U.S. says diseases like Ebola should be viewed as security threats

Yahoo! News ^ | September 27, 2014 | David Morgan (Reuters)

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Obama administration urged the international community Friday to view outbreaks of Ebola, MERS and other deadly diseases as global security threats that require broad and rapid responses to protect the safety of populations and economies.

Top U.S. officials from the White House, Pentagon and State Department met with representatives from 44 countries and multilateral agencies, including the United Nations and World Bank, to call for implementation of 7-year-old global standards for dealing with deadly epidemics and other health dangers, including biological attacks.

President Barack Obama, who this week urged members of the United Nations to do more against the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, told Friday's meeting that the current response to disease outbreaks often amounts to an ill-coordinated scramble with tragic consequences.

"With all the knowledge, all the medical talent, all the advanced technologies at our disposal, it is unacceptable if, because of lack of preparedness and planning and global coordination, people are dying when they don't have to," the president said.

The worst-ever outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus, which has killed nearly 3,000 people in West Africa over the past six months and could reach a total number of 20,000 cases by November, was front and center in the discussion.

"If left unaddressed, Ebola has the potential to cause instability the likes of which we haven't seen since Liberia's civil war," U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told an audience that included health ministers and other officials from countries with a combined population of 4 billion people.

The international community is mobilizing thousands of personnel and pouring billions of dollars into an Americana-led effort to control the Ebola outbreak, which the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says could infect 550,000 to 1.4 million people by January if nothing is done.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[pleasenotcalifornia]

And I’m part French and I surrender.

[ansel12]

We are coming up on the third month on this stuff, and there is only so far the screaming and panic posters can go with end of the world panic and nightmare scenarios.

If you go back a couple of months you will see that allowing those two American medical missionaries to be treated in America at Emory, was going to kill us all, and the panic sellers were raging and raving.

The policy is taking place and we can try to keep up with the story and update our information and perceptions, and opinions, and discussions, or we can just keep beating the same old zombie movie scenarios over and over and over.