Posted on 10/26/2014 5:07:51 PM PDT by nomad
Cold increases the time span for viral viability?
Freezing can preserve it?
What`s to prevent viral contaminated fluids from surviving all winter?
At least till someone or something encounters them. You pick up snow on your boots/shoes all the time in winter, then track it into the home. Now its water on your carpet, do I now have to wear a hazmat suit in my home?
Reducing the chances to < 1 in a million are going to be a problem going forward.
Do you support a travel ban from West African nations?
Do you support imposing a quarantine on healthcare workers who have worked with Ebola patients?
Aerosol means like sneezing and coughing...something different was used for description of airborne, so we can’t use that term.
LOL it’s not funny, but your description of airborne is...
I don’t know, she suggests a hazard of going barefoot. I wonder how small a droplet must be, to not contain a virus.
I don’t disagree with that.
sure does. Your hero is a fictional character and the advice you give may work inside a lab, I don’t know. But it isn’t worth much in a patient care environment. Its not so hard to say we just don’t know a lot of things about how Ebola behaves in the hospital health care environment, or in the wild in a modern highly mobile civilization.
wait a minute now. only fixed when the CDC showed up? but the nurses/Hospital say differently (and wasn’t it D w/o B that pushed the CDC to upgrade their standard?):
“This lack of sufficient protection has been widely reported, and blamed on the hospital. But the nurses say they looked up protocols from the CDC, and as of late September, that’s what the CDC recommended.
Scott Pelley: So the CDC protocols that you would’ve looked up the day he came into the emergency department was in your estimation deficient?
All four nurses: Yes.
Within 48 hours, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital moved to equip its staff with suits that didn’t expose any skin — three weeks before the CDC made that policy their new national standard.”
linked from: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3219909/posts
A link to this thread has been posted on the Ebola Surveillance Thread
According to the epidemiology folks that isn’t airborne, that’s airmobile.
SO was I, until they started admitting that some animals carry the virus, and don’t die off quick like monkeys and apes do. Makes me wonder if some of these really blind liberals would turn anti-animal just because somebody they saw as conservative said, “eradicate ebola to save the monkeys.”
From what I know, for sterilizing, and I mean kill even all microbes in soil, it takes a whole lot of radiation, or really high temperatures for a period of time in dry heat, to kill everything. Freezing does not kill viruses or virions, or bacteria, it simply preserves them and renders them dormant. Once exposed to warmer temperatures, they thaw and go back to normal. I personally don’t want to find out, and the unknowns of ebola should have been concern enough to the people at the top, but it somehow isn’t.
I am also concerned that ebola could make it into Latin America, where they have their own variants on animals that can carry or get infected in Africa, and they also have a tropical climate.
I share your fear, I may live in Valley Forge, PA, but that’s still freezing and below freezing temperatures in winter, and since the Philadelphia Airport isn’t quarantined, you can probably see where I am going with that...
No offence, but have you ever worked in a research lab or even been inside one? I can think of a whole host of dangers that exist in the research laboratory that you will never see in a patient care environment. One of the worst students I had was a physician--not just because teaching some level of arrogance seems to be part of clinician training, but because it was really hard, thanks to her medical training, to get her to understand how careful she needed to be to work in a lab.
You seem to think that a lab is a benign environment. The truth is, labs are dangerous--and not just because of the pathogens and toxins we work with, but also because of the equipment and chemicals. People get seriously injured and killed in labs fairly frequently (google "laboratory deaths"). Chemicals and equipment explode. Animals bite (and they have razor sharp teeth). Most of the procedures required to analyze pathogens generate aerosols. Some chemicals are deadly if you get them on your skin, others if you breathe them. And so on. I'm pretty sure I could discuss a different laboratory danger every day for the next year and not run out of topics.
Everything I have said about Ebola mostly pertains to the laboratory and healthcare settings. I actually do not consider Ebola much of a concern "in the wild" because the disease is so debilitating that by the time a person becomes contagious, they don't feel like doing anything. Most people who have fevers and abdominal pain, are vomiting and who have severe diarrhea really don't feel like going bowling or whatever. So their house might be contaminated, but that's about it. Even in Africa, at the heart of this outbreak, where they have cultural practices that facilitate the spread of the disease, the R-naught is still less than 2.
There are Ebola reservoir possibilities in the western hemisphere, but there were malaria, yellow fever and many other reservoirs before we wiped them all out. Granted a fair number of those were wiped out using vaccines, but many were simply tracked down and wiped out along with affected mosquito populations. Ebola will be easier to control than any of those since there are no mosquito or similar insect vectors.
“All fluids are capable of becoming airborne.” — GilesB
Nail-on-the-head.
“It’s only a virus, not some supernatural entity. You wouldn’t know that from a lot of the news reports.”
That’s a reasonable statement. You are knowledgeable, and I for one appreciate your participation here.
Would it be accurate to say that the virus is one of healthcare’s last frontiers? As I understand it, a virus is one nasty bugger to eliminate, and it crystalizes when frozen, then thaws out to be alive all over again.
Strep bacteria survived frozen inside an unmanned Surveyor 3 probe on the moon until Apollo astronauts bought the probe back for the data recordings. In other words, it survived being frozen at -250 F inside a container which shielded it from UV rays for years and revived once exposed to Earth conditions again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reports_of_Streptococcus_mitis_on_the_Moon
ANYTHING can become airborne under the right conditions..
How about if someone who is asymptomatic donates blood? Did you bother thinking about that. The chances are remote and close to none that a person from Africa will give blood, assuming they are honest, given the malaria risk, but had one of those nurses given blood during their asymptomatic period, are you sure about that?
People take precautions out of a knowledge that accidents and acts of stupidity can and do happen. I work in a lab to, I dealt with soil microbes and fungi that could be extremely dangerous even if you are vaccinated, even worse I could carry something out of the lab that I am immune to and unaffected by, but others around me could be killed or harmed by it. I am pretty well aware of how microbiological experiments work, I also understand that when you are dealing with something that unless it is in extremely large colonies is simply too small for you to see, or can be extremely hard to kill, extreme caution is fully justified. A lot of these people aren’t assuming the strawman idea that a virus is magic, but a lot of everyday people are aware that in the face of unknowns, extreme caution is highly justified.
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