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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
The more restrictive the quarantine rule is, the less likely someone will report symptoms. New cases don't announce themselves with a face-up card and a cube on a map. They arrive with aches and nausea, just like a thousand other ailments. If someone's at risk and starts feeling symptoms, are they going to voluntarily lock down their life for a week until a more accurate (and benign) diagnosis arrives? Of course not. They'll lie, say they're feeling great, then go out in public anyway.
Early and accurate detection is the key, not panicking every time someone gets a cough. If someone's at risk, encourage every report, but don't cause panic. After basic screening ("No, sir, erectile dysfunction is not a symptom of Ebola"), tell patients to be cautious and avoid contact with others. Make the patients feel like their conduct is the most important factor in protecting their neighbors. They're not just one of this week's overreactions. They're the center of attention, until their case is ruled out, like almost all such things are.
Ultimately, outbreaks like this only stop when there's either an effective vaccine/treatment, our when people can not or choose not to spread the disease to others. In the absence of the former, we must rely on others' good judgement to enact the latter. Panic is not conducive to that end.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
That mandatory quarantine and travel bans are a good idea yet?
No, nobody has figured that out yet.
The CDC says up to 1,050 people per week are coming into the USA from countries with active Ebola outbreaks.
Explain how you plan to run a rolling quarantine for 3,150 people?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
>How come they weren't the ones inventing modern techniligies abd colonizing Europe?
Well, first off - they did. At least twice. And Asia too - everyone on the planet is descended from the Africans who colonized the planet millenia ago.
More recently... My guess would be differences in the significance of warfare.
Medieval Europe was repeatedly conquered and reconquered by Christians and Muslims expanding from the Middle East, the so called cradle of civilization. Harsh, desert cultures forged in a world where they were perpetually on the knife-edge of survival, where losing a battle against raiders meant risking starvation, and as a result warfare was a serious kill-or-be-killed endeavor with survival always on the line. Whoever waged war best had the food, and everyone else obeyed them or starved.
Africa meanwhile was primarily tropical - food and water were always at hand, and raiding parties were an inconvenience rather than a serious threat to survival. Hence warfare could remain a primarily ritualistic endeavor. You raid me, I raid you, and so long as we don't die in the battle or have our favorite woman stolen, by next week it doesn't actually matter all that much who won - everybody still has plenty to eat and drink. The only real threat to your tribe is disease.
Now, put those two cultures into conflict, it seems pretty obvious that the desert culture will win - their warfare technology is centuries ahead of the competition. Now maybe you are inclined to rate a culture strictly on how well it wages war, me I tend to think that an aptitude for war doesn't necessarily reflect well on a culture.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
That isn't how you deal with plagues.
Nigeria is the model currently for dealing with this disease. They quarantine people. Not only do they do that, but they quarantine everyone they came in contact with... period.
Your method of dealing with a virulent disease has worked... never.
Just fyi.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
That mandatory quarantine and travel bans are a good idea yet?
No, nobody has figured that out yet. The CDC says up to 1,050 people per week are coming into the USA from countries with active Ebola outbreaks.
Explain how you plan to run a rolling quarantine for 3,150 people?
I guess you missed the "travel ban" part.
re "Why didn't they have something like this already, after all these years of talking about bioterrorism?"
it really depends how the US talks about its bio spending. Most of that went into the science of getting around the international treaty outlawing biological warfare.
So a huge effort to ensure tests could be done to make products, test them and then try and find a cure without the international community asking too many questions.
That has nothing to do with basic US science or spending or what is for public release to treat sick people in Africa.
Beyond that is the grant system to work for academic fame on different projects in Biosafety level 2 labs and pull in massive amounts of federal funding with the correct bioterrorism grant wording.
Great news for your book chapter, lab funding, staff size, city and state university state fame, not much help for sick people in Africa.
The final bioterrorism cash flow was the US wide sale of kits, testing, suits, filters, products, new services, long term maintenance contracts. All ready to suit up select state and federal staff but not much help for sick people in Africa.
Lots of cash floating around at different mil, gov, state and federal levels but most of that is going on existing projects or as tax payers cash going for products and boondoggle services in place around the USA.
The only real interesting aspect the US really has in Africa is for what is/was Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and wants to keep that 'local' connection in place.
"U.S. expands secret intelligence operations in Africa" (June 13, 2012)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
To keep that intelligence flowing US teams will be put on the ground.
Lets hope they are all NBC experts with many years of training.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
"Defense Department .. Elzea said the cost of the units couldn't be provided as the final contract for the project is still under negotiation .. Phoenix Air, which currently offers the only medically approved means of carrying Ebola patients at a cost of $200,000 a flight" ref
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.
"The Pentagon says it does not expect ..."
Haha, what? That line cracks me up.
No one expects . . . the Ebola Inquisition!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It was called ATI and was formed in the 1970s. The program was terminated by the Obama administration in 2010 because it was used that often.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U... [wikipedia.org]
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
His method worked great to stop the SARS outbreak in Toronto.
And SARS was much more difficult to contain than Ebola since you were infectious before showing symptoms.
Hardware:Take a small micro with BLE, add a temp sensor, put in a wristwatch style case with some batteries.
Software: once an hour it reads your temp and pushes it to your smartphone.
Emails your temps to public health every hour so they know it is working.
If the temp goes too high the email is flagged if it goes to low aka the watch is not on the person.
Give them two so they can recharge one at night when they sleep and one during the day.
No need for locking up health care workers that are not sick.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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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