Oh, this is terrible! It will be just like 2008 when that woman showed up in Colorado with Marburg and the entire state of Colorado died a horrible bloody death! It’s a good thing we were able to use the National Guard to keep anyone from escaping from Colorado and spreading that disease to the other states. /s
Link to MMWR article discussing the Marburg case: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5849a2.htm
For those that don’t know, Marburg is cousin to Ebola, and causes an almost identical disease, with a comparable death rate. When the Marburg case showed up, no one even knew it was Marburg until 6 months after the patient was discharged. She asked to be retested after hearing of a fatal Marburg case in a Dutch person who had visited the same cave she had visited, and was then diagnosed. Yet, despite that lack of diagnosis at the time of illness, not a single person caught Marburg from that woman. That is because our health system has protocols in place to contain infectious diseases, even those weird imported exotic diseases.
This Ebola patient was staying with relatives, and was symptomatic for 4 days before being admitted to the hospital. The only people who are in some danger of catching Ebola are those relatives, and they are being watched now.
Those little pandemic kits won’t work for Ebola—it’s spread by direct contact, not aerosol—but they will help avoid the flu. May I remind everyone that flu is a killer—an average of 16,000 people die from it every year—and flu season is on its way?