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Health Advisor: Ebola Still Spreading, Worst Outbreak We've Ever Seen
Lasrick writes After four decades of confining Ebola outbreaks to small areas, experts acknowledged in an October 9 New England Journal of Medicine article that "we were wrong" about the scope of the current situation. At the present transmission rate, the number of Ebola cases in West Africa doubles every two to three weeks. Early diagnosis is the key to controlling the epidemic, but that's far easier said than done: "And there are several complicating factors. For one thing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that 60 percent of all Ebola patients remain undiagnosed in their communities." A transmission rate below 1 is necessary to keep the outbreak under control (instead of the current rate of 1.5 to 2), and the authors detail what's in the works to help achieve early detection, which is crucial to reducing the current transmission rate.
I heard that a major problem in Africa is a burial custom where they pour water over the deceased persons body and then relatives drink the water. No idea whether this is true at all, but if it is, you would sort of think that there needs to be a fairly serious education campaign to control it. Ebola isn't that contagious considering it needs direct contact with bodily fluids, so something has to be happening which is consistently putting people at risk.
I had a crazy dream where it was 26th of November and the number of new ebola cases had been dropping for the last five weeks.
So it must not exist any more. Right?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
and they admitted it.
You will get to puke and shit your organs out along with the rest of us
Regardless of sourcing the information, the information is incorrect. According to this graph, Ebola is doubling every 60 days now -- so there has been some improvement.
Best way to keep up on this, that I can tell, is to google "ebola africa timeline wiki", and pan down to the timeline, near the bottom of the article. You'll see the graphs.
My favorite graph for keeping track is the logarithmic scale based on population , because it's easy to see where infection totality is: it used to be at 1 1/2 years, and now is about 5 years out.
Another thing of interest that I noted, though: The infection rates before a country mounts a serious response, can be as fast as doubling every 3 or 5 days. For that reason, I think our CDC's active attempts to STOP a proper response, was the worst thing they could do.
Just something to think about.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Is the string of experts saying how wrong they were after the fact.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
...it's people and their vast ignorance.
Around here people treat the news about Ebola like it's just another H1N1 outbreak and think nothing further of it. The schools are literally a walk-in petridish and the hygiene at the cafeterias are terrible, kids just dash in for seconds and dab their spoons gleefully into the pots and pans for more, and the next week - half of the kids and teachers are sick with the common flu. Imagine that scenario when we've got Ebola on the move.
We have lots of people who have families in Africa, they come over with their friends ALL the time, and they attend the same schools as the natives do, it's just a matter of time before this becomes a uncontrollable problem.
Proper hygiene needs to be taught, and before we know how to control this, we should limit the traveling from and to infected countries.
Personally I've stacked up like crazy, I've filled my house to the brim with food and stuff needed to cope with that time when the outbreak will be at its worst. Again - it's not Ebola I fear...I fear the people who will get desperate when they reap the fruit of their own ignorance.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
of course it is. this post is already out-of-date. every-damn-thing is out-of-date by now.
Don't sugar coat it.
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
NEJM is part of the vast right-wing conspiracy harping on the dangers of Ebola merely because faux news tells them to?
-Styopa
It's not 100 percent fatal. The human race can survive it. The present society will of course perish.
They don't realize that the worst is yet to come once it really breaks out of the 3 African countries where is is pretty much out of control.
The thing is, it is under control in Guinea with new cases declining. Liberia and Sierra Leone seems to be the true make or break cases, but with some success in the past few weeks. It's still exponential growth, but doubling time has lengthened considerably. Even if they fail to contain Ebola in the end, this buys us some time.
While I wouldn't ordinarily excuse the ad-hominem, when you feel like you might need to resort to a physically violent confrontation just because someone's challenged your credibility online, it only kind of affirms the possibility that they may actually have been right
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
When shit gets real there's more "the spirit of the blitz" than Mad Max. Compare the hysterics of meteor movies with Russian dashcam footage where the real thing is not even enough to turn down the stereo, let alone stop driving.
Of the 17 cases of Ebola that have occurred outside of Africa, 4 of them have died. One of them was in the USA.
Granted, a lot lower than 70% mortality rate, but by no means are Americans immune.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
No, that's diabetes. This article is about Ebola.
BTW... had it ever occurred to you actually link to the things you are talking about instead of just pretending to sound like you know what you are talking about by just expecting everyone else to do the same research that you allegedly did?
If you are going to claim to know something, then post the friggen links to the relevant material instead of just saying to other people that they should just go do it themselves like you claim you did... otherwise, for all anyone else knows, you're just full of a lot of hot air... which to be honest, is how your post comes across. Particularly since there is at least one factually incorrect statement. Specifically, the claim that no americans have died from the virus is false... one has, to date. While that's still a small number, the claim of none is still factually incorrect. Of course, even being factually incorrect is not necessarily unforgivable, if you show that you at least made an honest attempt to do some reseearch on the topic, and the detail about which you are incorrect does not detract from your main point. But again, this too requires that you cite your sources, so that people will be able to replicate your research. Typing stuff into google doesn't replicate anything because a page rank can easily change.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Actually the opposite is the case. Our economy has exactly the opposite, but nonetheless equally destructive, problem communism had: They had a shortage of supply. We have a shortage of demand.
Our economy produces enough. Proof? Go anywhere and behold how desperately everyone wants to sell. Be it goods or services, You'll be hard pressed to NOT find someone offering whatever you may want to you. What's lacking is the demand. And without it, there is no market either.
If you think people need any kind of incentive to be ravenous asshole capitalists, think again. Those that could invest already want to. Quite badly, too. There just isn't anything to invest in, because there is no viable business possible without consumers that would want to buy what you'd offer. And the main reason for this is simply that there are not enough people who have enough money to become consumers. And jobs are sadly not created when someone wills a business into existence. Well, you can do that, but it's not really viable to produce without a chance to sell what you produce. You'll be bankrupt in no time.
A job is created when the market situation of demand forces the supply side into hiring additional personnel to fill that demand. Nobody in their sane mind creates a job for the sake of creating a job, paying another person and putting more goods he can't sell on the stockpile. If this is the situation (and that is the situation currently), the sane option is NOT to hire someone and NOT to produce more of what you can't already sell.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Hyperbole much?
Ebola, and it's like, have come and gone countless millions of times over the years. Granted, our population density helps them spread a little, but that's vastly outweighed in scale by just the existence of simple hygiene - let alone medical knowledge. A few hundred years ago, in some European countries, it was normal to defecate inside the house, and wear one long shirt that was also your underwear.
We're talking about a disease spreading in one of the poorest and most deprived regions of the world where medical assistance is almost non-existent and where getting some means mingling with thousands of others who are also ill.
In the entire history of humanity, we have "cured" exactly two diseases. Smallpox (which recent science articles suggest may be making a comeback in a mutated form) and rinderpest (ever heard of it? I haven't - because it only affects cattle).
Ebola might well kill people. Lots of people. It may even creep into first-world countries, even with proper medical control. But the fact is that there are ten times worse things out there, spreading just as virulently, and we are either ignoring them or we have them under control because they can be made not as deadly. Before the 1980's, nobody had heard of AIDS. Now your life expectancy with it is about the same as that without it, so long as you live in range of a hospital that can diagnose and treat it.
Ebola is nasty. I sure wouldn't want to come in contact with it. But if you think that it poses a threat to the human race as a whole, you're sadly mistaken.
The Black Death may have killed up to 200 million people - estimated at around HALF of the population of Europe at the time, before America was even discovered - in less than 10 years. It killed nearly a quarter of the entire world.
That's a serious pandemic. It's still around, 700 years later. There are outbreaks every now and then still. And it can be effectively wiped out with simple antibiotics. And we don't even have it on the notification list for the World Health Organisation any more.
Ebola is localised, contained, vulnerable to basic medical practice, and actually pretty treatable. And all the cases outside Africa have been contained and nobody containing them (apart from one very stupid nurse that can't obey simple medical practice) has died. That tells you just how vulnerable it is. And most of those cases were seeded by people HELPING OUT Ebola patients in the origin countries.
The problem is not that Ebola is going to come over into the first world countries and wipe us out or decimate the population. It's that the countries where it is present at the moment have notoriously inadequate medical facilities generally. But nobody focuses on that. Everyone is much more concerned with whether their health insurance would cover them if they got it.
And, I'll be honest, in Europe (who are much closer to Africa and have already seen Ebola-infected refugees cross the notoriously-difficult-to-police waters into Italy, and who have free-movement laws across the continent - except for the UK), it's not even a news story. Hasn't been for weeks. Nobody is worried.
Your worries about Ebola are caused by watching too much Fox News blowing things out of proportion for the sake of entertainment, not any basis in fact. If you were that worried, you'd send $10 to Médecins Sans FrontiÃres.
wouldn't it be funny if someone called you on that? And publicly beat the snot out of you?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
The biggest problem with the economy is wage stagnation. I think that supply and demand is a terrible way to set wages as a job is a necessity for nearly everyone. Demand for workers can shrink but the supply will not and wages will bottom out and as they do so will demand for goods, effectively creating a catch-22.
At the time I'm reading this submission, it's tagged with "nothingofvaluewaslost". I can't fathom what this is supposed to mean. Lives in West Africa are worthless? Deaths in a developing country are meaningless because there's no economic impact? Am I missing some subtlety or other message here?
What a cynical, awful tag.
That's why a universal basic income is such a beautiful concept. It would remove from the equation human survival as an individual incentive - thus reducing the supply of workers when the work offers are not attractive enough, solving that particular problem.
If everyone had their basic survival guaranteed through an unconditional minimum wage, the work market would be driven by individual initiatives to create pretty things and to improve from that basic status by pursuing luxury.
The main fear against the UBI is that those incentives would not attract enough workers to support the needs of mankind as a whole, but I don't see evidence that this would be the case - the drive to be creative and improve your personal status are pretty strong ones.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
He assumes constant or rising speed of spreading of the disease and constant or increasing contact with the diseased.
While ignoring ANY possibility of lowering of those factors by various means.
From governmental blockades of travel, through people avoiding contact on their own, up to changes in weather as we are moving into a winter which will make moving of humans and viruses across continents slower, harder and easier to spot.
In short...
http://xkcd.com/605/
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The USA is the largest consumer market in the world where per capita consumption is higher than any other country. Yet you're making the claim that there's a shortage of demand, and you're getting modded up as interesting? Wow.
"And the main reason for this is simply that there are not enough people who have enough money to become consumers."
True only to a point. Then diminishing returns sets in as well. For instance, I could buy a camper, but I have little free time I could use to go camping. I could buy a new TV, but it would be only marginally better than the old one. I am sitting on brand new chair, which was bought because the old one wore out. The same thing happened to the dishwasher last month.
As far as material goods go, I'm down to basic replacement, and the increasingly desperate screeching of "BUY! BUY! BUY!" is having ever less effect. Buy what? For what purpose? Large blocks of Time, which I actually could use, are not for sale at any price.
"If everyone had their basic survival guaranteed through an unconditional minimum wage, the work market would be driven by individual initiatives to create pretty things and to improve from that basic status by pursuing luxury."
But the taxes needed to pay for the universal basic income would prevent anyone from improving from that basic status. Now Krugman stated a few years ago that the well-off were status-crazed workaholics who would keep on working even at 100% marginal rates. I don't agree, but then I am not a workaholic.
Another side effect is that you would have to shut the border to the point North Korea looks like a free trade area.
On the other side, as the robots take over, and I firmly believe that will keep happening, we will have to come up with something. Even on the right wing people are starting to mutter that it would be cheaper to have a universal basic income than 30 or 40 separate government programs doling out benefits. And there are voices on the Left who don't like it because (as usual) they don't trust people to be able to look out for themselves; they need government help to select what is in their own best interests (as determined by that ever benevolent government). See Bloomberg and his big soft drink ban. The overlapping government agencies ensure there is meticulous and continuous supervision of the rabble.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next 20 years.
So far the US bombed every remotely important country wanting to sell oil for Euros back into the stone age. Last time Ahmedingbats pondered aloud that he plans to have the Iran do so caused him to be pushed into the Axle of Evil.
Correlation doesn't imply causation. And it's worth noting that Iran hasn't experienced any serious consequences from the US for its alleged Euro-based oil trading since it doesn't sell its oil to the US.
The fed is not committed to maintaining inflation to stimulate investment. That's just the excuse they use to help themselves to the wealth of others.
I'm all for it. I'd quit my job tomorrow. Well, Monday. We're off tomorrow.
Regarding parent's and grandparents post, If there is too much supply for demand, the logical outcome is a fall in prices. This is called deflation. Inflation is exactly the wrong answer especially as it steals wealth from everyone and returns it in the form of money to the few wealthy bankers who get it handed to them.
The solution is to give extra income to people who work (as in physically show up). If you are unemployed there should be labor centers where you have to show up to get your check and that keep you busy for the day. I get that we can't have them competing with private enterprise as that would be unfair but until no charity needs volunteers, until no old folks in retirement homes are lonely, until all litter is picked up, we can keep these people busy and pay them. I'd suggest funding it with a tax on imports, with a bias against low income countries like China. This would stimulate domestic demand by putting money in the 99% instead of the 1% and it would not create a culture of laziness. Thoughts and comments welcome.
I'm not sure that's true. I've known too many people who were content doing absolutely nothing. They tend to be the disability types, always long on excuses and short on anything useful. Making people work for their wages makes sense. That's why I support a universal bonus income for people who work (coupled with a minimum wage to make sure that the bonus doesn't become a new way for the 0.1% to screw over the rest of us). The other half of making work people work is always having something for them to do. That's why I support the notion of work centers where people can show up and work is always available. It's the answer to the situation of telling someone to get a job when jobs aren't available.
We have 100% marginal rates and people keep working.
I think that with BLS there should be no progressive tax rate. Instead, there should be flat tax rate from any income, to be paid immediately, preferably automatically, no excemptions. You get money, you pay your share and rest is yours. The more you work (or smarter you invest), the more you get, linearily.
Also no tax evasion or loopholes, and no bureaucracy.
This would apply to individuals, whether they were employed or self-employed, and taxation would only get more complex with bigger businesses.
Nope. The lazy people who are financially well off, and not punished for working, actually get more active, and start doing more things. When weaned off the support, they turn their interest into a job. The capitalist stays home and faps, while waiting for his portfolio to increase 1/10th of a basis point, before selling, shorting, and twitting a false and damaging rumour about the company.
Giving to the poor and lazy makes more jobs than giving to the rich.
Learn to love Alaska
Read Animal Farm. Nobody liked the cat. But the cat didn't kill anyone. If Animal Farm were written today, the pigs would have blamed all the problems on the cat, despite no problem ever having been caused by the cat. That's the country we live in today.
Learn to love Alaska
You say that as if it was a bad thing. How does it affect you negatively?
That's not a given, in particular if the work they would be forced to do is not productive but "show off", as you suggest. Do you mind to elaborate that idea and justify it, to explain what it makes sense to you?
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
No because the niggers will spread the nigger disease far beyond themselves.
And still the pox infested wankers in government here in the UK will not SHUT the borders cus they are shit scared of the shirt lifters in the EU .
Raving faggots the lot of them
We need to shut the doors tight no one in at all plenty out only thou one way jobs back to Somalia Nigeria Pakistan India China Japan and on and on and on ..
You appear to have forgotten to preface your interesting remarks with the customary "I am not a racist/homophobe but..."
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
This would apply to individuals, whether they were employed or self-employed, and taxation would only get more complex with bigger businesses.
It is not feasible to separate businesses and individuals, since high earners use business arrangements to reduce their tax burden.
Those billionaire business owners who pay themselves (through the company they control) an annual salary of $1 salary a year are doing so for tax reasons.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I'm not sure that's true. I've known too many people who were content doing absolutely nothing. They tend to be the disability types, always long on excuses and short on anything useful. Making people work for their wages makes sense. That's why I support a universal bonus income for people who work (coupled with a minimum wage to make sure that the bonus doesn't become a new way for the 0.1% to screw over the rest of us). The other half of making work people work is always having something for them to do. That's why I support the notion of work centers where people can show up and work is always available. It's the answer to the situation of telling someone to get a job when jobs aren't available.
You're then talking about "work centres" which just dole out busy work. When we had National Service in the UK there were people who spent a couple of years painting coal white one week then cleaning off the paint the next.
The ideal would be not to make everyone work x hours a week regardless, but to divide the work up so that everyone does y hours each, which hopefully with increasing automation would be about 20 hours a week.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Perhaps the police would be more accommodating of blacks if they didn't commit nearly 60% of all crime while being only around 12% of the population.
You must be pretty stupid if you think those shit head statistics mean anything, when there is an obvious selection bias at play (EG. Minorities are statisticly targeted for investigation and prosecution). Do you even think for yourself, or do you just regurgitate shit you hear from your drinking buddies? You are either stupid, or have deceitful agenda. Either way, I don't like you.
Fanboy Status: Apache Flex, C#, Eclipse, KDE, Pirate Party, Ron Paul, Slackware, Windows 7
Since we're far from having a shortage of workforce, I highly doubt the world as we know it would grind to a halt just because 10% of the people are lazy dicks. So let them do nothing. If they're content with just barely getting by with no form of "luxury" whatsoever (no car, no cable TV, no vacation, a tiny apartment...), let them be.
If you want more than existence, if you want to actually live, you better work.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The problem is also the distribution of wealth. As you correctly identified it, you being able to buy a TV is worth jack (for the economy) if you have no need for one because yours is already top of the line. But there's others who would want one but can't afford it.
To pull a blunt example, if you have 100 bucks and so do I, we can both go and buy a DVD player for 80. If you have 180 and I only have 20, you can buy one, but it's rather unlikely that you'll buy two.
Now, of course someone will butt in and say "but he'll buy something else for the 100 he has left". Ok. Then multiply the whole spiel by 100 and have the first person furnish his mansion while the second can't even buy a couch for his one room apartment. The point is that the first person will have money left over after he has everything he can sensibly buy (in both, goods and services, you don't need two haircuts, do you?) while the second person WOULD buy more stuff if he just COULD.
What is currently needed is a way to sensibly and fairly distribute the wealth we have. I'm all for someone who works better/harder to get more/better goods and services, but for the sake of the economy we have to enable more people to spend and become a part of the demand side.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Actually the opposite is the case. Our economy has exactly the opposite, but nonetheless equally destructive, problem communism had: They had a shortage of supply. We have a shortage of demand.
Our economy produces enough. Proof? Go anywhere and behold how desperately everyone wants to sell. Be it goods or services, You'll be hard pressed to NOT find someone offering whatever you may want to you. What's lacking is the demand. And without it, there is no market either.
If you think people need any kind of incentive to be ravenous asshole capitalists, think again. Those that could invest already want to. Quite badly, too. There just isn't anything to invest in, because there is no viable business possible without consumers that would want to buy what you'd offer. And the main reason for this is simply that there are not enough people who have enough money to become consumers. And jobs are sadly not created when someone wills a business into existence. Well, you can do that, but it's not really viable to produce without a chance to sell what you produce. You'll be bankrupt in no time.
A job is created when the market situation of demand forces the supply side into hiring additional personnel to fill that demand. Nobody in their sane mind creates a job for the sake of creating a job, paying another person and putting more goods he can't sell on the stockpile. If this is the situation (and that is the situation currently), the sane option is NOT to hire someone and NOT to produce more of what you can't already sell.
I fully concur with your statements. As corporations outsource jobs, the local net net discretionary income disappears. Only essentials are purchased. It's sad, as the American society has become a for profit everything, from public education to medicine. Even the military is a for profit institution. MacDonalds has become the location of "lets go out for an evening's supper"
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
"Nobody in their sane mind creates a job for the sake of creating a job..." Nobody? You forgot about Big Gov. Just ask Obama; he's been "creating jobs" ever since he assumed role of Emperor. He's been saying as much for years.
-- "I'm not in a hurry; I'm in Hawaii." The Homeless Guy
Giving to the poor and lazy makes more jobs than giving to the rich.
when the financial crisis hit in AU they did exactly that and it seemed to work.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Well, that's because government's primary concern is not to make more money for those who rule it... erh ...
Never mind. I'm stuck in the times when politicians worked for their country rather than having their country work for them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You say that as if it was a bad thing. How does it affect you negatively?
Because I have to pay taxes to support them? Not only directly to them, but for all the other social services that they feel entitled to despite not paying their share of taxes to support them, especially (in my country anyway) health care.
That increases the cost of my labour, and that of the other people still willing to work, making us less competitive internationally. Which causes more jobs to be outsourced or just vanish due to being economically unproductive.
A rich person lives in a House. The money for maintaining it comes from somewhere. He eats with his family, money comes from somewhere. He uses a car for personal purposes, money for that comes from somewhere. He does a personal investment with money.
In my idea, all that money came to him as taxable income, no loopholes. Anybody spending a lot of money would have to (either eat into existing savings or) use taxable money for it. If company pays directly, it's still income and company needs to pay the tax toi. Flat tax rate is important here, no deductions, so there isn't complex tax calculation to be done, just $X (money or benefit) received by the person, then $Y paid in taxes would come directly from flat tax rate.
Not if you choose to be one of the people who doesn't work and lives from the basic rent.
Do you realize that those arguments wouldn't apply if the rent was truly universal? I.e. if *all* people could apply for them, not just people from a single country, all workers in the world would face the same increases in costs, thus not making any difference in their competitiveness.
Again you're assuming 1) that such thing would happen and 2) that it's a bad thing. Why?
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
What if the product is not created by a person but by a robot? That option didn't ever exist in the past.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
I said "Not if you choose to be one of the people who doesn't work and lives from the basic rent"... or also if you can't choose and are forced into it. Life is long and you never know what tomorrow brings.
With a basic income, you have a choice that you didn't have before. This is what those extra taxes are buying you (in addition to reducing competence because other people will choose not to apply to the remaining jobs). Being universal, you also benefit from them.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.