Posted on 03/24/2014 6:28:20 PM PDT by Pan_Yan
A possible Ebola case has been detected in Canada after a passenger returned from Africa where dozens have died from the virus.
"All we know at this point is that we have a person who is critically ill who travelled from a country where these diseases occur," Denise Werker, joint director of health in Saskatchewan province in western Canada, said.
She said the casualty had been in Liberia and had developed the symptoms after landing in Canada.
He or she would not have been contagious when travelling and was now in isolation pending test results.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.sky.com ...
I realize that Ebola isn’t the easiest disease to contract but I’m still glad this person isn’t in Toronto or Windsor.
Oh my.
Straight out of the plot of Tom Clancey's Rainbow Six except the Ebola virus was contagious.
It's close. Pretty much everything but airborn. Five of the people who have died so far in Guinea were medical workers.
Because this particular illness isn’t casually transmissible until symptoms start to appear.
It takes a day or two after infection before you start vomiting and bleeding out of your pores. After that it's all down hill.
So, what was this person doing, in Africa? Handling animals? Gay sex? Gay sex with corpses? Yikes!
I looked through the article, but it didn’t say WHERE in Canada.
Hope to God it ain’t Vancouver. That’s WAY too close for my taste. Just reading about it in Tom Clancy novels gives me the willies.
Saskatoon
THanks. Still too bleedin’ close. *shudder*
Test results are supposed to come out tomorrow. I hope they are trying to track down those who flew with him.
If you’re a reader catch “The Hot Zone” in paperback.
Ping...(Thanks, Pan_Yan!)
“Wow. How do they know this?”
Fascinatingly enough, back in late 80’s or early 90’s at a facility housing lab monkeys in Reston, Virginia a strain of Ebola ravaged the lab monkey population - 100% fatality rate.
Turns out that particular strain had mutated and gone airborne. Imagine something as easily transmitted as the common cold, except it can cause various types of hemorrhaging and multiple organ failure.
Thankfully, in that particular case in Virginia, in mutating sufficiently to become airborne the virus also became asymptomatic in humans (not monkeys though, where it had a 100% fatality rate).
Several of the lab workers actually tested positive for the disease, but showed no symptoms. I recall reading that workers in the Philippines involved in the primate industry were tested back in the 90’s for signs of exposure to the Reston strain of Ebola, and something like 20% came back positive.
The events in Virginia inspired a fictional book, The Hot Zone if I recall the name, and that book went on to spawn a movie staring Dustin Hoffman.
The bug has already gone airborne once, it’s just a matter of time and opportunity before it does again or before the extant Ebola Reston strains out in the wild cease being asymptomatic to humans. Even if it doesn’t go airborne, in the age of air travel a blood-borne-pathogen can conveniently hitch a ride on travelers in Africa and end up in San Francisco bath houses in short order.
Hell, hemorrhagic fevers frequently raged through Europe during the last couple of thousand years. That’s the reason that about 1 in 7 people Ireland and the U.K. are resistant to some strains of HIV, and about 2% of Europe shows total immunity to those strains. Selective pressures caused by the repeated waves of disease encouraged the proliferation of persons with a novel mutation influencing T-Cell function.
Whenever you hear about an outbreak of a deadly disease, and an infected person showing up via air travel just a single border away, it would be advisable to treat every soothing reassurance from the government with extreme skepticism until such a time that it really is apparent that the disease is contained. Expect government officials to tell you bald-faced lies just to prevent a panic. Hell, expect them to tell you reassuring fairy tales ESPECIALLY when they don’t have the first clue what the hell is going on.
The truth isn’t going to be available, regardless of whether the disease is contained or not, for months most likely.
I have the Ebola Nova DVD, which details the outbreak in the Congo 1996?
It talks about the ebola Reston break and mentions it twice.
Both times, the army went in and “secured” the installation - which means they sterilized it.
Whether it was living or dead, by the time the army was done, it was dead!
Unfortunately, this virus has a number of variants and can spread widely in a hospital setting before it is diagnosed. It only takes one patient in one emergency room for it to spread quickly among treatment staff and the subsequent patients they all treat.
None of this should be taken lightly or understated.
Thanks for the ping!
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