Ebola in the United States

First you need to understand that medical terminology is very precise. Then read between the lines.

The Mayo clinic says:
"Infected people typically don't become contagious until they develop symptoms."
"Typically" means in the majority of cases, so in a percentage of cases the carrier is infectious prior to the onset of symptoms. They are simply an atypical case". If the transmission were not possible pre-onset of symptoms they would say, "there is no evidence that transmission occurs in asymtomatic people" or "there is no evidence that the virus can be transmitted prior to the person displaying symptoms". That is not their wording and as I said they are precise, words do mean something.

They further state:

"Signs and symptoms typically begin abruptly within five to 10 days of infection with Ebola or Marburg virus. Early signs and symptoms include:"

• Fever
• Severe headache
• Joint and muscle aches
• Chills
• Weakness

Again, typically. Symptoms can occur earlier or later than the 5 to 10 day period, this is just the range where symptoms first manifest in the majority of patients. Factors that could lead to an earlier or later onset of symptoms include, but are not limited to, the state of the persons immune system, a compromised immune system will show symptoms quicker and much more severely than someone with a stong immune system, genetics, drugs (prescription) the person may be taking, other physical conditions, viral load the person is exposed to and hundreds of other factors. Also as with any other disease or condition, a person afflicted almost never displays all the potential symptoms, and in this case the symptoms mimic a great number of other illnesses. Do you simply have a cold? Are your muscles sore because you worked out a little too streniously? Etc. The CDC gives 2 to 21 days as the time from exposure to onset of symptoms, with the majority showing signs average between 8 to 10 days.

They continue:

"Over time, symptoms become increasingly severe and may include:"

• Nausea and vomiting
• Diarrhea (may be bloody)
• Red eyes
• Raised rash
• Chest pain and cough
• Stomach pain
• Severe weight loss
• Bleeding, usually from the eyes, and bruising (people near death may bleed from other orifices, such as ears, nose and rectum)
• Internal bleeding

Again, notice they said, "may include", most patients will not display all the symptoms and several of the symptoms only manifest later in the course of the disease. Nausea and vomiting? A stomach bug?
Red eyes? Who doesn't occasionally have red eyes? Where I live during times the pollen is very high, red eyes are very common as is an increased incidence of URI's (upper respirator infections) and URI's are often accompanied by chest pain and cough.
Stomach pain? Could be indigestion?
When you get to the last three the disease is far enough along that you've likely infected someone else.

Green Slime quoted from WHO report:

This is contradicted by the Mayo Clinic and the NHS of the UK which states:

"Ebola virus disease is generally not spread through routine social contact (such as shaking hands) with patients who do not have symptoms."

Again, note the wording, they do not say it is not transmitted by people not showing symptoms. Common sense will tell you the risk is higher once symptoms begin to manifest and you are more likely to contact the disease during that period, but it can occur with contact with an infected person who is not yet displaying symptoms. It is just that the risk is higher post manifestation of symptoms.

Your chart also does not adequately illustrate the pyramiding that is characteristic on such outbreaks. To illustrate you have the primary patient, if they come into contact with 100 people and ten contract the disease we now have 11 cases, if those additional ten people come in contact with 100 people and 10% develop the disease we now have 100 new cases, then those 100=1000 and on and on.

Data and projections from the CDC:

-Without additional interventions or changes in community behavior, CDC estimates that by January 20, 2015, there will be a total of approximately 550,000 Ebola cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone or 1.4 million if corrections for underreporting are made.

-Cases in Liberia are currently doubling every 15-20 days, and those in Sierra Leone and Guinea are doubling every 30-40 days.

If it breaks out in the US it will spead quicker and be much worse. Why? Because of lack of immunity. In the African countries where the disease has appeared you have a certain percentage of the population that is exposed but does not come down with a full blown case of Ebola or those that have a mild case and recover. In these cases they develop an anti-body that their body retains for about ten years, giving them a level of immunity to the disease. The majority of our population has never been exposed so has never developed the antibody.

 

Who is the Mayo clinic?

 

The Mayo Clinic is probably the most respected hospital, medical research facility, and teaching hospital in the United States. They are, and have long been on the cutting edge of medicine.

 

Thanks! I'd never heard of them before.

• Notify health officials if you have had direct contact with the blood or body fluids, such as but not limited to, feces, saliva, urine, vomit, and semen of a person who is sick with Ebola. The virus can enter the body through broken skin or unprotected mucous membranes in, for example, the eyes, nose, or mouth.

So Even if what you state is true regarding being infectious, (hypothetically), you still need contact between with bodily fluids and broken skin or mucous membranes.

Don't rub your eyes, don't stick things in your mouth, don't have unprotected sex with strangers, and avoid semen, blood, vomit, shit, and saliva. Seems like pretty standard fare to me...

Seeing as how 0,5% to 1% of the US population is already HIV positive. This means I now have to add avoiding shit, urine and saliva to the list of funky fluids I won't touch from Americans.... or Africans for that matter.

Sorry.

Although I agree that the situation is serious. I think the media has worked itself into a tiz to sell, and people are fearful. Why wasn't the the rest of the world acting quicker, when the outbreak was first reported, 6 months ago. Now, someone has died in the US.... OMG!!!!! Now it becomes serious?!?

The latest predictions were estimating that they expect to have contained this outbreak in three months (with a lot of very hard work), now that the NGOs, CDC, and WHO are suddenly receiving the attention, funds and materials they were requesting 5 months ago...

 

This means little to me, but I'm assured some septics may find this amusing, and some less so.

View attachment 21411

 

IIRC, Perry was responsible for Texas being one of only eight states that have prepared for a possible Ebola outbreak and have test kits on hand to test for the virus. They went through training back in August (I think). However, even with the training they didn't initially pick up on the man being infected with the virus. This should not be inferred as a dig at the health care workers involved because the early signs, (which I listed earlier) are the same for a wide range of other conditions. Most of which they see on a daily basis. It's only after the disease progresses further that you get symtoms that point more directly at Ebola. They've also got a case in Washington, DC that they think might be Ebola. I wonder if it is coincidental that the Liberian man with a confirmed case in Dallas had a connecting flight there???

 

Interesting comment from USMCPrice...made me remember that we used to have an island in Sydney (beautiful views) - that we sent migrants for at least two months to make sure they weren't carrying anything...obviously a quarantine area....I wonder which feminist hand ringer put a stop to that?

 

We had the same thing on Ellis Island in NYC harbor (complete with views).

Several of my relatives came through Ellis Island. Fortunatelly they didn't have to be quarantined.

http://www.ellisisland.se/english/quarantine_islands_newyork.asp

 

You have to wonder at the logic of officials who let people travel in exactly the same manner as pre-outbreak. No restrictions on the ingress and egress of people from affected regions, people filling out travel cards taken at face value. What are they going to say? "Yes...I have a case of Ebola...now will you let me on the plane?" Who in their right mind is going to admit to that and give themselves a one way ticket to some West African care facility with a death rate off the scale?

Early on in this crisis, I heard one news service claim that West African officials tried to cover up the lack of treatment for people. The logic was that the more they allowed this outbreak to spread, the more likely it would reach the shores of a country with far more money to deal with it, so help would come faster. It's a dangerous way to run the relief effort, letting it spread out of control in the name of getting the people with money to take it seriously.

This 'method' is the complete opposite of how any other country with the welfare of their citizens truly in mind would deal with it. Seal borders, quarantine suspects, allocate medical and professional resources, alert border security. It's not difficult to grasp. We seem to have to hold Africa's hand for absolutely everything that occurs there.

When are Africa and Africans going to take full responsibility for themselves? They have the resources and the expertise. It makes me wonder whether we shouldn't put a big fence around the entire continent.

Of course, if that happened, we would have a dictatorship across the entire continent, instead of just in regions, and run by one tribe.

 

That's a good one....

 

The issue with Africa is tribalism, call it mind-set if you prefer, and it takes generations to change that. Went to visit my grandparent's home village recently, less than 1 hour drive from the center of Rome and the people there "think" differently, loyalty to clan goes much deeper than loyalty to any other group, you cannot have western style accountability with a tribal mind-set and BTW even in the west accountability of politicians and other "rich and/or powerful" seems to be on a decline so there is little incentive to embrace that model.

 

I read the book, Hot Zone by Richard Preston back in the mid-1990s. After reading that book, I am surprised that it took this long for a full blown case of Ebola to get here.

 

You know what I do for a living and I've refused one job already until we were given more info, which took an age, thankfully it was a hoax. I suspect London is even worse knowing the demographic compared to where I work. Unlike squaddies I don't have any PPE to put on so I think I'd rather be a squaddie at the moment.

 

Perhaps the spread of any disease may be delayed a little bit by "control of borders" but in most cases in history border control ultimately fails to accomplish anything except "for the moment". We live with many many diseases present and some even return unexpected with a vengeance....if you have not experienced a bout with "shingles" you may soon get it based on whether or not you have the disease inside of you already. Leprosy, so once feared.........was "quarantined" on certain islands and varying fixed locations......yet Texans playing with their Armadillos managed to contract and spread it regularly, don't know why the state didn't stop all border travel when they found out the truth of it. How ironic it is that veterans who celebrate their lineage can't remember that our ancestors spread infected blankets to "conquer" opposing tribes as they transgressed the borders of indigenous peoples to spread their illegal immigrant selves into territories they were so "justified" to covet.......as we spend our time lamenting our border control. Isn't it noticeable that within certain borders the disease of "hypocrisy" can have no limits and no controls?

 

The French nurse was declared saved yesterday. She was cured with a mix of four different types of experimental medecine and hydrated constantly. Also being in intense care alowed doctors to treat weaker body parts when needed .

 

One of the things I noticed early on on this outbreak (haven't seen any recent data though) was that the survival rate was much higher than the earlier outbreaks. That is often consistent with a disease spreading faster and farther.

 

I'm not here to argue the merits or disadvantages of immigration, legal or illegal. There is no doubt that transgressions have been perpetrated by all peoples if you go far enough back. In fact many peoples that are considered "indigenous" themselves took the land from earlier inhabitants. A good example is the Sioux, and Cheyenne, they were originally not native to the great plains. The Cheyenne and Arapaho, pushed the Kiowa out of their traditional lands into the southwest. The Sioux then migrated west into Pawnee land, forcing the Cheyenne (who introduced the horse culture to the Sioux around 1730) into the southern plains, brought diseases and epidemics, and engaged in total war against the Pawnee tribe and managed to reduce them from around 12,000 people in the 1830's to 3,400 by 1859. So it's not just a european thing. When the US expanded into Sioux land in the late 1860's-1870's, and engaged in war with the Sioux and Cheyenne over what the tribes considered their ancestral lands, they were fighting over lands they had taken from the Blackfoot, Kiowa, Pawnee and other tribes only decades before. The US got most of the western US from Mexico as a result of the Mexican-American war of the 1840's. The Mexican's took it from various indian tribes, who themselves took it from previous populations. The Mexican's were descended from the original Spanish colonizers who wiped out the native indian tribes, who themselves wiped out earlier tribes. No ones hands are without blood.

What I am arguing is that from a medical standpoint, controlling the spread of a communicable disease is critical to getting in front of it and containing it. If it can be contained you can concentrate your resources on resolving the initial outbreak. Because of the way these things spread, on an exponential basis, failure to control the spread will result in a dilution of available resources and a continual spreading of the disease, resulting in a further dilution of resources and much increased mortality.

 

Victor, the "Infected Blankets" story is a myth. Europeans often carried smallpox and other diseases that native Americans had no resistance to. Europeans had lived with these diseases for thousands of years and had some resistance. Thus, Europeans generally lived through smallpox, typhus, measles, etc, and Indians nearly all died from those same diseases. They didn't get the diseases from blankets, they got it just from socializing with Europeans.

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/plag/5240451.0001.009/--did-the-us-army-distribute-smallpox-blankets-to-indians?rgn=main;view=fulltext

 

Which is why, to me, this sudden horror at the arrival of the disease in Dallas, is just so much political hogwash. WHO, and others, were trying desperately to get attention (and resources) to contain this outbreak months ago.