Posted on 10/13/2014 7:25:34 PM PDT by 4Speed
Isolating symptomatic patients is certainly effective, but it will not work as a proactive strategy of containment. By that point, a carrier may have already infected dozens of people. Even when surveillance is well deployed, the collateral costs associated with it are forbidding. Between July 31 and mid-September, New York City’s health department received 57 calls reporting suspected infections based on fevers. Of these, only six merited further testing. Three cases were caused by malaria and one by anaplasmosis; two were of unknown causes. Ebola was not found in any of the cases.
There is a fourth strategy, although it will need to be evaluated and deployed carefully. Since the 1990s, novel methods have allowed doctors to detect viruses in the pre-symptomatic phase of an infection, often with remarkable sensitivity and precision. One of these involves the polymerase chain reaction, or P.C.R., a chemical reaction that amplifies pieces of a virus’s genes floating in blood by more than a millionfold, which is what makes early, pre-symptomatic infections identifiable. The technique is not particularly cumbersome: As an oncologist working with blood cancers, I have been using variants of it to detect subclinical infections in patients for nearly a decade.
A 2000 study in The Lancet illustrates the power of this approach. Twenty-four “asymptomatic” individuals exposed to Ebola were tested using P.C.R. Eleven of the exposed patients eventually developed the infection. Seven of the 11 tested positive for the P.C.R. assay; none of the other 13 did. In 2004, virologists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention further refined this method to increase its sensitivity. The test now requires only a teaspoon of blood. The sample is transported, on ice, to a centralized lab. Results are back in a few hours.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
You have got to be sh**ting me.
Duncan —> Pham —> Pham BF
Another gift from Africa, huh..?
What next....
we could start by making it less EASY to come to THIS COUNTRY from the country with the RAGING, DEADLY, CONTAGIOUS, EPIDEMIC.
“An indiscriminate ban on travel would make it impossible for aid workers to reach the most widely affected areas, obviously deepening the medical and humanitarian crisis.”
THEY WILL NOT DROP THIS. There are airplanes designed to fly with 2 crewmembers and HUNDREDS OF TONS of cargo. THEY DON’T NEED PASSENGERS TO FLY CARGO! The crew can stay locked in the cockpit while others (probably US troops) unload it. This isn’t very hard.
Also, certain people would still be allowed to fly, but will be quarantined when they return. What our problem is the Open Borders policy that just won’t stop...and that is putting this country at serious risk of a massive outbreak.
Guardian - Spanish nurse . . . improvement
I came across this when I was googling for a better source for the Texas nurse's boyfriend. Email sent out by the CEO of the pharma company he works for. Nothing in the mainstream media yet.
He works at Alcon...which makes sterile solutions that go in your eyes.
Hope he didn’t work on the production line.
>Isolating symptomatic patients is certainly effective, but it will not work as a proactive strategy of containment. By that point, a carrier may have already infected dozens of people. Even when surveillance is well deployed, the collateral costs associated with it are forbidding. Between July 31 and mid-September, New York City’s health department received 57 calls reporting suspected infections based on fevers. Of these, only six merited further testing. Three cases were caused by malaria and one by anaplasmosis; two were of unknown causes. Ebola was not found in any of the cases.>
I think our government was being proactive when they expedited the VISAs of people coming form Western Africa this summer.
Post to me or FReep mail to be on/off the Bring Out Your Dead ping list.
The purpose of the “Bring Out Your Dead” ping list (formerly the “Ebola” ping list) is very early warning of emerging pandemics, as such it has a high false positive rate.
So far the false positive rate is 100%.
At some point we may well have a high mortality pandemic, and likely as not the “Bring Out Your Dead” threads will miss the beginning entirely.
*sigh* Such is life, and death...
Did you see the Leprechaun Bill O'Reiley tonight reaming out the ObaMao CDC guy who was repeating the totally stupid talking points that the only way to get relief supplies and workers into the affected areas was with commercial passenger planes going both ways?
Nice to hear SOMEONE spit it out, even if it is O’Reily. Where are the Republicans and why the hell don’t they speak up - I am SURE Liberia is not dangling money in front of them the way Karl Rove does on Amnesty...are they REALLY that pussified, REALLY? If so, maybe the Dems are right and they’re fit for office.
Canceling all non essential flights from the outbreak areas would be great.
If not that then:
Quarantine on an Island for 30 days before entering the USA works, as far as I am concerned.
A link to this thread has been posted on the Ebola Surveillance Thread
All they really need to do is flag their visas and not let them in.
The comments at the site are pretty interesting. Even the super libs who read and comment at the NY Times seem to be mostly in favor of a travel ban.
It is tremendously stupid that we haven’t done this, although it seems a miracle that we have had only one case slip through so far.
Notice their “better” method still has a nearly 30% false negative.
The excerpt begins to unveil an aspect of all this that it seems the”experts” at CDC have missed. Look at the man hours involved in sorting out the 57 cases they mention. I read that Duncan caused them to put 3,000 man hours into tracking contacts. The CDC claims that is what they do, why they are there. Fine. How many cases would it take before they just don’t have the resources? In other words, how many cases befor our defenses, such as they are, are saturated and overwhelmed? I suspect that those cases ARE ALREADY HERE. We still need to yank VISAS. And stop flights but when the folks who are going to get sick in the next month do so there may well be no way of tracking them all down.
“All they really need to do is flag their visas and not let them in.”
...but there are also Americans. As it is, when a person enters the US, legally, the guys at Passport Control already know every country that person traveled to (again, assuming legally...but slipping in and out of Liberia would not be easy), so identification of the people is VERY EASY.
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