Ebola in America

DavidJames said:
Thanks I thought you were making it up.

Just curious, your contempt for people who help others, guilt? It clearly is contempt because you could have made your point in much less emotional way.
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I think the contempt is caused by the fact someone was around a highly fatal disease, felt fatigued, but decided to parade around a densely populated city anyway.
 
wollclark said:
I think the contempt is caused by the fact someone was around a highly fatal disease, felt fatigued, but decided to parade around a densely populated city anyway.
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So I think it's the idea that he put others at risk through his actions.

But.....did he?


In all seriousness, do you know that?


He is a doctor with firsthand experience of the effects of the disease, and presumably some knowledge of its transmission. I'm willing to speculate that he believed he couldn't transmit it to anyone by the activities he engaged in.

If we assume, for the sake of argument, that that was in fact his belief, that he believed he was putting no one at risk, do we have any evidence that he was wrong? i.e. Do we have any evidence of the ebola virus ever being transmitted in similar circumstances? (I would think the relevant factors would be the nature of the contact created by his contact, and the degree of symptoms he was displaying.)

To my way of thinking, he was at least a little bit reckless, just because one never knows what could possibly occur on a subway. He could try to avoid contact, but who knows? One never knows when someone might send up a cloud of dust from their clothing, provoking sneezing or something. Therefore, you can't avoid all contact. As for being symptomatic, you could leave the house with no fever, and develop one while outside the house. In other words, it seems to me that he was at least slightly incautious. And yet....lots of people have gone to West Africa to treat people. Until this weekend, none were quarantined. Not one single case of Ebola has developed because of those people. Maybe that's because the risk is literally zero, or so close to zero that it might as well be zero.

Interesting fact I read on the internet today. (via google news, and if it's on the internet, it must be true.) Study conducted in Liberia followed lots of people who had been around Ebola victims. There were 76 people in the study who shared a dwelling with someone who was sick with Ebola, but did not administer care to that person. The number of people who came down with Ebola in that group: 0.

Maybe this disease isn't very easy to catch at all. If a place like Nigeria can have 20 cases, and stop it at 20, I'm thinking the risk can't be all that high.
 
Ebola here in America would actually seek out medical care professionals - in that the suffering carriers of the Ebola would be seeking medical attention, of course. ...and so it would be something like the way those selfish genes, that I've read about, drive their own particular carriers to spread themselves.

Anyway, since those people who are ill enough to be seeking medical care are also among the most contagious, that probably means that medical care professionals are truly the most at risk, and then their risk may even be compounded by the use of more invasive procedures - such as blood transfusions and whatnot - that are now being practiced/attempted here to treat the disease as opposed to how it is being treated in Africa.

This alone is very good reason to take early cases very very seriously and to do our best to keep this stuff out of our nation. If we were to get enough cases at once, and enough to start taking out our care givers or even to just put a significant number of them out of commission for a while, things could get really tense - if not even start spiraling out of control.

Is there any sort of evidence to back up such crazy speculation? Well, decide for yourself:

"Unprecedented number of medical staff infected with Ebola"

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/ebola/25-august-2014/en/

If we were to start getting numerous cases, I suspect it would be wise to add the protocol of encouraging ill people to stay home and to phone in their symptoms rather than showing up at hospitals or doctors' offices unannounced, and so that medical care professionals could assess the situation in relative safety and decide whether or not they need to start making house calls again - but, of course, while wearing their special suits.

Sometimes it's better for us to seek out a little tentative evidence beforehand and even show some degree of real caution rather than just wait for the definitive evidence to be delivered directly to our door.
 
Meadmaker said:
So I think it's the idea that he put others at risk through his actions.

But.....did he?


In all seriousness, do you know that?


He is a doctor with firsthand experience of the effects of the disease, and presumably some knowledge of its transmission. I'm willing to speculate that he believed he couldn't transmit it to anyone by the activities he engaged in.

If we assume, for the sake of argument, that that was in fact his belief, that he believed he was putting no one at risk, do we have any evidence that he was wrong? i.e. Do we have any evidence of the ebola virus ever being transmitted in similar circumstances? (I would think the relevant factors would be the nature of the contact created by his contact, and the degree of symptoms he was displaying.)

To my way of thinking, he was at least a little bit reckless, just because one never knows what could possibly occur on a subway. He could try to avoid contact, but who knows? One never knows when someone might send up a cloud of dust from their clothing, provoking sneezing or something. Therefore, you can't avoid all contact. As for being symptomatic, you could leave the house with no fever, and develop one while outside the house. In other words, it seems to me that he was at least slightly incautious. And yet....lots of people have gone to West Africa to treat people. Until this weekend, none were quarantined. Not one single case of Ebola has developed because of those people. Maybe that's because the risk is literally zero, or so close to zero that it might as well be zero.

Interesting fact I read on the internet today. (via google news, and if it's on the internet, it must be true.) Study conducted in Liberia followed lots of people who had been around Ebola victims. There were 76 people in the study who shared a dwelling with someone who was sick with Ebola, but did not administer care to that person. The number of people who came down with Ebola in that group: 0.

Maybe this disease isn't very easy to catch at all. If a place like Nigeria can have 20 cases, and stop it at 20, I'm thinking the risk can't be all that high.
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It gets better:

http://nypost.com/2014/10/29/ebola-doctor-lied-about-his-nyc-travels-police/

Dr. Craig Spencer at first told officials that he isolated himself in his Harlem apartment — and didn’t admit he rode the subways, dined out and went bowling until cops looked at his MetroCard the sources said.
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I wonder if he's lied about anything else.

More good news:

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/kaci-hickox-follow-maine-ebola-quarantine-rule-lawyer/story?id=26501921

"Going forward she (Kaci Hickox) does not intend to abide by the quarantine imposed by Maine officials because she is not a risk to others," her attorney Steven Hyman said.
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I wonder if she'll start to feel weak, take a bus around town then finally decide quarantine was a good idea when she discovers she has a fever.
 
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The father of a 8 year old girl in Connecticut has sued local schools, saying his daughter was discriminated against, and banned from school based, on fears of Ebola because she attended a wedding in Nigeria.


Kaci Hickox, who treated Ebola patients in Sierra Leone and was the victim of recent political grandstanding quarantine measures has said, through her lawyers, that she will not comply with Maine quarantine demands, who've stated on her behalf that "The conditions that the state of Maine is now requiring Kaci to comply with are unconstitutional and illegal and there is no justification for the state of Maine to infringe on her liberty".
She has agreed to comply with the CDC requirements.
 
Shepherd said:
Is there any sort of evidence to back up such crazy speculation? Well, decide for yourself:

"Unprecedented number of medical staff infected with Ebola"

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/ebola/25-august-2014/en/

If we were to start getting numerous cases, I suspect it would be wise to add the protocol of encouraging ill people to stay home and to phone in their symptoms rather than showing up at hospitals or doctors' offices unannounced, and so that medical care professionals could assess the situation in relative safety and decide whether or not they need to start making house calls again - but, of course, while wearing their special suits.

Sometimes it's better for us to seek out a little tentative evidence beforehand and even show some degree of real caution rather than just wait for the definitive evidence to be delivered directly to our door.
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But the article you quoted described why those medical personnel were affected. No protective equipment. Misdiagnosis. Dealing with very sick, symptomatic, people, without medical equipment, thinking that they are dealing with malaria until it's too late.

And I agree that an abundance of caution is necessary, but I think there is a real need to balance that against the burden we would place on those who are working to fight this disease. Is there any reason to believe that milder protocols are inadequate?

I keep going back to the same thought about these quarantines that some here, and Governor Christie, have called for. Either they are unnecessary, or they are inadequate.

If this disease is such a threat that it is necessary to call for strict quarantines for three weeks even in the absence of symptoms and a negative test for presence of the virus, then that must mean it is easily transmissible and lesser measures would not keep us safe. If that is the case, then the existence of several thousand cases in Africa would represent the beginning of a pandemic that is a global threat. People will flee that region and the disease will be transmitted, and it won't be so easy to identify high risk people like Craig Spencer or Kaci Hickox. While we might be able to identify and quarantine a few medical workers, we cannot identify and quarantine the thousands of other people who come in contact with Ebola carriers who are asymptomatic.

And if that is the case, if this disease is that deadly, and that difficult to contain, then there is one, clear, obvious thing that needs to be done to protect the American people. We must fight the disease vigorously in Africa. Only that way do we have any hope of preventing widespread infection in America. Anyone who demands strict quarantines ought to also be demanding vigorous control of the disease in Africa.


Or, perhaps the disease is easily stopped with measures less than what Governor Christie has imposed. If that is the case, then containing it is not as difficult. The need for vigorous control in Africa would be a humanitarian need, but not necessarily a requirement to keep the people of America safe.

Which all means that if people were behaving rationally, there ought to be a strong correlation between people demanding strict quarantines, and people demanding vigorous containment of the disease in Africa. However, that's not the case. If anything, there is an anti-correlation. Those who are most demanding of the tightest controls in America are the most critical of either public or private efforts to control the disease in Africa. Why is that?
 
"Unprecedented" probably comes along with any new virus breakout. It's almost as if unprecedented and new were synonyms.
 
shuize said:
Well, if Dr. Spencer lied, I'm sure he did it for a good cause. Like bowling.
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I just can't stop thinking about all the people he infected due to his wanton disregard for his fellow human.

Let's face it, the whole concept of zero is pretty fascinating, even without ebola.
 
wollclark said:
It gets better:

http://nypost.com/2014/10/29/ebola-doctor-lied-about-his-nyc-travels-police/



I wonder if he's lied about anything else.

More good news:

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/kaci-hickox-follow-maine-ebola-quarantine-rule-lawyer/story?id=26501921



I wonder if she'll start to feel weak, take a bus around town then finally decide quarantine was a good idea when she discovers she has a fever.
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He did all of those things when he was not contagious. Zero is still zero.
 
marplots said:
"Unprecedented" probably comes along with any new virus breakout. It's almost as if unprecedented and new were synonyms.
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With an unprecedented understanding as to the unprecedented risk to medical care professionals due to an unprecedented virus, unprecedented protocols might be adopted.
 
Dont' know who I dislike more:

The paranoids who are in a full scale meltdown over Ebola or
Those who are cynically trying to exploit the Ebola as an excuse to bash Obama/The Democrats.
 
Meadmaker said:
Which all means that if people were behaving rationally, there ought to be a strong correlation between people demanding strict quarantines, and people demanding vigorous containment of the disease in Africa. However, that's not the case. If anything, there is an anti-correlation. Those who are most demanding of the tightest controls in America are the most critical of either public or private efforts to control the disease in Africa. Why is that?
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It seems to me that they don't want to send help to prevent our people (the ones sent) from getting Ebola, and want the quarantines to prevent our people (here) from getting Ebola. It is an attitude that doesn't care what happens in Africa.

That's my reading of it, anyway.
 
Meadmaker said:
Which all means that if people were behaving rationally, there ought to be a strong correlation between people demanding strict quarantines, and people demanding vigorous containment of the disease in Africa. However, that's not the case. If anything, there is an anti-correlation. Those who are most demanding of the tightest controls in America are the most critical of either public or private efforts to control the disease in Africa. Why is that?
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Look no further then what the government is doing/recommending and you'll see the usual suspects demanding each is wrong.

I know (to the other usual suspects) there are a few exceptions.
 
dudalb said:
Dont' know who I dislike more:

The paranoids who are in a full scale meltdown over Ebola or
Those who are cynically trying to exploit the Ebola as an excuse to bash Obama/The Democrats.
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I'd go with the latter. The former are just stupid and ignorant, the later deliberately deceitful.
 
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