Duncan and government incompetence rack up second Ebola victim.
(CNN) -- A healthcare worker at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital has tested positive for Ebola after a preliminary test, the state's health agency said.
Confirmatory testing will be conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.The employee helped care for Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person ever diagnosed with Ebola in the United States. Duncan died on Wednesday.
It's okay though. This is "highly unlikely", health care here is "well-prepared" to deal with Ebola, and "We've got this!".
So everything's cool.
CDC and government screeners begin total bullshit "security" theatre at JFK; flight from infected countries continue unabated.
Federal health officials said the entry screenings, which will expand to four additional U.S. airports in the next week, add another layer of protection to halt the spread of a disease that has killed more than 4,000 people."Already there are 100 percent of the travelers leaving the three infected countries are being screened on exit. Sometimes multiple times temperatures are checked along that process," Dr. Martin Cetron, director of the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine for the federal Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, said at a briefing at Kennedy.Cetron added, "No matter how many procedures are put into place, we can't get the risk to zero."
Especially when you're only doing something so ineffective it failed to catch Duncan coming in three weeks ago, and who wasn't "obviously ill". We haven't had a president this gobsmackingly stupid since Jimmy Carter went traipsing through Three Mile Island in rubber booties.
President Barack Obama has said the new screening measures are "really just belt and suspenders" to support protections already in place. Border Patrol agents already look for people who are obviously ill, as do flight crews.Health officials expect false alarms from travelers who have fever from other illnesses. Ebola isn't contagious until symptoms begin, and it spreads through direct contact with the bodily fluids of patients.Cetron said more than 36,000 travelers leaving West Africa have been screened for Ebola in the last two months and none was infected with Ebola.
But if you want to work for the CDC, skip medical school; instead get a diploma from a box of Cracker Jacks, or just print one up at Kinko's. No one at the White House or CDC will notice, and you've just saved $250K and long wasted years.
Health experts say the new airport screening measures are more likely to calm the public than to prevent Ebola from entering the US.
Liberian Army is the new frontline resource.
Many Liberians have a love-hate relationship with the military: they love the American military; they hate their own.
Today, there are only 2,000 enlisted men and women in the Liberian armed forces.
Two months ago, with no warning, the Liberian government sent the army and the police to impose a 21-day quarantine on West Point, a crowded slum where tens of thousands of people live, many in two-room shanties.
Be afraid. Be very afraid. 2000 soldiers, who routinely accept bribes to let people out of quarantine, are what stands between keeping this outbreak contained, and letting it out to points beyond Liberia's borders.Clashes broke out as angry residents tried to get out. Shots were fired into the crowd, killing a 15-year-old boy.“All those soldiers them were shooting,” Nancy Jellehs, 76, a still-angry West Point resident, said recently.Residents say that during the 10-day quarantine they routinely bribed soldiers to let them through the barricades.General Ziankahn, the Liberian military’s chief of staff, has suspended all other training and exercises so that he can throw his entire army into the war against Ebola. He is dispatching troops to each of the treatment centers under construction, and Liberian soldiers have deployed to the borders to enforce screening measures.
"How do you trust a man who wears both a belt and suspenders? Man can't even trust his own pants!"
ReplyDeleteThe horse is out of the barn and into town!
ReplyDeleteHere are some more add on effects if ebola runs rampant in the world.
ReplyDeleteOne is the problem that dimming is holding back warming. Dimming is in large part created by coal burning in China. While it might seem good for a pandemic to shut down these factories, it is in fact as James Hansen says, a Faustian Bargain, for the dimming is holding back about 1.2 degrees C of warming. Add some part of that to the .7 C we already have and there will be heat - in fact particulates that cause dimming can drop out of the air quick quickly so the heat might go up rather quickly.
http://www.climatecodered.org/2012/03/faustian-bargain-revisited-study-finds.html
second likely add on is that with 70% of people dying you would have a hard time keeping the grid going. Losing the grid is not just losing power to houses, it is also losing power to nuclear plants who have only about 1 week back up of diesel to run the cooling of the reactors (even if they are shut down they still need cooling) and they are not required to have diesel back up for the spent fuel pools. Can anyone say Fukushima. This scenario is described by Matthew Stein in his article 400 Chernobyls. He looks at grid failure due to massive solar flare or EMP attacks, but hey ebola by decimating the work force both for the grid and for the plants themselves could do just fine.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/7301-400-chernobyls-solar-flares-electromagnetic-pulses-and-nuclear-armageddon
So many ways to die...well we have to die anyway as we are mortals, we just weren't expecting death by pandemic caused nuclear disaster.......
So healthcare worker in moon suit gets sick but no one he spent time with in the apartment got sick? Very strange.
ReplyDeleteAesop,
ReplyDeleteThe pendulum of reaction in the mismanagement handling of ebola is wildly swinging here in the US.
We have moved from a state of dumbfound neglect, to performing useless, no meaningful or logical actions, like the mass taking of external skin temperatures of the ambulatory populace, to extreme risk taking, like pressure washing virus contaminated sidewalks, and now we have entered into the realm of the reactionary state of overkill.
Watch this vid of a US doctor advocating on main stream media that we adopt the use of our military to assist in the processing of possible Ebola cases.
Dr. Gil Mobley on why the CDC is 'lying' about Ebola
Wholeheartedly, I agree that we should NOT be allowing or accepting potential cases of EBOLA clients directly into our hospital facility structures at all.
We need and should have designated regional facilities setting up external structures on independent sites that can provide ALL the testing, diagnosis and referrals or transfers that need to be made from those sites.
Triage and diagnoses staging areas need to be also set up outside of our larger community hospitals, and if any patient presents with Ebola symptoms, they get turfed to that regional facility by special designated Ebola care trained staffed ambulance services.
Let’s get really REAL in diagnosing this conundrum of reactionary behaviors and mishandling action.
The root problem as usual is money. Who is going to voluntarily pay to set up such a structure?
What is the cost and value of saving human life? Is it profitable? This is a loss leader for business and marketing. Unless you have an agenda. So goes the salvation of our health care system as a whole with more losses of choice and freedoms with Obamacare. It is much more profitable for the goals of treating Ebola, in developing a vaccine that could be sold, manufactured and mass enforced to the whole populace of an entire ebola affected country, or even to the whole world.
So much for the value, salvation and sanctity of human LIFE. The once Mighty, free market hospitals are mostly broke or beholding to the government and operating on borrowed dimes, and in regard to the treatment of Ebola, are now waiting for funding to come from the government.
The government is waiting until the hospitals collapse.
Then the government can do what it always does… Not let a good crisis go to waste.
Just when you thought it was safe of get MRSA while in the hospital now we have this...
Delete:anonymous 4:28am - Greatest comment ever! I laughed so hard I spit out my coffee!
ReplyDeleteCan you advise what you think about this: if someone lives in a townhouse complex, if a neighbor in the next townhouse develops Ebola, is there any chance of keeping it out of your own unit? This has me quite concerned and any advice would be appreciated.
ReplyDelete@ anon 10/12 6:46 am:
ReplyDeleteYes, very strange, and a suggestion that whatever is happening is not what they are telling us.