Sunday, October 26, 2014

And in the on-deck circle...Updated


Nineteen people are being isolated in home quarantine in Brisbane as a precaution against spreading the Ebola virus, as a teenage woman undergoes tests for the deadly disease in hospital. The 18-year-old is being kept in an isolation ward at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital after developing a fever yesterday.
She arrived in Australia 12 days ago from Conakry in Guinea, with eight members of her extended family, including six children.

Blood tests pending.
Australia's had 5/10/whatever number of false alarms over the past month or two.
Now they're waiting to find out if this one is the real deal or not.

You brought WHAT back from Africa??

UPDATE: An African girl who triggered an Ebola alert in Brisbane has tested negative for the virus, initial results show.
The 18-year-old girl had recently moved to Australia from West Africa with her family.
Queensland’s Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young said three other families from West Africa were also being monitored in Queensland, precautions that authorities had also taken with regard to returning health workers.

And the rest of Asia isn't feeling too happy about their prospects if Ebola touches down there either:
SINGAPORE - The longer the Ebola outbreak rages in West Africa, the greater chance a traveler infected with the virus touches down in an Asian city.
How quickly any case is detected - and the measures taken once it is - will determine whether the virus takes hold in a region where billions live in poverty and public health systems are often very weak. Governments are ramping up response plans, stepping up surveillance at airports and considering quarantine measures. Still, health experts in the region's less developed countries fear any outbreak would be deadly and hard to contain.
"This is a non-treatable disease with a very high mortality rate. And even a country like the United States has not been able to completely prevent it," said Yatin Mehta, a critical care specialist at the Medanta Medicity hospital near New Delhi. "The government is trying. They are preparing and they are training, but our record of disaster management has been very poor in the past."

Pay attention to the Media Accidental Truth Thunderbolt Of The Day:
The only way of ensuring that the virus doesn't spread into a country is enforced quarantine for people coming from countries with an outbreak or - even more effective - a total travel ban.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wouldn't it be ironic to have a reverse On The Beach scenario with the last survivors a bunch of American rednecks up in the hills?
Bill K.

Anonymous said...

North Koreans...

Anonymous said...

Irony so often has truth to it, Bill... "I'm jus' a peckerwood who lives up in the hills with too many guns...'
Oh yeah, and I'm a peckerwood who didn't get - or let his kin get - Obola...
"I live back in the woods, you see... my woman and the kids and the dogs and me..."