Ebola in America

[Soapy Sam]

There's a tendency among "sceptics" to downplay any threat which appears in the media.
Look at me. I'm sophisticated. I'm not panicking.

Fair enough. Panic helps nobody, long term.

Nor does underestimating a potential hazard.

Yes, the west has better health care than western Africa, but it also has faster transport. We also have people obsessed with their civil right to do whatever they want, no matter the possible effect on others.

British hospitals could prevent uncontrolled spread from a couple of dozen cases to extremely high standard, a couple of hundred borderline adequately and a couple of thousand, not at all.

But hospitals are not prisons. Anyone can, up to a point, walk out of a hospital. If he can't , then it's no longer a hospital, it is a prison and all manner of legal questions arise. Someone knowing he may not be allowed to leave, may simply not go in, even if that results in his death.
Not everyone is desperate to live.
At that point, we are into legal restriction of movement, curfew, soldiers delivering basic foodstuffs...
The secret is not letting it start. That means taking it very seriously.
So far, we don't seem to be doing that.
Maybe a good healthy dose of short term panic is just what the doctor ordered.

 

[anglolawyer]

There's a tendency among "sceptics" to downplay any threat which appears in the media.
Look at me. I'm sophisticated. I'm not panicking.

Fair enough. Panic helps nobody, long term.

Nor does underestimating a potential hazard.

Yes, the west has better health care than western Africa, but it also has faster transport. We also have people obsessed with their civil right to do whatever they want, no matter the possible effect on others.

British hospitals could prevent uncontrolled spread from a couple of dozen cases to extremely high standard, a couple of hundred borderline adequately and a couple of thousand, not at all.

But hospitals are not prisons. Anyone can, up to a point, walk out of a hospital. If he can't , then it's no longer a hospital, it is a prison and all manner of legal questions arise. Someone knowing he may not be allowed to leave, may simply not go in, even if that results in his death.
Not everyone is desperate to live.
At that point, we are into legal restriction of movement, curfew, soldiers delivering basic foodstuffs...
The secret is not letting it start. That means taking it very seriously.
So far, we don't seem to be doing that.
Maybe a good healthy dose of short term panic is just what the doctor ordered.

Aren't there already notifiable diseases that can result in deprivation of liberty?

Most European states have statutory powers2 enabling a range of compulsory interventions, from compulsory vaccination to the compulsory medical examination, compulsory quarantine3 and compulsory isolation or detention of infected persons.

 

[catsmate]

Thanks, I just read that and was coming to correct my error. If she was wearing a face shield, that tends to suggest that she might have touched her face with a contaminated glove, which is a common way that health care workers are being infected.

Yeah it seems to have been a common face shield, headband and visor over a mask.
There's examples from previous outbreaks of Ebola infecting via the eyes.

Be as cynical as you like but I just read an article that said Ebola could wipe out half the population of the planet!

So could an asteroid impact.

 

[The Don]

There's a tendency among "sceptics" to downplay any threat which appears in the media.
Look at me. I'm sophisticated. I'm not panicking.

Fair enough. Panic helps nobody, long term.

Nor does underestimating a potential hazard.

Yes, the west has better health care than western Africa, but it also has faster transport. We also have people obsessed with their civil right to do whatever they want, no matter the possible effect on others.

British hospitals could prevent uncontrolled spread from a couple of dozen cases to extremely high standard, a couple of hundred borderline adequately and a couple of thousand, not at all.

But hospitals are not prisons. Anyone can, up to a point, walk out of a hospital. If he can't , then it's no longer a hospital, it is a prison and all manner of legal questions arise. Someone knowing he may not be allowed to leave, may simply not go in, even if that results in his death.
Not everyone is desperate to live.
At that point, we are into legal restriction of movement, curfew, soldiers delivering basic foodstuffs...
The secret is not letting it start. That means taking it very seriously.
So far, we don't seem to be doing that.
Maybe a good healthy dose of short term panic is just what the doctor ordered.

True, but my concern is that panic will lead to the rushed implementation of laws and practices which will give the appearance of controlling Ebola (at the expense of civil liberties) whilst at the same time being ineffective. Ebola could be used as a long-desired for excuse to implement some draconian measures to control human movement (in the same way that the War on Terror^TM has been used as an excuse to collect all kinds of information on all kinds of people) and/or the measures give the impression of effectiveness which means that our actual guard drops.

 

[catsmate]

There's a tendency among "sceptics" to downplay any threat which appears in the media.
Look at me. I'm sophisticated. I'm not panicking.

Fair enough. Panic helps nobody, long term.

Nor does underestimating a potential hazard.

Yes, the west has better health care than western Africa, but it also has faster transport. We also have people obsessed with their civil right to do whatever they want, no matter the possible effect on others.

British hospitals could prevent uncontrolled spread from a couple of dozen cases to extremely high standard, a couple of hundred borderline adequately and a couple of thousand, not at all.

But hospitals are not prisons. Anyone can, up to a point, walk out of a hospital. If he can't , then it's no longer a hospital, it is a prison and all manner of legal questions arise. Someone knowing he may not be allowed to leave, may simply not go in, even if that results in his death.
Not everyone is desperate to live.
At that point, we are into legal restriction of movement, curfew, soldiers delivering basic foodstuffs...
The secret is not letting it start. That means taking it very seriously.
So far, we don't seem to be doing that.
Maybe a good healthy dose of short term panic is just what the doctor ordered.

UK law allows for confinement in the case of infectious disease, just like in the USA and other countries.
Frankly panic is potentially more dangerous than a few cases of Ebola.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

Frankly panic is potentially more dangerous than a few cases of Ebola.

But not as deadly as the potential of Ebola to become deadly. I'll take panic over pandemic any day. Ebola, while not actually there yet, could potentially get to pandemic stage. All it takes is one mistake that lets it out in a large population center and it manages to find some non human resident population. I hear in Africa that is generally bats. But suppose it got into a large city's rat population? You would have just as difficult a time getting rid of Ebola as it is getting rid of rats in a big city. Has it ever been successfully done?

 

[Harpo]

Has it ever been successfully done?

Hamelin, 1284.

 

[Mudcat]

I think that a more severe threat to country than the virus itself, like many other posters here, is the level of panic in the general public. It doesn't help that the media is stoking those fears, what with stories about Ebola Zombies. No, I'm not making that up.

 

[catsmate]

I think that a more severe threat to country than the virus itself, like many other posters here, is the level of panic in the general public. It doesn't help that the media is stoking those fears, what with stories about Ebola Zombies. No, I'm not making that up.

The CDC has stated that the infection of the nurse in Dallas was down to her breaching safety protocols at the hospital.

 

[Mudcat]

The CDC has stated that the infection of the nurse in Dallas was down to her breaching safety protocols at the hospital.

Why is this directed at me?

 

[xjx388]

There's a tendency among "sceptics" to downplay any threat which appears in the media.
Look at me. I'm sophisticated. I'm not panicking.

Fair enough. Panic helps nobody, long term.

Nor does underestimating a potential hazard.

Yes, the west has better health care than western Africa, but it also has faster transport. We also have people obsessed with their civil right to do whatever they want, no matter the possible effect on others.

British hospitals could prevent uncontrolled spread from a couple of dozen cases to extremely high standard, a couple of hundred borderline adequately and a couple of thousand, not at all.

But hospitals are not prisons. Anyone can, up to a point, walk out of a hospital. If he can't , then it's no longer a hospital, it is a prison and all manner of legal questions arise. Someone knowing he may not be allowed to leave, may simply not go in, even if that results in his death.
Not everyone is desperate to live.
At that point, we are into legal restriction of movement, curfew, soldiers delivering basic foodstuffs...
The secret is not letting it start. That means taking it very seriously.
So far, we don't seem to be doing that.
Maybe a good healthy dose of short term panic is just what the doctor ordered.

+1

I don't know that we need a panic, but we do need the public and medical community to take this very seriously. I don't think it would be wrong to suspend flights from countries where there's a big problem. And the correct information needs to be spread. A local hospital actually told the doctors in a big meeting that Ebola spreads much like HIV; that you couldn't get it by casual contact. What a stupid, stupid thing to say -ESPECIALLY in light of the recent infection of a hospital worker in Dallas. Luckily, several of the doctors stood up and corrected that information.

 

[Myriad]

Some deadly diseases kill by proliferating in the body beyond the immune system's ability to control.

Some deadly diseases kill by causing the immune system to become so over-active that the patient's own immune response becomes lethal. (The 1918 influenza was one example.)

The lesson here is: needless panic and insufficient action are both hazards.

 

[Dan O.]

?..
Some reporter hit pay dirt when he interviewed this guy:

When an Ebola patient enters the latter stages of the disease, as Duncan did, they become so-called fluid producers, Kaufman said.

"Towards of end of the illness, the virus is trying to live and thrive. It's trying to get out of the person's body. It's producing massive amounts of fluid," he said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/13/us-health-ebola-usa-nurse-idUSKCN0I206820141013

About a page ago I posted a link to a very informative information sheet that explains how Ebola works. It isn't the virus that is responsible for all the nasty effects of Ebola, it is the patients own immune system reacting to the presence of the virus.

 

[catsmate]

Why is this directed at me?

Sorry, it wasn't, I was just saving a post. I should have left more space between the points.

 

[marplots]

About a page ago I posted a link to a very informative information sheet that explains how Ebola works. It isn't the virus that is responsible for all the nasty effects of Ebola, it is the patients own immune system reacting to the presence of the virus.

These two things seem like the same thing to me. It wasn't the bullet that killed him, it was the reaction to the damage the bullet caused.

 

[superfreddy]

I don't know if this has been answered before...

If an infected Ebola patient survives, would he become immune to the disease?

 

[Dan O.]

These two things seem like the same thing to me. It wasn't the bullet that killed him, it was the reaction to the damage the bullet caused.

No. It's more like: It wasn't the bullet that killed Abe, it was the surgeon that came along afterward and stuck his finger into the hole to see where the bullet had gone.

 

[marplots]

No. It's more like: It wasn't the bullet that killed Abe, it was the surgeon that came along afterward and stuck his finger into the hole to see where the bullet had gone.

In that analogy, is the immune system the surgeon? Seems to me an immune system is part of the "original package" instead of some added feature.

 

[BenBurch]

I don't know if this has been answered before...

If an infected Ebola patient survives, would he become immune to the disease?

Yes, I believe so.

 

[wollclark]

I have a feeling that ebola is going to overwhelm the country in clusters and chaos will break out. Just two people with it (not brought back from Africa in quarantined travel to experienced hospitals), and the entire country starts screaming about not being prepared.

Why wasn't Duncan taken to one of the four experienced hospitals? Then maybe a second case wouldn't have happened. Why isn't this nurse being sent to one of these locations? What the hell is the CDC doing?