That's two...

Bobzilla wrote: remember, we want the Gov't to handle ALL of our healthcare. lol I tell you what I've read some messed up crap the last few days. "It's how they're going to kill off the population", "It's their planned genocide" etc. Holy crap some of these people are crazy. Don't get me wrong, I distrust the gov't as much as the next right leaning libertarian-esque person. But to believe that they brought it here intentionally and are planning to use it to kill millions? Umm... yeah, that's way out there.

Sometimes incompetence can be mistaken for genius.

In reply to bravenrace:

And sometimes stupid is just stupid.

To me it's like the 9/11 conspiracy theories from the same people that told us repeatedly that Bush was the stupidest president ever. Look folks, he's either an evil mastermind or dumber than a box of rocks. He can't be both. Pick one and stick with it.

slantvaliant wrote: I hear Guantanamo is nice this time of year ...

I wonder how many terrorist prisoners would start singing like a bird if they were threatened with being bunked with an ebola patient.....

In reply to yamaha:

Ebola-boarding?

In reply to bravenrace:

I don't thing Geneva ever said E36 M3 about that did they?

The Associated Press (@AP) 10/16/14, 4:24 PM BREAKING: Obama authorizes call-up of National Guard, reserves if needed to address Ebola.

Waitaminnit... thought this was supposed to be under control.

In reply to fasted58:

It isn't for the home front, the national guard would be assisting the aid operation in liberia and the other west african countries.

So I am just going to say Nigeria had 20 cases of ebola and they are about to be declared ebola free. I am pretty sure our medical system will be able to contain it.

Also, correct me if I am wrong. The ONLY people to get sick outside of Africa had direct contact with a very sick person (or came here sick). None of the casual contacts have gotten sick.

That said, there's still no reason they should have just let people waltz into this country directly from an infected area. At LEAST check them. It's not that many people!

It's got to be hard times for any black people with African accents in this country though though...

Yeah, the handling of this has been abysmal. The story goes is that both sick nurses were in close contact with Duncan at the early stages of his second visit but without good PPE stuff. It also means that possibly the thing spreads in ways that we don't know about yet.

So then Nurse 1 got sick, went to the hospital. Smart move on her part.

OTOH Nurse 2, with FULL KNOWLEDGE of her close contact with Duncan, calls the CDC because she is running a low fever claims she was told 'naw, everything's OK, go ahead and fly' so she does. You'd think she had enough smarts on her own (surely she had some briefing on what to do in case she ran a fever) to put 2 and 2 together... but no. She hops on a plane back to Dallas, thus exposing everyone she came in contact with. Not so bright.

Research into Ebola cures only started recently and only when Whitey was threatened?

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141014-ebola-vaccine-treatment-history-health-medicine/

The United States began investing heavily in Ebola research only after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, when it feared the virus could become a weapon of international terrorism. Such research has to be funded by taxpayers, because no company wants to invest the kind of time and money it takes to develop a vaccine or drug with a market that seemed—until this year—to include just a few hundred people a year.

NIH funding has essentially been flat since it peaked in 2004; accounting for inflation, that means less federal money has been available for research. Funding for biodefense research has fallen from $1.3 billion to $1.27 billion since 2010, budget documents suggest.

Last I checked, the US has a large segment of brown folk living here. That means the research was in defense of ALL US citizens, not just us pasty types.

I'm really curious about the second paragraph: who's gonna be the Dr Mengele that makes the decision about the number threshold below which no research will be done, effectively 1) sentencing people to death and 2) taking the massive and unknowable risk that such a disease won't get loose from that tiny population segment? The way it could happen now with a possibly incurable disease? Remember, the sample size who have taken the current ZMapp and that B word drug and lived is in no way proof they even worked. They may have been among those who recovered on their own.

Oh, and:

As luck would have it the President was speaking as I was driving home from work. He sounded all presidential and stuff but the thing he kept repeating was "The experts all agree that the procedures they have in place now are MORE affective than a travel ban"...seems to me that logic would say that it's not. I mean that's like saying the experts all say that making sure you pull out is more affective than abstinence

93EXCivic wrote: So I am just going to say Nigeria had 20 cases of ebola and they are about to be declared ebola free. I am pretty sure our medical system will be able to contain it.

It's looking like their version of the CDC is more competent than ours.

Another fun little tidbit.

My wife just showed me a letter sent home from my sons school today. Apparently they have closed three elementary schools in our county because a couple kids were on the plane with nurse #2 back from Cleveland. It seems a lot of parents from our school found out and have been pulling their kids out all day.

It just keeps getting crazier.

In reply to Nick_Comstock:

I really don't get you guys. It's not crazy, it's smart. This is definitely a case where extreme overkill to the safe side is smart. Maybe if that infected nurse was roaming around your neighborhood, using public bathrooms, eating at your restaurants, etc... you'd think differently.

In reply to bravenrace:

Not that kind of crazy, crazy that it's been allowed to get this far out if hand. Everyone is saying it's contained and not a problem. And they can guess and assume that no one on the plane got it, but the fact is no one will know for sure until damn near thanksgiving. Who knows how many people that next person may have had contact with.

And incase you missed it, this is my county, the next town over, just a couple minutes away. In my sons school system.

bravenrace wrote: In reply to Nick_Comstock: I really don't get you guys. It's not crazy, it's smart. This is definitely a case where extreme overkill to the safe side is smart. Maybe if that infected nurse was roaming around your neighborhood, using public bathrooms, eating at your restaurants, etc... you'd think differently.

This is wierd. I think this is twice in a week. Something is seriously wrong here..... I agree. Something that takes as long as it does to show symptoms, as dangerous and deadly as it is and as fastspreading as it can be and we want to just "brush it under the rug" like it's no big deal?

We've had some stupid crap (Y2K, bird flu, swine flu etc) that have been overhyped. But... this is serious joo-joo. Taking extra precautions seems SMART to me rather than minimalizing the issue. YMMV

In reply to Nick_Comstock:

Sorry, I incorrectly interpreted your post.

Extra precautions will cause severe economic damage so the government wants to avoid using them until Ebola poses a risk of causing even worse damage. The costs in equipment, personnel and worst of all lost business that are involved in travel bans and extreme precautions would slam the brakes on the economy.

They know that the current course of action will result in just a few dozen deaths at most, so they punch all that into a calculator and it says to take the risks of a moderate response. If a few thousand people get infected, it might tip the result the other way.

In reply to GameboyRMH:

Yeah, whats a few dozen deaths? Hell, let's let em die and save some money. What a stupid thing to say.

I guarantee the family of those "few dozen deaths" will severely disagree.

Hey it's not nice but that's how any government will work things out.

Edit: See also: Why different countries socialize health care to different degrees. That E36 M3 costs money.

In reply to bravenrace:

I don't think Gameboy is necessarily supporting that decision... However, He is probably right to some degree.

This is the government we are talking about.

In reply to wvumtnbkr:

Obviously, that doesn't make it right.

No, the deaths would not be right. Unfortunately, the virus has pretty much caught the entire planet with its pants down and it doesn't know or care about our schedules or economies. The ZMapp (still unproven, see above and yes some people who received it died anyway) is not quick to manufacture and hasn't been FDA approved so it's going to be a while before our reply to this thing is available. Until then, yes people are going to die. I don't like it, no one does (at least I hope they don't) but it's unavoidable.

Brincidofovir is the other promising drug, but like ZMapp it's not proven yet and its use was allowed by the FDA on an emergency basis.

On the non-African parts of this planet we are just going to have to deal with it through pretty primitive methods to prevent its spread. The only thing going for that is the low number (comparatively speaking) of index patients. In Africa, they have a much bigger problem due to the high number of patients, really poor infrastructure and the population's basic ignorance as evidenced by the WHO workers who were killed. It may become necessary to block air travel from these countries at some point, maybe until the number of new cases begins to drop.

By the way, there have been comparisons drawn between Ebola and HIV, since they are similar in their transmission methods (at least from what scientists have been able to determine), was allegedly first seen here in the mid 1980's. Some sources say the actual first patient here in the US was treated in the 1950's. At the time docs had no idea what it was.