Obama Presses Leaders To Speed Ebola Response 221
mdsolar writes with the latest plan from the U.S. government to fight the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, and a call for more help from other nations by the President. President Obama on Tuesday challenged world powers to accelerate the global response to the Ebola outbreak that is ravaging West Africa, warning that unless health care workers, medical equipment and treatment centers were swiftly deployed, the disease could take hundreds of thousands of lives. "This epidemic is going to get worse before it gets better," Mr. Obama said here at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he met with doctors who had just returned from West Africa. The world, he said, "has the responsibility to act, to step up and to do more. The United States intends to do more." Even as the president announced a major American deployment to Liberia and Senegal of medicine, equipment and 3,000 military personnel, global health officials said that time was running out and that they had weeks, not months, to act. They said that although the American contribution was on a scale large enough to make a difference, a coordinated assault in Africa from other Western powers was essential to bringing the virus under control.
War! (Score:3)
U.S. lawmakers called for a government-funded "war" to contain West Africa's deadly Ebola epidemic...
"We need to declare a war on Ebola," Senator Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican, said...
It's good to see that word in a context that we can all agree on.
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Let's hope it goes better than the "War on Drugs".
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Don't forget the "War on Poverty."
Don't forget the "War on Terrorism".
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War on Cancer ....
Turns out that "War" is a bad descriptor. How about "Global Viral Change"?
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The War on Poverty apparently led to a significant reduction of poverty that lasted a long time. It's the only one of the War on $ABSTRACT_NOUN thingies that seems to have had a positive effect, as far as I know.
What good is aid going to do (Score:5, Insightful)
When the populace actively attack medical workers, violently disrupt quarantines, and engage in ebola spreading funerary customs? 3000 soldiers seems hardly enough to combat that level of ignorance of how disease transmission works.
Re:What good is aid going to do (Score:5, Informative)
When the populace actively attack medical workers, violently disrupt quarantines, and engage in ebola spreading funerary customs? 3000 soldiers seems hardly enough to combat that level of ignorance of how disease transmission works.
When medical workers take your relatives away, lock them into camps where the litteraly die from either the disease or starvation, then refuse to let you burrie your relatives... you might react rather violently when they came for you as well.
Logically we in the west can think about this and say that all of those things were required to control the outbreak. But now think of it from the perspective of a villager that has never set foot in a school and the only news they get is via word of mouth and text message.
Re:What good is aid going to do (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Considering the situation from the perspective of someone who is ignorant doesn't remove the ignorance from their point of view. In fact, it makes it more obvious. Their ignorance explains their behavior, and it also explains why this effort to stem the tide will probably be ineffective.
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Because you're clearly using it in a disparagingly. They're as learned as can be expected given their situation. Medical staff need to take that into account and deal with them appropriately. If my dentist told me to fix tooth he was going to drill a hole in my head, then tried to strap me to a chair forcibly, punching him in the face would not be an over reaction. If I had a medical degree, you could argue, I'd have know that what he said was an appropriate remedy, but that doesn't negate his responsibly a
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The disparagement is all in your mind. Ignorance is usually used disparagingly, but I didn't do so here. I simply used the word that was most appropriate to the situation: these people are ignorant of certain information about the world, and that informs their behavior. To stop that behavior, they should be educated, not invaded by soldiers.
Here is something that is meant disparagingly: stop projecting your insecurities and personal biases onto the world and try to--actually--consider the idea that not ever
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It might come down to putting the entire region on lock-down and shooting anyone who tries to leave.
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Actually, 300,000 soldiers seems hardly enough to eliminate ebola-spreading funeral customs. It would allow protection of medical workers and enforce some quarantines.
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Not to ebola, because of the type of virus it is. Not all viruses are created equal.
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More likely is that we'll get something that's less deadly, but more easily spread as one of the major containment factors for ebola is that it kills too many of the infected. Something that's only 30% fatal, but spreads more easily would probably kill off as many people percentage-wise as the Blac
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Can you link me to anything about this airborne ebola? It sounds interesting.
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Please do do not move.
Place your hands on the monitor.
The SWAT team will be at your door shortly.
- - -Thank you
FBI Task Force on Terrorism
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Actually there is no such strand. ...
I don't get what the purpose of this fear mongering should be.
The chance that Ebola becomes airborne as you want to name it, like Flu etc. is NIL.
You ever will need direct contact with another victims body fluids to have a chance of getting infected.
Or perhaps you have a very strange definition of 'airborne' would not wonder, as no one in medical circles uses this term for virus transmissions. Or it is a new layman term? The correct term is: "respiratory route"
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No. You don't give a fuck about anyone else and you project that onto everyone else to make yourself feel ok about it.
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Different AC but a lot altruism is rooted in selfishness. I'm not saying what he is though, bear with me.
That doesn't devalue altruism, and sometimes that root can be simply feeling better about yourself for doing a good thing, or making sure horrible things don't tumble into your own comfortable life, which are ultimately good reasons to do good things and those reasons don't cheapen the fact that you did a good deed for someone else. But ultimately good deeds are still about imposing your will on the worl
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I think you mean "vein satisfaction".
Hmm. I know what vain satisfaction is, but what are the vane and vein variants? I'm feeling like I just can't get no.
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You know, when you have a really nice, new, shiny weather vane. That warm and tingly sense of well being is Vane Satisfaction.
Vein Satisfaction is probably something from Dwarf Fortress. "Urist McHappyPants has been quite satisfied lately. He passed a beautiful vein of gold recently."
Re:What good is aid going to do (Score:5, Informative)
I see you're still stuck in that Party vs. Party trap. ...need help getting out of that, or do you wish to continue laboring under the delusion that either of the big two political parties actually give a damn about anything beyond the continued acquisition of money and power?
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We're addressing the specific nutjobbery at hand. Nobody is endorsing a political party.
Worse than it seems. (Score:4, Insightful)
I have a feeling that all this effort from the US and others is to make the folks back home feel safer in that we are 'doing something'. In all likelihood the only thing that'll stop the spread at this point is stricter quarantine around the infected countries(!). Refugees would need to go into quarantine to make sure they are not carrying the disease.
This disease, and the corresponding collapse of infrastructure, will likely kill hundreds of thousands of people before its over.
I hope I'm wrong.
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will likely kill hundreds of thousands of people before its over.
What thought process did you use to gauge your order of magnitude there? I'm generally distrustful of largish numbers thrown out in an armchair analysis.
Because you can just as easily say "millions" or "thousands" as you can "hundreds of thousands". What makes that number more right?
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That's the World Health Organization's current estimate of fatalities if more containment is not done immediately.
They're not exactly "armchair".
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Okay, and that'd be perfectly reasonable, if there was any way I was supposed to understand that source for the figures.
To put it another way, how was I supposed to know it wasn't armchair in the context of information available in this thread?
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Fair enough. Obama made that claim, with a citation, in his speech.
Re:Worse than it seems. (Score:5, Informative)
Best article I've found on this topic (they are estimating between 77000 and 278000 cases by the end of the year):
http://www.eurosurveillance.or... [eurosurveillance.org]
And the wikipedia page on the outbreak is also quite good:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... [wikipedia.org]
This is an extremely scary situation. We have a 77% fatal virus with the caseload doubling roughly every three weeks. We might get lucky and this might burn itself out before it goes airborne or global some other way. Then again we might not.
My concern is what we are sending to Africa is probably not going to be nearly enough. And by the time it all gets there we might be looking at 10000 or 30000 cases, not the few thousand we have today. I also agree that it is very likely that the official figures substantially understate the number of infected.
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The bigger issues is that this is going to set those countries back a few decades or more in their development. Which means lots of instability in the region, which tends to result in bad things happening (wa
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I would agree with you except that in the past Ebola has became airborne amongst monkeys and amongst pigs, of all things. That makes me suspect that it could happen in people, too.
Having ebola become airborne is probably a lot less likely than any one person being struck by lightning tomorrow. Probably those odds (ballpark) are around one in a billion for any one person to be struck by lightning. But each time ebola is transmitted to another host there are literally trillions of reproductive events that
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Like that would ever work.
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The symptoms include severe diarrhea and vomiting. There is little to no sewage system in these cities. Where do you think it's all going?
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I am not sure where some of your numbers are coming from but you are correct about one thing. There are likely *many* unreported cases out there.
I hope we are not putting our service people into harms way against an enemy that they are not trained or equipped to fight; just to look like we are 'doing something'.
Re:Worse than it seems. (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't fall for the media frenzy. Keep in mind they are making a lot of money off of all your panicked clicks.
This is certainly a tragedy for Africa. Just like the last 5 Ebola outbreaks were. This one's bigger but that mostly appears to be due to changes in culture and population than any change in the disease. But, by and large, Ebola is hard to transmit. It's prevalent in Africa because of poor sanitation. I've been to Africa (not this region, but others) The sanitation there is awful and even I, being careful, pretty much caught everything under the sun. There is no clean water to wash with. I bought bottled water and washed with that... didn't matter. The food is handled by dozens of people before you get it and there's no way to wash that either. The people that handled it clearly couldn't wash up properly either.
In regards to the medical facilities... they are woefully understaffed, under trained and short on equipment. The biggest difference the United States could make is to send over more of all of these. If the troops were sending are of this nature, it will certainly do a lot of good.
As far as a threat to us in the west though? No... short of it going airborne which, despite the soulless talking heads on TV are saying, is extremely unlikely. And if it were already airborne, we'd all already have it. Luckily, ultra deadly diseases like this burn out very quickly. It's hard to be virulent and deadly at the same time. The dead aren't that great at walking around and infecting people.
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Nope. Go read this [vanityfair.com] fine article.
It is quite a bit more complex.
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short of it going airborne which ... is extremely unlikely. And if it were already airborne, we'd all already have it.
To start, let's ignore the first part of your statement and focus on the second part. If the disease is airborne, we're looking at an immediate 60-75% reduction in the world's population within 3-6 months. It'd be very, very bad. This is where all the fearmongering is coming from.
Now, let's look at the first part. As far as we know, the virus has not evolved significantly since its first discovery in the 70's. The virus has also been observed to mutate fairly slowly. This is good news. In addition, there ar
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Ebola has nothing to do with sanitation.
The virus is killed pretty quickly outside of the human body.
Outbreaks nearly always start by eating infected animals (often immune or at least resistant animals, like flying fox/fruit bats)
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Sadly, I think that if it happened now, we would be in a situation where people staying home would end up causing them to loose their home due to a lack of income, and any calls to help those people would be met by Neo-Con hate.
I guess you ought to leave the thinking to grown ups. So why would "neo-cons" want to foreclose on a zillion underwater (in the sense that the debt owed is more than the price the home can be sold for) home loans? That turns a temporary shutdown of the loan repayment revenue stream into a large permanent loss. They haven't bankrupted themselves enough that month?
Easy Math (Score:2, Insightful)
The death rate for the first 1000 infections was around 75%.
So 750 deaths.
By the time we reached 2000 infections the overall death rate was around 65%
So 1300 total deaths, or only 550 of the second 1000, which is 55%.
and by the time we reached 3000 infections it was around 55%
So 1650 total deaths, or only 350 of the third 1000, which is 35%.
The actual death rate right now is more like 35-45%
Which is certainly an improvement, but it's still terrible.
I assume this is because the care is improving and more people are pulling through
They try to keep them hydrated and well fed so that they don't simply die from the vomiting. They also try to detect them as early as possible to prevent the disease from spreading, and that likely makes the treatment more effective. However, there isn't much they can do as the treatment doesn't attack
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I assume this is because the care is improving and more people are pulling through but outbreaks like this often become less virulent over time as well.
Oh good, instead of losing 90% of the country, we might just lose a few New York Cities. That makes it better. :)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:so the story goes (Score:5, Insightful)
...
Dubya: What do you mean western union kicks ass their commercials are funny.
Get over your "blame BOOOSH!!!!" childishness, you ignorant twerp.
Eugene Robinson: George W. Bush’s greatest legacy — his battle against AIDS [washingtonpost.com]
This is a moment for all Americans to be proud of the best thing George W. Bush did as president: launching an initiative to combat AIDS in Africa that has saved millions of lives.
All week, more than 20,000 delegates from around the world have been attending the 19th International AIDS Conference here in Washington. They look like any other group of conventioneers, laden with satchels and garlanded with name tags. But some of these men and women would be dead if not for Bush’s foresight and compassion.
Those are not words I frequently use to describe Bush or his presidency. But credit and praise must be given where they are due, and Bush’s accomplishment — the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR — deserves accolades. It is a reminder that the United States can still be both great and good.
When the Bush administration inaugurated the program in 2003, fewer than 50,000 HIV-infected people on the African continent were receiving the antiretroviral drugs that keep the virus in check and halt the progression toward full-blown AIDS. By the time Bush left office, the number had increased to nearly 2 million. Today, the United States is directly supporting antiretroviral treatment for more than 4 million men, women and children worldwide, primarily in Africa.
Eugene Robinson and the Washington Post are hardly Bush's greatest supporters. Yet I bet you never even heard of what Bush did for Africa and AIDS, have you? Yet you felt qualified to make fun of what Bush knew about Africa. So that makes "childishness" and "ignorant twerp" quite accurate, aren't they? How about "arrogant", too, to go along with "ignorant"? It fits.
Meanwhile, Obama's poll numbers are worse 6 years into his Presidency than Bush's numbers 6 years in. Yeah, we know, all Obama's problems are because of "BOOOOSH!!!!".
Fucking baby.
Re:so the story goes (Score:5, Interesting)
From UT Austin: On the Cusp of an Ebola Vaccine [utexas.edu]
Bush built that lab [nytimes.com] (Galveston National Laboratory) as part of the $5 billion Project Bioshield Act of 2004, one of two, the other being at Boston University Medical Center. These are the places where actual research [utmb.edu] on ebola, dengue, hemorrhagic fever, SARS and others has been happening for years while you perfected your Bush derangement syndrome narrative.
Ass monkey.
What part of "exponential" did you not understand? (Score:2)
Granted, it won't be that fast unless it mutates in such a way that it can be spread through the air. If it does that, then growth quite a bit faster than exponential is possible.
Obama Presses Leaders To Speed Ebola (Score:2)
Tea Party would have a field day with a title like that. :)
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It is grim because we don't want to "offend" anyone with the proper response (quarantine the zone) . Political Correctness run amok is going to kill people.
How many dead or sick people before we stop worrying about feelings and sensibilities?
Re:Grim (Score:5, Insightful)
It is grim because we don't want to "offend" anyone with the proper response (quarantine the zone) . Political Correctness run amok is going to kill people.
How many dead or sick people before we stop worrying about feelings and sensibilities?
Don't be daft.
It is impossible to quarantine an area encompassing Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Congo, etc. Furthermore, a quarantine condition would likely lead to a humanitarian disaster, which I'm guessing the US government foresees and wants to establish a presence on the ground to "assist."
As the days go by I can't help but think of the way in which the military was deployed in 28 Weeks Later (sequel to 28 Days). Let's hope treatment production can ramp up and get to the sufferers before a tactical military response is even contemplated.
Also, I suspect one reason why the US is out in front of this is that they've run epidemiological simulations on EBV and have found that the whole world, including the US, in a shitload of trouble in short time.
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It is impossible to quarantine an area encompassing Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Congo, etc.
Completely? You'd be right. On the other hand, blockading air and maritime travel, and deploying military forces on the borders of these countries would go a hell of a long way towards containing the disease.
The rest, while yes I agree would suck hard, is probably and sadly the only way to be certain that no one outside those areas get infected.
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No it would not. I would give you a false sense of security. That is an enormous area that is virtually uncontrolled at present. All you need is dozen infected people to wander into some major city at the border of the quarantine region and it's all over.
Nobody has enough military forces to cover that much ground.
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I'm not convinced some level of quarantine wouldn't be wise. Just ban general air/maritime travel to/from any location within 100 miles of a reported Ebola case, and lock down borders/etc as best as you can. I agree that the disease will certainly continue to spread, but then you just expand the quarantine region as it does, staying a step ahead.
The goal isn't so much to prevent any spread at all as to keep the disease off of aircraft, where it could spread globally overnight.
Sooner or later the spread of
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There is some level of quarantine - the liberian government blockaded in the slum area where a clinic was raided, and sealed off about 50,000 people. That's probably about the limit of their efforts.
But frankly, you're also ignoring what's been actually happening: such an ambassador catching Ebola in one country, knowingly returning to another (via air travel), then staying in a hotel without telling anyone being treated in secret by a doctor, who also doesn't tell anyone, goes home, and spreads it to his w
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Sure, it won't be pleasant, but the "Western" world shouldn't take anywhere near the damage Africa is taking.
You're doing that thing some of us call "skating to where the puck was" rather than "skating to where the puck will be".
EBV has already manifested several versions, some airborne (not yet contagious for humans), others with lower lethality (which is why this recent outbreak is so much more severe than previous ones).
If EBV is not contained now and stopped in its tracks, it will mutate/evolve and eventually be "successful" enough that you, I, and everyone else in the Western world will wonder what the hell h
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It is grim because we don't want to "offend" anyone with the proper response (quarantine the zone)quote> lulz. why would you think that quarantine zones would be effective? issue a: the quarantine cordon would need to actually stop people from entering and leaving. even if you post troops there will be people bribing and sneaking in and out. issue 2: you need a massive logistical response to take care of a large population under quarantine, and the currently afflicted nations don't have the logistics they need. issue d: what do you do when people riot.
come back to me with an example of when quarantining was effective. ever. in history.
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1495 Quarantining of Mercenaries in Switzerland.
While not 100% effective immediately, it did drastically reduced the infection rate. WHICH is really the goal.
Now, if your one of those "100% or don't bother trying" people, you're part of the problem.
But then again, allowing infected people to migrate all around the world seems so much better option. I mean, how else are we going to reduce population by 7 billion people to "sustainable" levels like the Georgia Guidestones suggest?
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if it happened in north america or the EU they'd quarantine the areas and the people inside would be super pissed but likely understanding mostly.
maybe in Europe because they're used to their governments telling them what to do. in America, people have RIGHTS and people have GUNS and they're going to do what they please thank you very much.
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You might have a point there. If this happened in the US, people would perhaps really go nuts, many would likely panic and do all kind of crazy things, and some of them would shoot around like mad men, killing their fellow citizens, doctors, nurses and aid workers, and then infect 20 other people ... and then refuse to get vaccinated even tough a vaccine was available ...
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Guns? Yeah, we got 'em in spades. Good luck using one to stop an M1 Abrams, a Hellfire missile, an AC-130, or suchlike.
Yes, we also have rights, but... an extreme and obvious case such as an Ebola outbreak in the US will obviously trump those rights (hell, past presidents have suspended habeas corpus before in the name of extremes...)
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Re:Grim (Score:4, Insightful)
Ye Gods... really?
If you're quarantined and you see neighbors dying of Ebola, for fuck sakes - do your rights demand that you escape by any means, carry it with you, and spread it to other areas?
I get individual rights over statism, and would be among the first to take up arms against a tyranny, but damn... think of your fellow human beings for once.
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Re:Grim (Score:4, Insightful)
you're really excited to give your rights away, but I'm not going to let you take mine.
Uh, if you're in the one town in the US where there is an Ebola outbreak you're not going to be able to stop the rest of the country from taking your rights. There will be fences, tanks, armies, drones, aircraft, and the general works surrounding your town. Your stash of AR-15s in the basement aren't going to accomplish much except maybe to keep your neighbors from stealing your food assuming you have a stockpile so that you can stay inside and let the disease blow over. Besides, if you do have such a stockpile then just hunker down - you'll outlive the epidemic anyway, which is probably why you have that stockpile to begin with.
Well, that is if the rest of the country has the brains to set up a strong quarantine. There is a good chance that this won't look good in the polls so we'll just ask everybody to be nice and stay at home, and watch the disease overrun the country. Maybe I should work on my own stockpile... :)
But, if the government has any brains they'll put up a perimeter around the town, lock down all air travel into/out of the country, And burn down everything within 10 miles of the town to create a no-man's land. I mean, we are talking about a plague that could kill half the population here. Given a choice of raising taxes half a percent to rebuild the no-man's land after it is all over, or watching the entire country turn into a post-apocalyptic horror story, I'll take a bit of authoritarianism and call you in the morning.
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2) i'm not going to waste any more typing
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I never claimed the quarantine would work.
You claimed that "you're really excited to give your rights away, but I'm not going to let you take mine."
My point was simply that you have no ability to prevent the government from taking your rights away in a situation like this.
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You have no right to infect me, no idea how you come to that absurd idea.
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Guns? Yeah, we got 'em in spades. Good luck using one to stop an M1 Abrams, a Hellfire missile, an AC-130, or suchlike
I'm so weary of this Rambo Commando talk. the world doesn't work this way, k?
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That was the stupids thing I have seen posted on /. for ages.
First: european have rights, too. And some even guns.
Second: suppose a town gets quarantined in the USA, what do you believe your punny guns inside of the quarantine will help you against tanks and flame throwers? A SAVE BET IS THAT THE US GOVERNMENT WILL HAVE NAPALM BOMBERS circling over the town, exactly BECAUSE they know that idiots like you rather risk to get infected by breaking out with other infected people, or risk to get shot instead of s
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In fairness, I suspect that GP was assuming that aid and care would still be shipped in (volunteer basis of course), which does not preclude or invalidate a quarantine.
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Can you picture Obama bent over a petri dish?
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You don't need love to get sex.
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http://lmgtfy.com/?q=metonymy [lmgtfy.com]
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Pease take off your tinfoil hat - it's acting as an antenna and overconcentrating the paranoid thoughts the CIA is putting into your tiny brain.
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He really needs to cut out the bath salts. That's nasty stuff - you can tell.
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Rwanda was very different. It was a tribal war and not a medical emergency. Rwanda was much more complex.
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It was only different because the death toll didn't have any direct affect on us. An extremely deadly virus left unchecked to mutate could in VERY bad ways.
So the simple answer is selfish interests. We don't care when people are dying as long as it doesn't affect us.
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If you can't see a difference between a viralant deadly disease and an ongoing tribal war then you have a problem. The former is countries asking for international aid to fight a deadly disease using doctors and a small security force. The latter is a foreign military force entering a country after years of tribal war where they are not welcome by some and forcibly preventing people from killing their neighbors. The main difference is that one disaster is caused by a virus and the other by people's decision
Re:It's not really that bad (Score:5, Insightful)
We're looking at 10^3 *reported* cases, and this is currently uncontained, so who knows how many are bleeding out of their orifices in single apartments, unreported.
The bigger an infection gets, the harder it is to stop. So yeah, you want to freak out early and try to put the fire out quick by putting a lot of assets on the scene.
And, by the way, there are regions of the U.S. (yes, 'Murika!) where washing of the dead is a burial ceremony. Don't say that it can't possibly happen here. It can if you tempt fate enough times.
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Perhaps you are unaware of exponential growth - http://www.geert.io/exponentia... [geert.io]
It's going to be difficult enough to get the 1700 beds constructed quickly enough to make a dent in this problem, and the magnitude of the problem is approximately doubling every month.
From the comments I've been reading to most of the Ebola news articles these days, American's have been demonstrating their stupidity at a truly alarming rate.
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I would also add that the 52% fatality rate is much better than the 90% rate that other outbreaks have sufferred, and it suggests that the heroic medical intervention that is underway is having a beneficial effect.
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Either that or the most susceptible people were killed in previous outbreaks.
Thinning the herd etc.
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Uhh. No. The number of people previously infected is very low, and concentrated in areas not part of the current outbreak.
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The current outbreak is not a single outbreak.
It is already spread over six or seven quite distant from each other areas. There are also minimum two different strains involved, about which I'm aware, probably more.
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I would also add that the 52% fatality rate is much better than the 90% rate that other outbreaks have sufferred, and it suggests that the heroic medical intervention that is underway is having a beneficial effect.
The 90% figure is for the Zaire strain of Ebola,
The current strain is new but believed related to the Uganda strain that has a 50% fatality rate.
However this is still bad, diseases that we consider bad like Yellow Fever have a 20% mortality rate that reduces to 3% if treated early. If you travel to a South America, you need proof of a Yellow Fever vaccine to get back into Australia without issue.
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WHY is the Chinese. We're being out-competed. The Chinese are providing technology to a number of African countries in exchange for resources (e.g. Coltan in Congo. Oil from Nigeria) and they're not insisting on human rights or democracy to provide it. Right now, the USA has the closest thing to an Ebola cure, which means that the Chinese are at a disadvantage.
This won't last, of course, and may result in a significant worldwide plague. Whether this is an unforeseen consequence of a planned feature is left
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CDC and WHO have never shown a hint of being concerned when diseases break out in Africa.
You mean besides sending doctors and scientists to help?
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Not at all. That's because we don't have teams dedicated to study tropical diseases or virology or epidemics or anything like that ....