Posted on 08/05/2014 9:21:34 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
With the largest Ebola epidemic ever recorded raging across West Africa and as two Americans who were infected in Liberia have entered the U.S. for treatment, the question has been raised: will Ebola happen in the U.S?
Actually, an Ebola outbreak has happened in the U.S. before -- not just once, but at least three times.
In 1989, Ebola entered into the U.S. through infected monkeys, which were shipped from the Philippines for experimentation. At the time, Hazleton Laboratories (now Covance, Inc.) owned a facility in Reston, Virginia. After one shipment, monkeys were falling rapidly ill and dying. The Reston facility sent monkey tissue samples to the United States Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases where Ebola was definitively diagnosed.
This first-ever known case of Ebola in the U.S. caused a panic within the public health community. A biocontainment team swept in, captured one monkey who had escaped, killed the remaining monkeys, decontaminated the building and closed down the facility.
All of this happened while my family and neighbors slept unsuspectingly not two miles from the facility.
It was not until the book The Hot Zone publicized these events years later that my community even knew how close we were to this dangerous virus. I remember visiting the site with my brothers and sisters after reading The Hot Zone, but all that remained was an eerie abandoned building with no identifying signs....
(Excerpt) Read more at huffingtonpost.com ...
This isn’t a comment on the article itself but on the tawdry crap in the right sidebar next to it at The Huffington Post. Can they possibly get any lower?
Let me guess. The root causes have to do with poverty and racism.
Don’t dare them.
Oh no . . . ! Root Causes strike again.
“Bushmeat”
Like cocaine and meth, just another thing I’ll never eat, snort or smoke, but will get blamed for anyway.
Why?
Because I’m a “white devil”.
The author maintains that part of the problem is the illegal and legal trade in wild animals. She has a point.
Again, another article quoting the Hot Zone, where they intentionally leave out the part about the Ebola Reston virus being harmless to humans.
All humans with verified infection found in their blood, not only survived but never showed and syptoms and the virus disappeared from their blood over some weeks of testing.
It only killed animals, and in this case only monkeys. crap eating monkeys..Crab-Eating Macaque.
I worked with a guy who would stop at a donut shop across the street from the Reston facility that was identified in the story. He said....at the time....the donut guy reported to him that trucks just suddenly pulled up one morning at the building, and construction started immediately. The crews were coming over for donuts for a number of days, and the donut shop just couldn’t understand the reason for tearing down a perfectly new building, or the pace of the effort. Near the end of the demolition episode...one of the crew guys found out about part of the story of the monkeys and told the donut shop what he knew.
Once they finished....the whole thing was sprayed down, and just left there. Nothing was built on the site, and I would take a guess that it’s just a vacant lot today. I’d also question if it’s “clean”, but it’s best not to bring up this topic.
A daycare facility is built upon the lot of the monkey house at: 1946 Isaac Newton Square West, Reston, VA. Reston Monkey House today>
Every Thanksgiving weekend, millions of Americans do ‘legal’ trade in ‘bushmeat’. It’s the opening of deer season.
Most humans make use of ‘wild animals’ for food. Not just Africans. Cajuns are famous for this but rural people in general do everywhere humans live.
Hunting for deer, elk, boar, rabbit, and other animals is a lot different from importing and eating monkey meat that originated in nations that incubate Ebola.
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