Google “stop Ebola.” Won’t take long (hums final answer Jeopardy music to myself) …
Okay, if you did that, I bet you came up with a lot of articles like this one. Or this one. And a bunch about whether we should or should not ban airline flights from Africa into the United States. You’ll find articles about why we should not freak out, and articles about FREAK OUT because we’re all going to DIE!!!!! And of course the articles about how are freaking out about Ebola will make it harder to stop.
Read them if you like, but I’ll let you in on a the best way to stop Ebola. The Ebola outbreak is a serious problem, and doing nothing about it is not the answer. However, how to stop it is actually very simple, though it does require (gasp!) spending money and committing resources to do this:
Speaking to the UN Security Council on Tuesday, Anthony Banbury warned “we either stop Ebola now or we face an entirely unprecedented situation for which we do not have a plan.”
He added: “the best way, the very best way to protect the people of non-infected countries is by helping the people of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone to stop Ebola now where it is.”
Seems sort of obvious to me. Help the people where the epidemic is worst. Send in lots if trained medical personnel, and portable hospitals, and medical supplies – including whatever experimental vaccines, blood from patients who survived, or anti-viral drugs including those that have been shown to help in other cases – military troops for logistics and security if needed and whatever the fuck else it takes to help the people where Ebola is spreading the fastest.
Mr. Banbury painted a picture of substantial need. Only 50 safe-burial teams are on the ground, he said, but 500 are required. They need protective gear and about a thousand vehicles. So far, Mr. Banbury said, the mission has delivered 69 vehicles.
“We are fighting for people who are alive and healthy today, but will become infected by Ebola and die if we do not put in place the necessary emergency response,” he said, speaking by a video communication link from Accra, Ghana, where the mission was established in late September.
So, what are we waiting for? Those nurses in Dallas are getting help. The people in West Africa, not so much. Get off your ass, Europe, China, and the Americas – including the US, of course, because while we have finally started to do something on the ground ‘over there’ we need to do more and do more faster.
You don’t stop a man whose leg has been cut off by applying a bandage to his finger. We need to stop talking about keeping “them” out and instead do what is necessary to help our fellow human beings in distress. Because you don’t stop a fire by watering down your house while several of your neighbor’s houses are going up in flames.
In this 21st Century globalized world of ours we are all neighbors, and there is no place we can run to and hide. The Atlantic Ocean didn’t stop Ebola from making it to our shores, and no other geographical barrier will stop this out break. If we want to protect ourselves from Ebola then that means we need to go and help our neighbors in West Africa where the outbreak is at its worst, and where each day we fail to act means more people die and places more people across the globe at risk.
do what the doctors say?
pfft commie mooslim soshulist!
CDC establishes a quick response team for each ebola diagnosed case in the US. County Judge Jenkins of Dallas relieved of care for Amber Joy Vinson …
○ Nurses’ union slams Texas hospital for lack of Ebola protocol | CNN |
○ U.S. aid workers who survived Ebola leave Atlanta hospital | Reuters | Aug. 21, 2014 |
Cross-posted from my diary – Texas County Judge Leads Ebola Response ¶ 2nd Worker Diagnosed.
and added info about treatment ebola patients in German hospitals … Deutshe Gründlichkeit.
Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Dallas: CDC director Tom Frieden should step down.
○ @DrFriedenCDC
I guess Gov. Perry is patrolling the Mexican boarder with his 50 cal mounted on a pickup looking for ISIS?
Ok, then who will replace him?
So why are we sending 4,000 troops? To shoot the virus?
Same reason we send them to disaster relief areas – help distribute supplies and see they do not get stolen, but arrive where they are needed.
troops do more than shoot guns
It would seem that it would be better to send construction companies or medical teams.
those people are in the military too, the military is the fastest to mobilize and I’d rather have them than contractors who we have even less control over
But the report says we are sending “troops”, not support personnel.
Of course, the News did say “Iraqi WMD’s finally found” as well.
they’re all technically troops even the support personnel
Plus it sounds more dramatic to say troops
Medical units with lots of tents and medical equipment. Most important, skills in hazardous waste disposal and decontamination.
Back in 2001, ebola was on the scary potential biological weapons that terrorists might get. Remember. Glad the DoD put a little war money to some good use in creating this capability.
Fight it over there so we don’t have to fight it over here. Sometimes that strategy makes sense.
Nigeria and Senegal have successfully proven that their health care systems can contain an outbreak.
Helping Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea get health care systems equivalent to Nigeria and Sierra Leone could prevent future outbreaks.
So could global economic policies that make sufficient food available so that communities are not hunting game bats and monkeys. (Or squirrels and opossums in the US.)
All the GOP can do now is whine and carp.
If these units can perform well and the local health care people can do enough screening of people, there might be sufficient progress before the US election day. Something like a dramatic reduction in new cases.
Unless the transmission rate was below one a couple of weeks ago and the epidemic is dying out, no way can the cases be reduced before US election day. (Although, I find it somewhat gross to politicize a deadly epidemic. Particularly after for major US parties essentially ignored the need for months when there was a better chance to contain and control it.)
More screening will mean more Ebola cases as they will be identified earlier and the numbers of cases for other illnesses will increase as well. (The earliest symptoms of Ebola and malaria aren’t much different.) Whatever number additional beds for Ebola patients public health authorities say are needed in the three countries, that number needs to be doubled to care for those without Ebola that will also rush to get medical attention as each new facility opens.
Right now there are 9000-10,000 cases in three countries and a few scattered cases (less than 100) elsewhere. Nigeria and Senegal are now clean.
Logistics are probably something like 15,000 to 16,000 isolation units–tents with dividing sections or whatever. A disaster response unit better be able to handle numbers like that. Those units are best segregated from public hospitals while decontamination teams start scrubbing down public hospitals for use in treating patients without ebola, using temporary units that can either be decontaminated or destroyed for ebola patients.
The Liberian government says that it needs, just to handle the next six months, 2 million boxes of examining gloves.
Good point about the new cases of ebola and other diseases during screening.
Given the life cycle of the disease, there will be some sign of a change before election day. A drop in the transmission rate after a rise just because of recognition of existing cases.
In any case, this is a doable task for the US military. And if it isn’t, we are in much more trouble than we realized.
Nigeria: one index case, in hospital, diagnosed within three to four days and led to 19-21 first, second, and third order cases and eight deaths. A total of 894 contacts were identified, and approximately 18,500 face-to-face visits were conducted by contact tracers to assess Ebola symptom development. Monitoring and isolation for a high percentage, if not all contacts, and medical facilities available for suspect cases for testing and treatment for those tested positive. Imagine 100 index cases. Let alone a few thousand.
You’re way underestimating the resources required and the speed with which they will be effective. Also, delivering any other than medical tents and setting them up, should not be done by the US military. Trust within local communities is vital in public health.
Not the same as “troops”. I gather you are saying that the MSM are being inaccurate. I should have known.
Some twitterer put up a link to the PR piece for the unit that was being deployed last week on the unit’s DoD web site. Essentially it was something like a BW unit.
Repeatedly saying troops, usually in close conjunction to stories about the need for “boots on the ground” in the Middle East, you have to hand it to those vermin, they are good at misdirection.
Silly Booman, even now George Will is collecting his fat five figures while talking to some B School douches about how to maximize profits. Here are his points:
“We have to fight it OVER THERE so we don’t have to fight it OVER HERE”
I guess flooding the countries with equipment and supplies their health care operations can’t absorb as quickly as it arrives and therefore, half or more goes missing or is stolen is better than sitting on our pocketbooks during the six months this was developing on even WHO was begging for money to stop the epidemic.
There are big gaps in the health care infrastructures of those three hardest hit countries. One or two could be closed quickly at not too much cost in Sierra Leone. Guinea may be the most challenged because it’s the largest in terms of population and has a very low literacy rate.
The first step is to set up a disaster relief BW recovery operation in parallel with the existing health care operations. The military is bringing complete units to deal with the crisis. As far as I know, it’s military and not contractors. The supply chain for that is pretty well established.
The longer term issue is one that is better sent through WHO and their supply chain and accounting channels.
All three countries together have the population the size of Florida. Or the New York City urban region.
The bigger challenge to long-term prevention is food security, something that change in the economic policies and central banks in stimulating the global economy in general could go a long way to fixing.
Technical schools and medical schools are critical to providing long-term staffing. And that means more extensive educational infrastructure. Again, getting to the level of infrastructure of Nigeria or Senegal will go a long way to reducing the risk of another outbreak of ebola.
Note from The Guardian’s interesting article: The Ebola outbreak this year that you won’t have heard about.
Haste makes waste is tolerable; but haste that leaves serious coverage gaps isn’t.
I had a comment to make, but it got to be too long, so I just made it a diary.
A Hospital Microbiologist Take On Ebola…
For starters, prohibit all air travel directly from those countries into the US and indirectly from other countries until 21 days have passed and no symptoms.
Ultimately however that won’t prevent its spread to many other countries.
Is sealing off the borders of the 3 affected countries, allowing only carefully trained medical personnel through, now the only way to nip this in the bud?
“In this 21st Century globalized world…”
Sure. Go help the victims, but when that is done, isn’t it time to start questioning the wisdom of a “globalized world”? What purpose does it serve again? It makes the super-rich richer. It gives lunatics access and ability to harass and terrorize people far away. It facilitates the spread of disease. It exacerbates climate change. It causes wars between groups with no common borders.
And for what, exactly?
Cars/oil, cell phones, diamonds, coffee, chocolate, bananas, and strawberries in winter.
It’s time to start questioning the wisdom of a vastly overpopulated world, with inadequate food and clean water for far too many.
Don’t know that I’m entirely convinced that the world can’t sustain a world population of 12 billion or so and at a decent standard of living. It just couldn’t do so in the three hundred fifty years from 1800 when the population was one billion or the one hundred seventy-five years from 1927 when it was two billion.
I’m not sure that world leaders fully understand the seriousness of this disease. Now I’m not saying that this is the outbreak that will end the human reign on earth as we know it, but it can do some serious damage if it isn’t stopped asap. To that, yup, resources need be sent and lots of them. Viruses don’t care about borders and right now, neither should we.
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regal assets
Viruses will respect borders when the host carriers are forced to respect them.