Monkeypox Scare Grounds Flight In Chicago 109
Hugh Pickens writes "AP reports that when a Delta Airlines flight touched down at Midway International Airport in Chicago, the passengers looked out the window to see the jet surrounded by fire trucks, police cars and ambulances. Health officials came through the door wearing facemasks and other protective gear. As it turns out the bedbugs that infest hotels appear to be the source of red marks on a 50-year old Minnesota woman that prompted health officials to quarantine the jet for fear they were dealing with something much more serious: monkeypox. Lise Sievers called her mother during a layover in Detroit and told her that one of the children she visited and is trying to adopt in Uganda had some pus-filled red bumps and also mentioned she had some small bumps of her own, a rash that she suspected was the handiwork of bedbugs. Those two very different bumps — one with pus, one without — got jumbled up in Siever's mother's mind, and she called a hospital near her Indiana home to ask about treatment for her daughter. 'She told them her daughter is on a flight back from Uganda and has some red bumps which are pussing and what should she do to treat them,' says Roger Sievers. 'She was looking for some general advice.' Health officials feared they were looking for monkeypox, a rare and sometimes fatal disease mostly in found in central and western Africa. After the passengers waited on the plane for a couple of hours, officials brought good news. 'They came back down and told my mom it was bed bug bites and they started releasing people.'"
Good news, you got bedbugs! (Score:1)
Well, the alternative is monkey pox!
Follow the Paw (Score:2)
Somebody needs to find that monkey paw. No doubt some shyster's put a pox on Delta for their dastardly short-sell scheme.
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Stupid people... (Score:2, Insightful)
"Hey, I just wanted to ask about treatment for this disease that my potential daughter has in FUCKING UGANDA that I've been exposed to, but I'm not going to really be clear in my mind as to the symptoms, especially after I've already come back to the United States and am walking around in a large metropolitan airport."
Can we start imprisoning people for being idiots yet? Please?
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I know it's Slashdot and nobody expects you to RTFA, but you didn't even read the summary:
Hey, I just wanted to ask about treatment for this disease that my potential daughter has in FUCKING UGANDA that I've been exposed to, but I'm not going to really be clear in my mind as to the symptoms, especially after I've already come back to the United States and am walking around in a large metropolitan airport.
1) I'm pretty sure she'd know it's truly her daughter, but maybe you want them to do a maternity test first?
2) The daughter wasn't in Uganda at the time of the phone call.
3) The summary doesn't mention that the mother was ever exposed or at risk of exposure.
4) The daughter (not the mother) was in the airport and, according to the summary (I know, I know... who bothers to read all the way through before posting?) she wa
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Addressing the points you raised...
1, "Potential" daughter, because she was adopting the girl. Maternity is not a factor here; it's an adoption. I'm assuming it's pretty rare for maternity tests on adopted children to come back positive, but maybe I'm just stupid that way...so I figured we'd pass on the test.
2, It doesn't matter where the daughter was during the phone call. My point is that the phone call happened (to quote myself) "after I've already come back to the United States," which is the problem
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Geesh... it's getting bad. Don't say anything to police... don't ask hospital personnel anything
This is America, if you don't know that by the time you hit the age of 18 then it is unlikely you will live a long and free life here.
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by the time you hit the age of 18 then it is unlikely you will live a long and free life here
Citation, please. Or at least some non-rabid babbling, if you can muster it.
One way to avoid a premature death is to make sure that you don't die of a horrible tropical disease you've picked up from someone spreading it around in an aircraft on their way back from Uganda. But thanks for the really insightful perspective.
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Still, his point is well taken.
"She told them her daughter is on a flight back from Uganda and has some red bumps which are pussing and what should she do to treat them," Roger Sievers said. "She was looking for some general advice."
I don't know wtf she expected to happen making a report like that to a public hospital. Saying something like that in the US has very obvious and somewhat ridiculous consequences which would be unlikely to occur in most other countries. Despite what many Americans seem to believe there is such a thing as an over-reaction. Based on an unverified, second hand report, the health authorities acted as if there was a confirmed Ebola Zaire infected passenger. Just because someone has
Re:Never talk to strangers (Score:4, Interesting)
An intelligent response would have been to first verify the symptoms
Which you would have done how ... by preventing people from leaving the plane until you could check her out, right? Right. That's what they actually did.
Hell, they could have called the passenger herself to ask about her symptoms.
So, you're will to risk a big outbreak of a very nasty tropical disease by gambling that the passenger in question will answer her cell phone once they touch down, but before anyone else is allowed to leave the plane, and that if it sounds like the pox in question, that in the five minutes or so you have left before they deplane, you're then going to scramble the authorities to contain the problem?
consequences which would be unlikely to occur in most other countries
So, most other countries, finding out that a passenger on an inbound flight from Uganda is exhibiting signs of what could be the highly contagious monkeypox ... just shrug their shoulders? You know that's not true.
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The CDC fucked up. It's that simple. Based on "better safe than sorry" they inconvenienced and scared a plane full of passengers for absolutely no reason. There was no conclusion they could draw from a second hand report of symptoms. They were clearly wrong to make a diagnosis of monkey pox. Even the most cursory direct examination of the patient would not have given the slightest reason to suspect monkey pox over insect bites. The patient herself even suspected that they were just insect bites. She was not
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They were clearly wrong to make a diagnosis of monkey pox.
They didn't make a diagnosis of monkeypox. They reacted to a hospital employee's considered opinion that it might be monkeypox, and did the standard thing you do to see whether or not it is. It wasn't. They didn't diagnoise it as such.
What would you be saying if a planeload of people who did have monkeypox were busy spreading it around all of their familiy members, coworkers, fellow students, bus passengers and everyone else because the very sort of conjecture you think was lame at the hospital was lame
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They could have taken an hour and 55 minutes off of the hold time with one question: "Does anyone here have a fever?" The fever comes before the bumps.
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Actually, it's not that unlikely someone will speak up if asked. If not, they do have these amazing space age thingamajigs that can confirm it in a couple seconds.
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And you trust a plane-load of tired, usually dehydrated, and currently alarmed passengers to accurately gauge and honestly report their own body temps? It's a good thing you don't handle events like these for a living.
Just out of curiosity, why do you say airplane passengers are usually dehydrated?
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It's entirely feasible using ear thermometers with disposable cones and more than one person taking readings.
Keep in mind, the longer and more intrusive such checks are, the more people will try to avoid them.
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Sorry, but no. There are certain criteria under which a quarantine is entirely justified, and due to the mother's (accidental) conflation of two people's symptoms, this appeared to fit these criteria. The fact that the flight originated in Uganda is very important, as there are quite a few endemic pathogens present with which most American doctors could never have anything beyond a textbook familiarity. Anecdote: a coworker of mine and his girlfriend lived in Uganda for several years; at one point she wound
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in pretty much any civilized part of the world, if you report someone is coming into the country with pussing red spots, there going to want to contain.
" Just because someone has red spots does not mean they have Monkey Pox or Ebola FFS"
correct. You seem to be missing the puss bit.
No one is in hysterics. A proper response isn't hysterics.
"An intelligent response would have been to first verify the symptoms."
ah, so you haven't actually studied this sort of thin, have you?
There is a good chance people will do
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The best way to puck up a drug resistant flesh eating infection is in the hospital.
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by the time you hit the age of 18 then it is unlikely you will live a long and free life here
Citation, please. Or at least some non-rabid babbling, if you can muster it. One way to avoid a premature death is to make sure that you don't die of a horrible tropical disease you've picked up from someone spreading it around in an aircraft on their way back from Uganda. But thanks for the really insightful perspective.
This article is really all the citation I need to prove my point.
Monkeypox? (Score:1)
"monkeypox, a rare and sometimes fatal disease"
As opposed to MonkeyShines, a more common and fun disease.
Ugh, more hugh Pickens spam! (Score:1, Insightful)
Seriously, you guys either need to stop posting his spam as stories or just give him the keys to the store and get out of the way. Why is this even considered for a Slashdot story? There's no News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters angle AT ALL. And that's typical of the spam from Hugh Pickens. You ban other spammers, now do the same for him.
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It IS a notable story, the first time in 10+ years that I hear a story about airports where security officials and procedures do the right thing. :)
Send 'em a pie.
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Notability isn't the issue. The issue is the type of story. That story was already covered to death in the regular press. Slashdot is for tech stories, and this doesn't have *any* tech angle at all. Unless you count someone using a cell phone?
Travel Fun (Score:3)
The good news is the person next to you on the plane does not have monkeypox. The bad news is that person's clothes, and now the plane seats, are infested with bed bugs. Thanks for sharing.
There is no protection from the inconsiderate behavior of your fellow traveller.
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HAHAHAHAHAHA. You might want to read up on bedbugs.
start here:
http://membracid.wordpress.com/ [wordpress.com]
They're lucky... (Score:1)
Those passengers were lucky they weren't tased, pepper sprayed and dragged off to jail.
Smart Fast Action Still Can Happen?! (Score:4, Insightful)
This is incredibly cheering news. There are still people in government capable of responding quickly and effectively to try to corral a potentially devastating epidemic.
After all the news about the TSA saving us by groping four year old girls, this is practically redemptive news. Not everyone in government is a fool, even after the thirty year decline.
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Not everyone in government is a fool, even after the thirty year decline.
I don't think there are very many fools in government, aside from about 535 in charge of the operation.
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So, wait... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Don't worry the TSA will protect us...
Ah fuck.
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Adopting from Uganda? (Score:2, Offtopic)
American orphans aren't good enough for her? Pathetic.
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Why is that pathetic ? They're all just kids. It's not as if the american kids fought in nam or something.
Maybe the lady in question was born in uganda herself and would like a child from the same area.
Also, while being an orphan in the US certainly doesn't sound all that pleasureable, one could make the argument that those kids are at least fed and given a bed to sleep in. I have no expertise on the subject but i imagine orphans in uganda are often not as well off.
Great (Score:1)
So they let her off the plane and onto the streets to spread more bedbugs.
This city astounds me sometimes.
Why a couple of hours to figure out its bed bugs? (Score:2)
I understand the quarantine and think it was justified, but if this was a simple symptom mixup, then why did it take a couple of hours to clear it up?
CDC's quick response: good. Slow follow through: bad.
Bed bugs == good news (Score:2)
It's not often that it's good news that it's "just" a bunch of bed bug bites!
Re:Blabbermouths (Score:4, Insightful)
So, your "privacy" is more important than the risk of carrying a highly contagius and painful disease that could very well require quarantine? Because that's what monkeypox is. I've helped treat people who have it, it spreads quickly as hell, and the enclosed nature of an airplane means that you need to check them out like this.
If you really think that your "privacy" or convenience is more important than the risk of spreading a disease like that to 10, 100 or potentially thousands of people, the world is better off by putting a bullet through your head.
Re:Blabbermouths (Score:5, Informative)
As a follow-up, I should point out that TFA saying it is rare is a bit of a misnomer: It's rare in Europe and North America. In Africa, it's not very rare.
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a highly contagius and painful disease that could very well require quarantine? Because that's what monkeypox is.
Highly contagious - er, no. Person to person transmission is RARE. So long as infected monkeys or prairie dogs aren't on the plane, the passengers should be pretty safe. Go read up on it again, nurse. It's ignorant people like you that cost a LOT of money. There is nothing worse than an idiot with initiative. Love - a doc.
Re:Blabbermouths (Score:5, Informative)
The description is incorrect, possibly because it's written by worthless, status-obsessed docs in shiny western offices, where they rarely encounter it.
However, if you had been lessed obsessed about artificially propped-up status and wages, and instead worked on the ground for a year or two in, say, Sierra Leone, or Congo, empirical evidence down there would tell you it's NOT rare, it IS highly contagious. But *fatalities* ARE rare.
Re:Blabbermouths (Score:4, Insightful)
The description is incorrect, possibly because it's written by worthless, status-obsessed docs in shiny western offices, where they rarely encounter it.
It would have been best if they had qualified "Rare" with something like "in the west" or "outside of endemic regions". But textbook descriptions are written by western docs, for the use of western docs, who have enough problems as it is with students/patients who hear hoofbeats and think Zebras.
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Experts are well away of exactly how contagious it is. You are an idiot and know nothing about the medical community in the US.
It's slightly less contagious the small pox. You're problem is you aren't an expert, you don't understand the verbiage, and don't understand what rare means.
Fatalities are 1 to 10 percent.
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If there wasn't a threat why were crews brought in, why were they not letting people off the plane? Ask yourself these kind of things before ever posting again. Be sure to log in first.
Humbly I modify a quote from the
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If there wasn't a threat why were crews brought in, why were they not letting people off the plane? Ask yourself these kind of things before ever posting again. Be sure to log in first.
Apparently you've never heard of swatting [wikipedia.org] and the tendency in the US of over-reacting to any simple event.
But the answer was that there wasn't a threat. (Bed bug bites, while unsightly and disgusting are not a threat.)
Nor would real Monkey pox be that contagious requiring full quarantine. It is not spread by casual contact. Even under their own protocol, it was an over-reaction.
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..... If there wasn't a threat why were crews brought in, why were they not letting people off the plane?
Corporate PR, legal liabilities/regulatory compliance, international diplomacy -there are a host of legitimate reasons why the events should have unfolded just as it did. Having said that, the explanation FTFA is that some misinformation was communicated that lead the folks at the CDC taking a "worst case scenario" approach.
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Yes, but substantially higher when it a bunch of people in a tight metal tube for hours.
If you are a doc, please stop practicing. You lack the ability to take situations into account before rendering an opinion.
How do people get monkeypox?
Monkeypox can spread to humans from an infected animal through an animal bite or direct contact with the animal’s lesions or body fluids. The disease also can be spread from person to person, although it is much less infectious than smallpox. The virus is thought to
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You're bad karma is from posting ignorant hyperbole like that.
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> the world is better off by putting a bullet through your head.
I find this attitude interesting, albeit somewhat hypocritical. You'd happily help people treat a physical disease, but argue in favor of killing somebody because of their opinion. And if somebody disagrees with that, should they also call for your execution? Taken far enough, that has potential to lead to a lot more deaths than the people who got sick from the bedbugs. We'd all be better off with a bit more tolerance, no?
THIS! (Score:5, Insightful)
This attitude is exactly why the world is going to be horrendously screwed when the next super flu breaks out. Wild overreactions to highly contagious diseases are the only appropriate reactions. Its one thing to queue up and get groped by the TSA to protect us from the terrorist boogeyman, but quite another to be inconvenienced due to a credible possibility that everyone on the plane may need to shortly check into a hospital along with everyone they've had contact with.
Let me guess, your kids don't get vaccinated either?
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Wild overreactions to highly contagious diseases are the only appropriate reactions.
If they are appropriate reactions, then they aren't overreactions.
This reminds me of the time my boss told the department that he expects us all the get "Exceeds Expectations" on our performance reviews.
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It's not overreaction at all. It's appropriate reaction. When the next super pandemic breaks out, the main solution is likely to be quarantine. The hospitals won't cope, and when the doctors and nurses start getting sick themselves it all falls apart and you'd be better off not going to the hospital for anything. Stay at home, and wait for the disease to kill all it can kill and/or
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From what Ive read, monkeypox is not a good candidate for a pandemic, since it spreads through blood-to-blood contact or rodent bites.
Your post IS an overreaction.
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1) I didn't claim monkeypox was a good candidate for a pandemic.
2) Do you have any believable citations for your claim on how monkeypox spreads?
The following contradicts your claim:
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs161/en/ [who.int]
Secondary transmission is human-to-human, resulting from close contact with infected respiratory tract excretions, with the skin lesions of an infected person or with recently contaminated objects. Transmission via droplet respiratory particles has also been documented. Transmission can also occur by inoculation or via the placenta (congenital monkeypox). There is no evidence to date that person-to-person transmission alone can sustain monkeypox in the human population.
Despite the last sentence, based on the rest of the paragraph I doubt you'd still want anyone who might have monkeypox to roam freely.
1) It's still a nasty disease to get
2) Some other animal might get it from the human, and monkeypox might be sustainable in that species.
Seems th
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Despite the last sentence?
No.
You do not get to dismiss the KEY sentence in the paragraph. Just NO.
Close contact with someone's used tissue MIGHT transmit it, and maybe being coughed on. But the passenger had no such coughing symptoms.
This is not some horrible disease that spreads like wildfile. The reaction was defiantly an over-reaction based on their own hands off (2000 mile away) diagnosis from third hand information. They violated their own protocols.
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coughed on, touch the same thing. Hell the NEXT passengers could get it.
Here is something you people need to know. Introducing a virus into a new set of population risks mutatin to better fit the population. The particular disease would be incredibly hard to eradicate.
The response was appropriete for the information they had. As someone who has studied these types of break outs, I am glad for this response.
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I did not dismiss it. I addressed it see 1) and 2).
Read this too: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/26/opinion/la-oe-orent-pox-20100926 [latimes.com]
Congo is not Uganda, but it's not far away enough for diseases like this (they share a border).
In hindsight you can say it was nothing. But it's all based on the information they had at that time. When a potentially infected passenger is in flight, you'll just have to quarantine everyone on the flight till you know things are OK.
What do you propose they do instead?
a) Let
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How do people get monkeypox?
Monkeypox can spread to humans from an infected animal through an animal bite or direct contact with the animal’s lesions or body fluids. The disease also can be spread from person to person, although it is much less infectious than smallpox. The virus is thought to be transmitted by respiratory droplets during direct and prolonged face-to-face contact. In addition, it is possible monkeypox can be spread by direct contact with body fluids of an infected person or with virus
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When the next super pandemic breaks out
Ah. Super pandemics. The scourge of mankind. When was the last one again? 1918?
This absolutely was an over-reaction. There was no reason to believe that the passenger was infected with some sort of exotic tropical virus. If she had presented with her symptoms to most doctors they would no doubt just tell her to call an exterminator or prescribe a topical corticosteroid and not create a major panic and have her quarantined.
I hope you do not work in the medical field. Something about hoofbeats and zebras come
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And that passenger was on a plane that will land in the USA. They hadn't seen the patient to be sure that she didn't have monkeypox OR something worse yet.
So do you actually propose letting the passenger and all of them head off to their various destinations without examining any of them? Yeah maybe the fire trucks were unnecessary (not sure why they were there) but
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Perhaps someone should have mentioned to them that Uganda is not in Central Africa? It's considered part of East Africa.
Looking at this map from a recent publication, there seems to have been more cases of monkeypox in the US than in Uganda: http://wellcometrust.wordpress.com/2012/03/01/developing-the-atlas-of-human-infectious-diseases/monkeypox/ [wordpress.com]
But, hey, it's "Africa", right.
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Ah. Super pandemics. The scourge of mankind. When was the last one again? 1918?
Yep, we are over due for another one.
This absolutely was an over-reaction. There was no reason to believe that the passenger was infected with some sort of exotic tropical virus. If she had presented with her symptoms to most doctors they would no doubt just tell her to call an exterminator or prescribe a topical corticosteroid and not create a major panic and have her quarantined.
Indeed. If some kid showed up in a clinic with little red pimples Monkeypox would be the last thing on people's mind. However if a kid showed up in a clinic with little red pimples and told everyone he'd just returned from a foreign disease filled country the diagnosis is likely to change very quickly.
Symptoms are only ever half of the story. The history is as important as the symptoms themselves.
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It's not overreaction at all. It's appropriate reaction.
That's effectively what I just said.
I used the words "wild overreaction" as a direct reply to the GP.
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Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] is indicating this is NOT highly contagious:
Limited person-to-person spread of infection has been reported in disease-endemic areas in Africa.
...
Monkeypox is usually transmitted to humans from rodents, pets, and primates through contact with the animal's blood or through a bite
Nor does it seem to be super deadly-- between 1-10% fatality rate even in Africa.
Maybe it IS an overreaction? Should a flight be grounded if one of the passengers has AIDS, since that is far more deadly and far more transmissible?
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HIV is not as contagious as monkeypox, nor does it normally kill as fast. And it is unlikely that stereotypical virgin slashdotters will get AIDs.
Nor does it seem to be super deadly-- between 1-10% fatality rate even in Africa.
5% would be a pretty high fatality rate for an infectious disease. Not as high as the 1918 flu, but high enough to worry about. Even 1% is nothing to take lightly. And do read on - not all monkeypox is the same.
Might be a good idea if you do not rely solely on wikipedia for your information.
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/monkeypox/treatmentguidelines.htm [cdc.gov]
www.state.nj.us
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But that reinforces what I said: barring getting bitten by (or exposed to the blood of) a rodent, you generally arent going to catch the disease, and it generally isnt transmissible.
Re:THIS! (Score:5, Insightful)
Another way of looking at this is that three out of ten of the top causes of death worldwide are classes of infectious diseases that can spread from person to person: respiratory infection, diarrhoeal diseases, and tuberculosis. TB, the smallest of the three, kills something like 1.3 million people/year -- probably more in one year than terrorism has killed in all time.
Of course deaths/year isn't the right metric for where we should put our attention and money. The best metric would be *preventable* deaths/year. You're over two hundred times more likely to die from a mistake in hospital care than you are from terrorism, and that's preventable. Infectious diseases are often preventable through hygiene and surveillance. We spend 8.8 billion dollars on the Centers for Disease Control every year, as opposed to 59 billion on Homeland security; which do you think provides the biggest bang for the buck in terms of lives saved?
You don't want to be lackadaisical about a viral pathogen like Monkey Pox that already has the capability (albeit weak) of spreading from human to human because mutation can cause a strain to be more infectious than expected.
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"Its one thing to queue up and get groped by the TSA ..."
The TSA agents _are_ monkeys, if they get infected and they touch and cough on every ape that passes by, god forbid.
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She knew it was bedbugs you half-witted retard.
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