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Just found this 4 minute USAID video of the ETU in Bong County, Liberia. It was uploaded 3 days ago, no indication of when the video was produced but that ETU is relatively new IIRC.

A nurse at the facility says that when their ambulance brings in a patient the ambulance personnel say there are 20 more where that one patient came from who need to be transported to the ETU. It's at the 1:15 mark.

Fighting Ebola

That indicates to me that the claims of reduced transmission are inaccurate, assuming the video was actually recorded in the past week.

for an explosion of cases in early December.

Sirleaf-Johnson is contributing to this with her press crackdown. I'm not seeing nearly as many news stories out of Liberia. I even read in the NYT (quote and link below) that she is more concerned about the effect of Ebola on the economy than the death and destruction of Ebola. My guess is that the government of Liberia is intentionally pushing it under the rug as far as it will go in order to attempt to salvage Liberia's economic situation. I think that has been the case since the outset. How often have we seen WHO reports come out with outdated or missing data on Liberia?

Here's her quote:

Liberia’s Ebola Crisis Puts President in Harsh Light

“Right now, all the international attention is on Ebola,” she said of critics, including at the United Nations, who say she has been more worried about the economy than a health catastrophe. “If we don’t focus on our economy, we will not be able to sustain it when they are gone.”

The problem with that idea is that the truth can be hidden for only so long. Once it gets out, the effect on Liberia's economy will be much worse than if the government had been truthful from the outset and maintained honesty throughout.

And every scientist knows that the absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence. Just because something has not been studied, peer reviewed, and published, does not mean it does not exist.

I'm afraid current "science" just doesn't work like old time science. Nowadays cooling is caused by warming, a magic form of thermal energy escapes all detection until 2000 meters beneath the surface of the ocean, and Ebola must behave as the CDC demands. Anyone who doesn't believe those statements is, by the definitions of "new science," an anti-science nut.

2011 Nobel Prize: Medicine winner supports tougher quarantine than Christie's, supports the NJ quarantine in general.

Dr. Bruce Bueler, winner of the 2011 Nobel in medicine, is saying what we've been saying: we simply don't know a lot about Ebola and its transmission.

Christie's controversial Ebola quarantine now embraced by Nobel Prize-winning doctor

I hope this phenomenon is indicative of Ebola burning out but how many times have we seen reports like this that turn out to be either blatantly wrong or due to unseen factors like failure to report? I really hope it’s true but I’m skeptical.

By "here", I meant the US. I haven't been in any towns where pigs have free run of the place.

Sorry for my confusion. That's what I thought you meant but wasn't sure.

However, there is a feral pig problem in parts of the US, and stray dogs abound.

Oh yes, I am aware of both.

There is one heck of a lot we don't know about this disease, and for only one or two possible means of transmission to be considered leaves much to be desired...and we haven't mentioned the ubiquitous flies....

The list of what we don't know, and what we don't know we don't know, is much longer than the list of what we do know. I've been saying this to family and friends since the summer and those who brushed me off as not being "up to date" on research are now asking me to explain what's happening.

I maintain that much, if not most, contemporary Ebola dogma is going to be upended before this is over.

Thanks! I read that and posted about it way upthread (somewhere around post 1,000 I think.) It’s the genesis of my idea that village dogs could be an intermediary host. The dogs eat the infected primary host, then interact with villagers and pass the virus. That seems more likely than many of the hypothesized wild animal scenarios I’ve read over the past 20-odd years but the idea hasn’t been studied or researched at all.

Well, here, in town, the pigs don't run wild, but imagine Ebola getting out into the farthest rural areas where there is a significant feral pig population...Pigs and dogs will both eat human corpses...

Which town do you mean? The pigs in that video looked to be wandering unimpeded to me but I may have missed something.

Now, the question of whether dogs can pass the virus on to humans or other animals which can needs to be answered.

That's the research I'm waiting for. Village dogs as intermediary hosts makes sense to me in the abstract. Much more sense than many of the hypothesized wild animal interactions I've heard posited as explanations for previous outbreaks. I hope someone is planning that research now.

OMG I can hardly believe my own eyes. I'm watching a BBC video of SL and in the middle of this video they show a photo of an ETU and PIGS wandering in the street right in front of a hospital door.

Pigs are definitely susceptible to Ebola Zaire and in pigs, there is a respiratory factor. Having pigs wandering amongst Ebola-infected humans is not a good idea.

The image is around 0:0:43 in this BBC video. I made a copy and have saved the image for later use if needed.

You'd think one of the first things done would be to remove animals from the vicinity of the ETU.

An excellent interview with a virologist/Ebola specialist/other degrees. It’s long but worth the time.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/21-days/381901/?single_page=true

I know what you mean. The worst part is, my daughter and son-in-law cannot have weapons at home or as concealed carry because they live on base. There’s some kind of regulation about it on military bases and SIL hasn’t found a way around it yet.

I cannot fathom why civilian command is telling troops and families to duck and cover while leaving the suspects alone. PC crap I think, and it’s infuriating.

My son-in-law is teaching my daughter how to use a vehicle, a tire iron, the car keys, just about anything she can grab as a weapon to protect herself and their baby. She barely hits five feet tall and weighs under a hundred so she doesn’t have mass on her side.

Fascinating, thanks! I thought the epidemiology departments always with the physics departments to determine things like fluid dynamics, etc. with regards to aerosol/droplet vectors. I suppose that makes entirely too much sense, eh?

Here’s another good one, narrative rather than science paper but still quite informative.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/27/ebola-wars

According to researchers writing in The Lancet, the R0 in Liberia is 2.49 as of October 24.

Dynamics and control of Ebola virus transmission in Montserrado, Liberia: a mathematical modelling analysis

Thanks for the post. I don’t know how widespread the agitation is within the entire military structure but I know what people on the ground are saying at those two bases and the enlisted troops scheduled to deploy are very, very unhappy with their “mission.”

I agree—the brass putting unanticipated money into creating Ebola evacuation units seems to verify what I’m hearing.

Who knows, perhaps dissension in the ranks is actually going to get somewhere this time.

This is interesting.

(Lancet Oct 25 2014) Ebola control: effect of asymptomatic infection and acquired immunity

Evidence suggests that many Ebola infections are asymptomatic, a factor overlooked by recent outbreak summaries and projections. Particularly, results from one post-Ebola outbreak serosurvey1 showed that 71% of seropositive individuals did not have the disease; another study2 reported that 46% of asymptomatic close contacts of patients with Ebola were seropositive. Although asymptomatic infections are unlikely to be infectious, they might confer protective immunity and thus have important epidemiological consequences.

Big snip

Unlikely to be infectious? I don't know about that.

At any rate, it's yet another display of how little we actually know about Ebola Zaire.

I think the intricacies of our society will create points of failure unimagined in other cultures.

I hope and pray you're wrong but I think you are probably right.

I’m not really sure about the division of authority between the various levels of government but I do know that health officials can and do imprison uncooperative Tuberculosis patients to force those patients to complete treatment. I’m assuming that such forced treatments have been litigated and determined legally valid.

With Ebola we have the immigration aspect, which the feds have litigated and the Supreme Court has determined is outside the sphere of state and local law. How that factors into Ebola I have no idea.

Perhaps an immigration lawyer and an ID law specialist will chime in.

My son-in-law got an email about it on his .mil account. I’ll see if he can forward a copy to me but I doubt that’s possible.

Please let me know what they say. I’m hearing it from Ft. Campbell and Ft. Carson.