Ebola in America

Well, I obviously realize that. It just put me ill at ease to hear that some of the response techniques don't seem so airtight.


ETA - In contagion-containing situations like this, it seems to me that taking people at their word should never really be the basis for proceeding, and it seems it happened here at a few different steps along the way. Also, the quarantine sounds...mild.

There's a difference between having my concern peaked by that and wondering how much is clickbait and how much is legitimate, and raving that it's all an Illuminati conspiracy to "thin out the population" or something. I already said I have anxiety.
 
Last edited:
schplurg said:
Because all people from Africa are black? It's very hard to take anyone serious who throws out the race card so blithely.....
Click to expand...
Black or brown, the reaction of many people in the US is the same, keep those people out.

Did many people call for travel from Hong Kong to be stopped during the SARS outbreak?
 
News

The condition of the first Ebola case in the United States was downgraded to critical Saturday by Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas.

The patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, had been listed in serious condition in recent days. He was diagnosed with the deadly virus Tuesday.
Click to expand...
 
I'd like to add that in his position, I very likely would have panicked and done the same darn thing. I can't curse him. It wasn't right, but it's totally understandable. Extreme circumstances often precipitate extreme responses. It's easy to say, "Oh, I would never do that, what a selfish ****!" when it's not you experiencing the circumstances, but I don't know. I bet when our backs are against the wall, a lot of us are suddenly bigger ***** than we'd ever dreamed we could be before. So I'm not going to judge the guy.

What does trouble me is how the various authorities have handled it since his deception was done and over with and came to light. It seems lax, but then again I wouldn't know because I dropped out of medical school almost immediately due to panic attacks (lol).

SG, I know you work in the medical field and you don't seem concerned about lax procedures, so I guess I'm just having one of my classic anxiety episodes with a new and unusual impetus. But it just SOUNDS like...not enough.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
USA Today
Click to expand...

So, in Liberia they ask if you've been around Ebola-infected people.

It looks like at the Dallas hospital he was simply asked if he'd been around "ill" people.

Asked whether he had nausea, vomiting or diarrhea, Duncan said he didn’t, the statement said. "When Mr. Duncan was asked if he had been around anyone who had been ill, he said that he had not."
Click to expand...

It seems that he answered no to both ways of asking the question.

Around Ebola people? No.
Around ill people? No.
 
Disease metaphors in new epidemics: the UK media framing of the 2003 SARS epidemic
Since the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, social scientists and sociologists of health and illness have been exploring the metaphorical framing of this infectious disease in its social context. Many have focused on the militaristic language used to report and explain this illness, a type of language that has permeated discourses of immunology, bacteriology and infection for at least a century. In this article, we examine how language and metaphor were used in the UK media’s coverage of another previously unknown and severe infectious disease: Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome (SARS). SARS offers an opportunity to explore the cultural framing of a less extraordinary epidemic disease. It therefore provides an analytical counter-weight to the very extensive body of interpretation that has
developed around HIV/AIDS. By analysing the total reporting on SARS of five major national newspapers during the epidemic of spring 2003, we investigate how the reporting of SARS in the UK press was framed, and how this related to media, public and governmental responses to the disease. We found that, surprisingly, militaristic language was largely absent, as was the judgemental discourse of plague. Rather, the main conceptual metaphor used was SARS as a killer. SARS as a killer was a single unified entity, not an army or force. We provide some tentative explanations for this shift in linguistic framing by relating it to local political concerns, media cultures, and spatial factors.
Click to expand...

The long and ugly tradition of treating Africa as a dirty, diseased place
This week’s Newsweek magazine cover features an image of a chimpanzee behind the words, “A Back Door for Ebola: Smuggled Bushmeat Could Spark a U.S. Epidemic.” This cover story is problematic for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that there is virtually no chance that “bushmeat” smuggling could bring Ebola to America. ...
While eating bushmeat is fairly common in the Ebola zone, the vast majority of those who do consume it are not eating chimpanzees. Moreover, the current Ebola outbreak likely had nothing to do with bushmeat consumption.
Click to expand...

Newsweek’s racist and misinformed Ebola cover story, say some

But I agree one hears BS surrounding this issue from both sides like Rush Limbaugh's denial to Louis Farrakhan's claim the virus was engineered to kill blacks. That's no reason to completely dismiss the racial affect on the US public's response to ebola.

It'll be interesting to hear Newsweek's editors respond to the charge.
 
Last edited:
Skeptic Ginger said:
Considering the circumstances, he's apparently not such a bad guy.
Click to expand...

Good guys give hugs

Younger Jallah told the Wall Street Journal she now fears for her own health. She is also worried that her children may have been exposed to the deadly disease when they went with her to her mother's Texas apartment to see Thomas Duncan. Jallah is a 35-year-old nurse's aide and the daughter of Louise Troh, Duncan’s girlfriend. He traveled from Ebola-racked Liberia to visit Troh on Sept. 21. Troh and Duncan met in West Africa. They have a college-age son.

"I knocked at the door and he gave me a big hug," Jallah told the Journal, describing her initial encounter with him and the first time she had ever seen him.
Click to expand...
 
William Parcher said:
So, in Liberia they ask if you've been around Ebola-infected people. [and anyone who died in an ebola outbreak area.]
Click to expand...
ftfy

William Parcher said:
It looks like at the Dallas hospital he was simply asked if he'd been around "ill" people.

It seems that he answered no to both ways of asking the question.

Around Ebola people? No.
Around ill people? No.
Click to expand...
They're still pedaling furiously to not blame the doctor's poor judgement**.

You have an ill patient from Liberia, who said he was from Liberia. The doctor should have considered the patient might not know he'd been exposed.

**Edited to change my judgment after reconsidering.
Everyone makes mistakes, I'm not saying this doctor was any worse than thousands of doctors and nurses across the country who make mistakes, we're all human.

My complaint is, why isn't this hospital and doctor saying, the doctor made a mistake? It's probably not the first patient a doctor somewhere in the country discharged that had ebola warning signs. It's just the first one someone sent home that actually had it.

“A failure by a hospital to be open about what went wrong in a major medical case such as this does a major disservice to everyone else in the health-care industry,” said Paul Levy, a former Boston hospital CEO and national analyst on patient safety and hospital transparency.
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
The taxi driver who took Duncan, Sonny Boy (who died from Ebola on Wednesday), the pregnant woman named Nathaline Williams who was dying from Ebola, and her father to the hospital - which turned out to be full so they were turned away - said he was told the pregnant woman, who was "helpless" and bleeding from the mouth was having a miscarriage and was assured she did not have Ebola. She was turned away from a total of three hospitals and a clinic. It isn't clear from the article who reassured the taxi driver Nathaline didn't have Ebola, and exactly when she was turned away from two other hospitals and a clinic. Nathaline is also referred to as Marthalene in many other articles. Her father and mother are both hospitalized and being treated for Ebola.

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/eb...describes-ebola-patients-fateful-ride-n217011
 
Last edited:
isissxn said:
I can't believe I'm saying this, but reading about the screw-ups that led to this (whatever this is) I'm actually entering a bit of a high-anxiety state myself. I have terrible nerves, but not usually about stuff like this. It's normally limited to things in my personal life, or pointless things like whether my computer is working properly or whether all my collections of things are labelled correctly.
But now I'm freaking out. All of a sudden, out of nowhere. I was fine when I started this thread. Why is this happening? I'm exaggerating something here, I know this, because (most) everyone else here is relatively calm. It just seems like all the links served to sow more seeds of doubt than make me feel better. What am I misinterpreting?

Note: I have not ever been any degree of conspiracy theorist beyond general, non-specific "the government/corporations are EVIL" hippie crap in college.

WTF?
Click to expand...

It sounds like your brain has latched onto an obsessive thought pattern and can't let go. I have the same problem sometimes, especially this time of year. You might want to try an SSRI or similar if it doesn't go away on its own after a few weeks.

Meanwhile, the good news is... you won't get ebola. Oh, you could I suppose. But, you won't.
 
Charlie Wilkes said:
It sounds like your brain has latched onto an obsessive thought pattern and can't let go. I have the same problem sometimes, especially this time of year. You might want to try an SSRI or similar if it doesn't go away on its own after a few weeks.

Meanwhile, the good news is... you won't get ebola. Oh, you could I suppose. But, you won't.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it sounds like whatever they did WAS enough, even though it didn't SOUND like enough. Maybe I've seen too many movies. Quarantines in films are always extreme - I may have unconsciously appropriated fictional ideas, as humans are wont to do.

As for the rest of what you said, hoo-boy do I know it. It's been going on for years too. It's actually caused me to quit several paths that would have been good for me at different points in my life, and it wastes a ton of my mental energy even during the best of times. I was prescribed something for it several years ago, but then I started having money troubles and never filled the prescription. And now... let's just say the way things are currently, it would be impossible. For myriad reasons.

But I've definitely got it in mind for the future. I really do think I need to be medicated for this, at the very least intermittently. But my little flare-up of concern over ebola seems to have gone away as quickly as it spiked (thanks in part to the sensible hive mind here at my favorite online haunt HAHA).

Now then, back to my usual activities of obsessively running virus scans and arranging music files in genre-subgenre-subsubgenre specific folders.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
It's racism, pure and simple, keep those people out.
Click to expand...

That is a ridiculous and unhelpful assertion.

I don't know if a travel ban is appropriate or not, I tend to think it is, but better educated people may make counter arguments (as has happened in this thread).

But I guaran-goddamn-tee you it has nothing to do with race. I am sure most of the good people at the WHO and CDC are above such nonsense as well.
 
Mr. Purple said:
That is a ridiculous and unhelpful assertion.

I don't know if a travel ban is appropriate or not, I tend to think it is, but better educated people may make counter arguments (as has happened in this thread).

But I guaran-goddamn-tee you it has nothing to do with race. I am sure most of the good people at the WHO and CDC are above such nonsense as well.
Click to expand...
Denial is the ridiculous and unhelpful assertion, not someone bringing the subject up.

Did you read the criticism of the Newsweek story and cover? Have you made any effort to see what is and is not the result of racism in this case? Are you one of those people who thinks there is no more real racism in the US?
 
wollclark said:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nat...amined-ebola-newark-airport-article-1.1963383

How the hell did they figure it wasn't Ebola so fast?
Click to expand...

http://www.erietvnews.com/story/26705113/cdc-responds-to-sick-passenger-on-flight-from-brussels

CDC quarantine officers met the plane after one of the 255 passengers vomited on the flight, officials said.

The passengers were released at 1:50 p.m. and permitted to go through customs, said Erica Dumas, a Port Authority of New York and New Jersey spokesperson. The sick passenger and his daughter were taken to a hospital for evaluation.

The incident comes amid heightened concerns after Thomas Eric Duncan, who had recently arrived from Liberia, on Tuesday was confirmed as the first case of the deadly Ebola virus diagnosed on American soil. Duncan arrived in the United States after a connection in Brussels.

"So far, nothing to indicate patient has Ebola, but given all the heightened concerns precautions were taken," an airport official told CNN.
Click to expand...

Why are people being so damn flippant about this disease?

Second source also saying these just let the two go within hours:

http://www.northjersey.com/news/ebo...ger-at-newark-airport-official-says-1.1102563

Jesus Christ... :boxedin:
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom