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You Are Not Nearly Scared Enough About Ebola
Foreign Policy Magazine ^ | August 14, 2014 | Laurie Garrett, Senior Fellow for Global Health, CFR

Posted on 08/16/2014 1:23:08 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet

Experimental drugs and airport screenings will do nothing to stop this plague. If Ebola hits Lagos, we're in real trouble.

Attention, World: You just don't get it.

You think there are magic bullets in some rich country's freezers that will instantly stop the relentless spread of the Ebola virus in West Africa? You think airport security guards in Los Angeles can look a traveler in the eyes and see infection, blocking that jet passenger's entry into La-la-land? You believe novelist Dan Brown's utterly absurd description of a World Health Organization that has a private C5-A military transport jet and disease SWAT team that can swoop into outbreaks, saving the world from contagion?

Wake up, fools. What's going on in West Africa now isn't Brown's silly Inferno scenario -- it's Steven Soderbergh's movie Contagion, though without a modicum of its high-tech capacity.

Last week, my brilliant Council on Foreign Relations colleague John Campbell, former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria, warned that spread of the virus inside Lagos -- which has a population of 22 million -- would instantly transform this situation into a worldwide crisis, thanks to the chaos, size, density, and mobility of not only that city but dozens of others in the enormous, oil-rich nation. Add to the Nigerian scenario civil war, national elections, Boko Haram terrorists, and a countrywide doctors' strike -- all of which are real and current -- and you have a scenario so overwrought and frightening that I could not have concocted it even when I advised screenwriter Scott Burns on his Contagion script....

(Excerpt) Read more at foreignpolicy.com ...


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Government
KEYWORDS: disaese; ebola; epidemic; illness
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1 posted on 08/16/2014 1:23:08 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Just read “The Hot Zone”. Very good book, a fast read, and will have you sufficiently terrified of Ebola for life. One of the phrases from that book that is forever in my mind... “the sloughing off of the tongue”


2 posted on 08/16/2014 1:27:40 AM PDT by Teacher317 (We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men)
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Comment #3 Removed by Moderator

To: 2ndDivisionVet

Ever seen a dog with parvo? A fatal virus — another dog can get it just by walking down the same sidewalk a year later.


4 posted on 08/16/2014 1:43:45 AM PDT by zipper (In Their Heart Of Hearts, Every Democrat Is A Communist.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet; Slings and Arrows; Salamander

No. I think I’m scared enough.

That’s why I plan to immediately cut myself off from society and virtually all human contact and live on Walden Pond and kill deer and fish and eat Juniper berries and wild honey.

See you guys in about 10 - 15 years.

Or the Rapture.


5 posted on 08/16/2014 1:47:08 AM PDT by shibumi (Cover it with gas and set it on fire.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

People who are posting that they are not afraid or worried, it’s been nice knowing you. I am stocking up on much basic goods. I have neighbors building around their property like a fortress. Really. People who live in the wilderness far off from the cities is where I’d prefer to be away from all of the risks.


6 posted on 08/16/2014 1:56:38 AM PDT by Christie at the beach
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To: shibumi; Salamander; 2ndDivisionVet

7 posted on 08/16/2014 1:57:54 AM PDT by Slings and Arrows ("Your Daddy Was Drunk and Your Mama Was Lonely" - http://youtu.be/4HYy62qiOwA)
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To: 2ndreconmarine; Fitzcarraldo; Covenantor; Mother Abigail; EBH; Dog Gone; ...
Ping...

A link to this thread has been posted on the Ebola Surveillance Thread

8 posted on 08/16/2014 1:58:33 AM PDT by Smokin' Joe (How often God must weep at humans' folly. Stand fast. God knows what He is doing.)
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To: Slings and Arrows

Nah. Don’t panic. Just pay attention. You can always panic later.


9 posted on 08/16/2014 2:13:29 AM PDT by Smokin' Joe (How often God must weep at humans' folly. Stand fast. God knows what He is doing.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Okay. I’ll try to be more scared in the future.


10 posted on 08/16/2014 2:23:37 AM PDT by WayneS (Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Bam bam will protect us, and make our house payments.


11 posted on 08/16/2014 3:27:15 AM PDT by driftdiver (I could eat it raw, but why do that when I have a fire.)
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To: sauropod

.


12 posted on 08/16/2014 3:49:41 AM PDT by sauropod (Fat Bottomed Girl: "What difference, at this point, does it make?")
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To: 2ndDivisionVet; Smokin' Joe; All

Interesting article and comments at the FP link. Thanks for posting; thanks for your link.


13 posted on 08/16/2014 3:51:56 AM PDT by PGalt
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To: Christie at the beach

“People who live in the wilderness far off from the cities is where I’d prefer to be away from all of the risks.”

My mother, now 97, lived in tiny, isolated Medina, Ohio. She said her father and the local sheriff went to the edge of town and put up a sign that the flu had already reached Medina and urging people fleeing the city to keep going. They thought they were lying in an effort to protect themselves and their neighbors. But the flu had already hit at a boarding house that had rented rooms to city dwellers and they just didn’t know it yet. Mom, who was born at the end of the outbreak, knew lots of people who lost family to the flu.

Having said that, I don’t think Ebola is spread by air, which makes it less dangerous than the flu. Theoretically, you get it by directly touching the body fluids of infected people. (Although, sneeze droplets hang for a long, long time. The closed ventilation system of a plane could be a 100% effective vector on a four hour flight with an infected person.)


14 posted on 08/16/2014 4:14:46 AM PDT by Gen.Blather
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To: zipper

Several years actually.


15 posted on 08/16/2014 4:40:50 AM PDT by MarMema (Run Ted Run)
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To: Gen.Blather

droplet precautions are three feet.


16 posted on 08/16/2014 4:41:45 AM PDT by MarMema (Run Ted Run)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Read up on colloidal silver, then buy what you need to produce your own. And please, do not tell me how someone knew someone who turned blue from drinking it everyday. I have a degree in chemistry, nutrition and fifty additional hours in herbs and vitamins. Our family has been using it for 20 years, my kids were raised on it, are healthy as horses and not blue yet. If you use the right kind in the right amounts you will survive what others won’t, free from pharmaceutical intervention. Educate yourself and you will not be afraid. :)


17 posted on 08/16/2014 4:48:32 AM PDT by republicanbred (...and when I die I'll be republican dead.)
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To: MarMema

“droplet precautions are three feet.”

Years ago, when the fuel crisis hit, commercial planes started flying with their fresh air vents closed, as it saved fuel. An FAA study, published, as I recall, in Aviation Week, said that in a four hour flight all passengers would be exposed to an airborne virus if the virus carrier was active. I don’t know if airborne viruses travel in droplets or not. Nor do I know where the air returns are on planes. But I’d imagine the ventilation system would pick them up and move them farther than three feet.


18 posted on 08/16/2014 4:51:01 AM PDT by Gen.Blather
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To: Teacher317

>> Just read “The Hot Zone”. Very good book, a fast read, and will have you sufficiently terrified of Ebola for life.

Just read “the Bible”. Same comments. Both the second “big chapter” and the final one describe horrible plagues. And plagues pop up here and there throughout.

The good news is we WIN in the end because this really cool guy (he’s actually GOD himself) named Jesus loves us enough to lay down his life for us. Amazing ending!

Real page-turner, I’m telling you! Highly recommended.


19 posted on 08/16/2014 5:05:58 AM PDT by Nervous Tick (Without GOD, men get what they deserve.)
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To: shibumi

You are a funny person Shibumi. We need more of this type of dark, but common sense humor, with a touch brainstorming hope of trying to solve the problem. I was thinking the same thing only even so far as to have a snorkel for venting and “purifying?” The air hundreds of feet in the air and living like Bubble boy. There’s not a dang thing we can do to avoid this one. My sister just got back from a missionary trip to Swaziland and although it’s on the east coast. She came down SICK (poor Kellsiwells) with “something” and “they” don’t even know what the cause of it is yet, but hey! they let her in anyway! (And being ex Intel; I know my country cares for each and everyone of us and that they would NEVER keep any important knowledge from us that could possibly help save ourselves or others....mmmmm) I’m going to give her a huge bear hug. Maybe go back there to Swaziland myself and help them build something or teach. Life is too short any more to worry about the ramping up of plagues, knowledge increasing, signs & wonders in the heavens and on Earth, nations rising against nation, kingdoms rising against kingdom, men being lovers of themselves rather than lovers of God. You know the lists of signs of the End Times? The only one, well 2 I can think of not yet fulfilled is the 3rd Jewish Temple being rebuilt and the other “men’s hearts failing them in perplexity at the roaring of the oceans and its waves”? Whatever that means...It will be interesting though to witness the world panic when this thing takes off. Heck, it’s amazing it’s been so quiet this long since I last heard of it’s existence 20? something years ago. (Not that I wish EBOLA on anyone but...tongue sliding off of itself?...yuk) I just hope everyone has been working out their own salvation with fear and trembling like we were told to do. It would just infuriate the hell out of a Muslim who when he goes to chop off my head for not denying the Lord, and he goes to hold up my head my tongue slides out and the smile on my face melts into a gelatinous bloody mess all over himself. (Lol) “ Hey, Haadji,hatmohead or mohomeathead or whatever ever you call yourself...getsomonia? Ahhhh allah might be displeased at your “sloppy” workmanship. Actually he can’t hear a damp thing you poor misguided soul”


20 posted on 08/16/2014 5:07:34 AM PDT by Rainwave (" No moral education means social regression" - Rush L.)
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