Posted on 05/26/2015 5:49:22 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
The news from Africa and the Third World is seldom good, and much of the bad news is about disease born of ignorance, superstition and primitive sanitation, news dispatched by a media addicted to tales of unrelieved gloom, certain doom and inevitable disaster.
We were all supposed to be dead by now from strange diseases reduced in the public prints to acronyms and bold initials — AIDS, SARS, MERS, swine flu, avian flu and most recently Ebola. These diseases are rightly feared, but in most places they’re diseases only of a tiny part of the population of a country or continent, often abetted by primitive custom.
Ebola is the real deal, a dark word that rolls easily off the tongue, redolent of sorcery and mystery, and a word short enough to fit neatly into almost any headline. When it kills, which is often, it kills quickly at the price of considerable pain and horror, though not inevitably, as the first dispatches from Africa said it would.
Controlling the spread of Ebola, being as highly contagious as it is, has not been easy since it emerged decades ago from the Ebola River valley. The authorities have had to contend with persistent tribal customs of ceremonial washing of the dead, often accompanied by widespread touching, handling and even kissing of infected corpses.
The latest figures, compiled by the World Health Organization, show that Ebola has infected 26,933 persons, mainly in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, and of those, 11,120 have died. The figures barely describe the dimensions of personal tragedy, which has taken entire villages in the remote and isolated back country, whole families in the cities, and even some of the doctors and nurses who have given their lives for their patients...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Combined General and Maryland “Freak State” PING!
I don’t have it and that’s pretty good news.
A massive outbreak in Pakistan — would be good news about Ebola.
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...
someone from NJ just died of Lassa fever.
A link to this thread has been posted on the Ebola Surveillance Thread
My cousin was working on a vaccine for Lhasa fever. After the last outbreak of Ebola he was taken off the Lhasa team and put on the team working the Ebola virus. He has just returned to West Africa and he is hopeful about a vaccine. God Bless him, I sure as hell couldn’t do his work....
Anyone who believes that “we’re all supposed to be dead now” doesn’t quite understand the disease process.
Everyone dying means the disease doesn’t continue to spread. Nature favors the disease that spreads over the one that doesn’t.
Thank God.
There are a number of similarities to Baltimore.
The irony is that modern burial customs solve the scourge - like cremation and wrap em in plastic and bury in the ground.
Thanks Joe.
You’re Welcome, GOPJ!
I am amazed at the people who have become convinced from the MSM that this was just another political issue. From the figures cited in the article, mortality is down from 70% to "only" about 42%. That's still ten more than the Black Death. We'd better take it seriously before it takes us, seriously.
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