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Everyone has it wrong. Americans are frightened to death of the medical implications of Ebola- as well they should be. I’ve never in my lifetime seen a disease that has infected and killed so many healthcare professionals.Unfortunately I might have also been the first American to experience damage from Ebola to my “personal economy” 2 weeks ago. As a branding expert, I speak at business conventions and conferences all over the world. I had already been booked for weeks as the keynote speaker for an event in Dallas in early November. Then came the announcement that Thomas Duncan was being...

The empirical evidence of an airborne Ebola Strain is overwhelming Hat Tip GWP - Patrick Sawyer was the American businessman, who contracted Ebola while working in Liberia, then collapsed after he got off a plane to Nigeria and died July 25. He was the first patient in Nigeria with the Ebola virus. The Nigerian authorities have refused to release the names of other passengers on the plane with Mr. Sawyer, or notify the media of their status.

U.S. Army warns of potential 'airborne' Ebola Virus could be transmitted by means other than contact NEW YORK – While Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization officials continue to insist Ebola cannot be transmitted by air from one person to another, an Army manual clearly warns the virus could be an airborne threat in certain circumstances. The handbook published by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, USAMRID, titled “USAMRID’s Medical Management of Biological Casualties Handbook,” is now in its seventh edition. The most recent edition was published in 2011, with more than 100,000 copies distributed...

Kevin LoriaOctober 6, 2014 The idea that Ebola could go airborne is terrifying. Once you are infected, few diseases are more likely to kill you — and death by hemorrhagic fever, diarrhea and vomiting often accompanied by bleeding and organ failure, sounds particularly awful. At present it's hard to get infected — healthcare workers and family members caring for victims are at highest risk — but that would change if the virus were to mutate so that it could be transmitted through the air while keeping its present lethality. That's a nightmare scenario. But it's more the stuff of bad...

Bloomberg - link and title only.

<p>Muslim burial practices are being blamed for the spread of Ebola.</p> <p>Remains of Secretary General of The Nigeria Supreme General for Islamic Affairs and Seriki of Egbaland, Alhaji Lateeef Adegbite at his burial in 2012.</p> <p>Islam requires family members to personally wash the corpses of loved ones from head to toe. This practise is putting more Africans at risk to catch the disease that is spread by body fluids.</p>

Ebola virus disease (EVD) was first identified in 1976, in what was then called Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). The name comes from the Ebola River, a tributary of the Congo River in central Africa, where the majority of EVD epidemics have occurred. However, recent outbreaks are now in Western Africa, and involve major cities, as well as rural areas. WHO pegs the average EVD case fatality rate at around 50%. Outbreaks in the past have logged case fatality rates of 25 to an astonishing 90 percent. Recently, symptoms of this dread disease have been well-publicized. Indeed,...

Why is the United States not closing all flights from the affected areas, and why is it still issuing travel visas to citizens from Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea? The Congressional Research Service has been driving the legislative debate since 1914, giving our Congressmen information on various topics. The latest report on October 3, 2014, entitled, “Ebola: Basics about the Disease,” by Sarah Lister, Specialist in Public Health and Epidemiology, provides the following information obtained from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO). Ebola outbreak began in December 2013 in Guinea and spread...

The pitch was intriguing: U.S. health officials wanted to fast-track trials for an Ebola vaccine and sounded the call for volunteers. Charles Sullivan called up the hotline on a whim, figuring the National Institutes of Health already had filled its queue and wouldn’t need him. But he was accepted for three rounds of shots of a deactivated virus, a year’s worth of blood analysis and a $900 check for his trouble. The clinical trial went well, and the vaccine seemed promising. A decade later, the country is still waiting for a vaccine amid a worldwide Ebola outbreak, and Mr. Sullivan...

With the announcement last week that a second nurse had contracted the Ebola virus – and then flown with the Ebola virus already manifesting as a “low-grade” fever – it has become clear that the government is not in control of the situation. Already, the Centers for Disease Control have announced that they will be adopting stricter protocols in the future, which would make perfect sense given that any common sense standard would include travel bans on those who treat Ebola patients.

CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta reported that the CDC admitted during a phone conference with the press that Texas Presbyterian Hospital “did seem to be following CDC protocols” in their treatment of Ebola patient Thomas Duncan on Monday’s “

Politics: More than two dozen House Democrats are pushing the Senate to revive and ratify the nomination of Dr. Vivek Murthy to a critical post, but helping to fight deadly disease is not what they have in mind. The question of the day is why we have or need an Ebola czar in the form of political operative/hack Ron Klain when we have an unfilled surgeon general's position that physician emeritus serving as America's doctor is supposed to fill. We have an acting Surgeon General, Rear Admiral Boris Lushniak, but he is seemingly just a placeholder instead of the force...

While federal and state agencies institute new policies and procedures in light of Ebola making an appearance in the U.S., the White House has called for a suspension on research involving other viruses with deadly potential for the time being. On Friday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced its moratorium on funding new “gain-of-function” research, saying it plans to further assess its risks and benefits. It also called for a voluntary stop on current research in this field. “Because the deliberative process launching today will aim to address key questions about the risks and benefits of...

It’s the fault of those mean Republican budget cuts. The CDC had the cash to pay out $25 million in bonuses, but it just couldn’t put the money together to write up guidelines telling hospitals that nurses should have no exposed skin when treating Ebola patients. Will the Republican budget cutting madness never stop? "U.S. taxpayers gave $6 billion in salaries and $25 million in bonuses to an elite corps of health care specialists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since 2007, according to data compiled by American Transparency’s OpenTheBooks.com, an online portal aggregating 1.3 billion lines of...

An Obama administration health official said Sunday that U.S. protocols on Ebola failed because they originally were intended for African field hospitals, while the White House came under another round of attacks for its refusal to restrict travel from nations suffering epidemic outbreaks. Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the original Centers for Disease Control and Prevention instructions for dealing with the virus were taken from the World Health Organization’s protocol for Africa, where conditions are much different from those in U.S. hospitals. Two nurses caring for an Ebola patient flown into...

The folks at Media Matters for America are angry at the press. In a sublimely ironic post, Eric Boehlert fumes, “As Republicans seek to gain a partisan advantage by ginning up fear about the Ebola virus … they're getting a major assist from the news media.” Boehlert believes that media coverage of Ebola has abetted the GOP’s low designs by creating the “unfair” impression that the Obama administration is somehow incompetent ... Presumably, this indictment includes notorious right wing rags like the New York Times, which recently published an op-ed by Joe Nocera that points out the obvious: “When you...

<p>To pick up the load, he says Parkland Hospital will now stand up a Go Team, including 50 medical specialists who can assist at any local hospital.</p> <p>There are also plans to identify a new hospital as the primary Ebola facility as soon as tomorrow. Back at Presbyterian, the health care workers enter another week of closely monitoring their temperatures for any signs of fever -- a symptom of Ebola.</p>

The new protocols that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are developing for health care workers treating patients with Ebola will be "much more stringent" than previous guidelines, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institutes of Health [NIH] National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. While Fauci said he didn't want to "preempt" new protocols, he said they will go "a step further" than the previous World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines that the CDC had followed for years.

snippets- Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said those caring for an Ebola patient in Dallas were vulnerable because some of their skin was exposed. "So there were parts about that protocol that left vulnerability, parts of the skin that were open," Fauci said.

DENVER The president of Frontier Airlines says a nurse who was on flights between Dallas and Cleveland and who later tested positive for Ebola may have been at a more advanced stage of the illness than previously thought.Barry Biffle emailed employees Friday about the findings by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He said the CDC has assured the Denver-based airline that crewmembers on the flights are at a very low risk of exposure.The airline put the pilots and flight attendants on leave for 21 days, which health experts consider the outer limit of how long it would take someone...