London. Is Great Britain considered a "risky" nation? Should my flight of 100+ people be diverted because one person came from a place where a rare disease is somewhat less rare? If so, then you must also divert thousands of other flights. Soon the logistics of scale creep in, and you're processing a ridiculous number of passengers through this "small number" of quarantine sites.
Let's not discuss the cost of diverting so much travel and disrupting so many plans.
If we have a sufficiently fast, cheap, and reliable Ebola screening test...
...but we don't. We don't have anything remotely like that. Reliable testing takes a few days to get results. Faster screening is asking "do you have these symptoms", but since symptoms don't appear for a week after infection, it's often inaccurate.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
This is why I'm not panicking about an Ebola plague - despite the media's and some politician's attempts to make it seem like Ebola Doomsday is just over the horizon. Ebola isn't an easy disease to catch. It doesn't spread by air (even though the conspiracy theorists would say otherwise). You need direct bodily fluid contact. This is why in the Duncan case his family and friends weren't infected but a couple of health care workers (who were close to him when he was the sickest and thus had the biggest viral load) were.
Worst case scenario is that we will isolate the infected and anyone they came in contact with. The disease would quickly lose its infection vector and die out. However, with only about 9 cases in the US so far, I think we're a long way from needing to take these steps.
Nigeria imposed quarantines early and quickly and they have been declared Ebola free.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Your method of dealing with a virulent disease has worked... never.
Meh. Virulence (severity of effects) is only one of two relevant factors when trying to figure out how to manage a disease. The other is communicability, and that, in fact, is the variable that matters most when you decide to what extent quarantine is necessary or appropriate. The more communicable the disease the more important it is to isolate those that have it, unless its virulence is so low that you just don't care.
Ebola, however, is one of the least communicable diseases possible. Literally. If it were much less infectious it would just die out on its own.
Infectious disease modelling uses several values to describe communicability, but the most important one is basic reproduction number, called R0. Diseases with an R0 of <1 will die out on their own because the number specifies the average number of new infections that will arise from an infected person in "normal" society. The exact value of R0 is society-dependent. Measles, for example, has an R0 of between 12 and 18, lower in societies with greater personal space and higher in societies with less personal space, because measles is transmitted via aerosols.
Recent studies put R0 for Ebola in the 1-2 range, in Africa. Given the way in which it's transmitted, the highest infection rates are in societies with poor sanitation infrastructure and/or practices, like Liberia, and even there Ebola is barely able to reproduce enough to grow. This is why it's been hanging around with only periodic, mostly small, outbreaks for 40+ years. The same recent studies say that all that's necessary to stop the outbreak completely is to reduce the new cases by 50%. That's all, and Ebola's poor communicability will mean that the outbreak will collapse.
I posit -- though we'll never have the numbers needed to evaluate it statistically -- that Ebola's R0 in developed countries with good sanitation infrastructure is <<1. Notice that so far the only infections that have occurred in the US were of health care workers treating the ill, and doing so with inadequate care. None of the family members or other people the infected individuals have come in contact with have contracted the disease, in spite of the fact that there have been hundreds. The sparse data so far argues for an R0 of ~0.01 in the US.
This means that quarantining people who may have come into brief contact with an Ebola patient is unnecessarily restrictive and -- as the GP explained quite clearly -- very likely to be counterproductive.
It doesn't make sense to use the same response for every disease any more than it makes sense to give the same medicine for every disease. Let the professionals who know what they're doing devise the protocols for limiting the spread. And what they -- very sensibly! -- recommend is simply to quarantine those actually diagnosed, and to have their caregivers take appropriate precautions against infection. Barring a mutation that dramatically increases the communicability of the disease, that will be perfectly adequate.
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