Posted on 06/20/2014 6:27:09 AM PDT by Olog-hai
A senior official for Doctors Without Borders says the Ebola outbreak ravaging West Africa is “totally out of control” and that the medical group is stretched to the limit in its capacity to respond. […]
According to the latest figures from the World Health Organization, Ebola has already been linked to more than 330 deaths in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. …
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
From an epidemiology perspective, that is apples and oranges. The mortality rate of novel H1N1 case is minuscule compared to ebola/ hemmoragic fever. H1N1 (common influenzas) really don’t kill you - the complications of it do. Ebola *DOES* kill most infected humans.
It’s bad stuff. Won’t spread much in 1st world countries or amongst populations with decent health and sanitary habits. But still bad stuff.
posting from mobile; excuse typos
Going to go look it up, but I am pretty sure ebola doesn’t have an airborne human to human vector.
ebola is a contact/ bodily fluids/ contaminated environment AFAIK.
Google and CDC are my friends. BRB.
Point is, not sure it would spread like a Hanta or novel H1N1 would.
Not as frightening as Univ of TX bio prof Pianka who teaches his students he wants an ebola outbreak to take out 90% of earth’s population. Just keeping up the city motto of, “keepin’ Austin weird.” Austin is the blue blight in the middle of a Texas political map with libnut UT being a more intense shade of blue.
http://rense.com/general70/massdeath.htm
just back from the CDC site. Ebola’s natural reservoir is believed to be bats, with African fruit bats the likely culprit. They are the carriers. contact with the bats and/or their feces/bites is the presumed vector to a human ‘index’.
No identified vector beyond contact and contamination.
SO ... not a typical ‘outbreak’ sort of virus.
Remember a couple years ago when some illegals, after a couple days of mall shopping and spreading germs, took their kid to the Brownsville Hosp. with H1N1 or whatever it was.
It doesn’t have to come through the southern border, all he has to do is send a few airline tickets. Hey, he already brought over thousands of illegal kids so a few infected Africans should be easy.
Add me please and thank you.
One would think he'd be concerned with his daughters catching something but he's too far into LaLa Land to realize that could happen. Just because they're surrounded by security and go to a private school doesn't make them immune. Even he's not immune. Just let someone cough in his vicinity or he picks up a germ from a golf cart or the gal at the ice cream shop who makes his cone could pass a bug along.
Thanks for the ping!
He’s not at all concerned about that. He and his family are protected against all ill - foreign or domestic.
He just really doesn’t care. Even if he’s purportedly called Mexico and said they’d have to go back, he knows that won’t happen. It’s all just political maneuvering and he is trying to stem the tide of political disaster for him when the House and the Senate move out of his control.
Not so fast there with it only being in African fruit bats. Some research monkeys in Texas had it and there was a big scare. I couldn’t find a link (the posted link is, I think, of the same facility but earlier timeframe) but iirc there were some that got loose about 8 years ago and there was a panic to get them back and play the story down.
Correct. In this current outbreak the spread has reportedly been caused by people eating bats.
Correct, but infected people leak bodily fluids. So a sneeze, cough, blood dripping, and so on spread the disease. Very easy to transfer to caregivers if precautions are not taken.
What a nightmare. The Ebola virus is frightening.
And a person who has it can hop on a plane and be in any large city in the world inside of 24 hours.
“The Hot Zone” (true story)
“The Ebola virus kills nine out of ten of its victims so quickly and gruesomely that even biohazard experts are terrified. It is airborne, it is extremely contagious, and in the winter of 1989, it seemed about to burn through the suburbs of Washington D.C.”
“At Fort Detrick’s USAMRIID, an Army research facility outside the nation’s capital, a SWAT team of soldiers and scientists wearing biohazard space suits was organized to stop the outbreak of the exotic “hot” virus. The grim operation went on in secret for eighteen days, under unprecedented, dangerous conditions.”
“The Hot Zone tells this dramatic story in depth, giving a hair-raising account of the appearance of rare and lethal viruses and their outbreaks in the human race. From a remote African cave hot with Ebola virus, to an airplane over Africa that is carrying a sick passenger who dissolves into a human virus bomb, to the confines of a Biosafety Level 4 military lab where scientists risk their lives studying lethal substances that could kill them quickly and horribly, The Hot Zone describes situations that a few years ago would have been taken for science fiction. As the tropical wildernesses of the world are destroyed, previously unknown viruses that have lived undetected in the rain forest for eons are entering human populations. The appearance of AIDS is part of a larger pattern, and the implications for the future of the human species are terrifying.”
“The first chapter of The Hot Zone is one of the most horrifying things I’ve read in my whole life–and then it gets worse. That’s what I keep marveling over: it keeps getting worse.”
–Stephen King
http://richardpreston.net/preston-books/hot-zone
You’re Welcome, Alamo-Girl!
The southern border of West Africa?
Oh, you meant of the U.S. -- please tell me about cases in Mexico and southward. Do you honestly think they'd survive the trip north for more than 8 hours or so?
Can we stop visas from such countries? Or will this be like AIDS and a ton of Americans will be dying soon?
He recently lifted a 22 year restriction on people with HIV entering this country.
I missed this news. The CDC does not have our backs. It’s all political bullcrap.
You can come in with HIV but I can’t give blood ever in my life because I lived in Switzerland in the late 1980s. Reason being because there was mad cow in the UK during a small part of that time. So anyone living in Europe, including serving in the armed forces, at that time can’t give blood ever. (In the USA). Even though I wasn’t in England and the Swiss import no English beef.
thanks for the update. what with everything else,
I can’t keep up on this.
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