Posted on 08/02/2014 7:18:35 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
America, the land of the free, the home of the brave, is in a social-media panic because Dr. Kent Brantly, the 33-year-old Indiana physician who contracted Ebola while battling it in Liberia, is coming home as he struggles to hang onto life. This fear-laden response to a true American hero is out of touch with the fundamental principles of this country.
The Internet is afire with protest, and the misleading headlines stating that Ebola is being brought to the U.S. spread more fear but no understanding or empathy.
Brantly himself makes me proud to be both an American and a physician, and reminds me of the fearless battle against HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, when we took personal risks to care for the sick and the dying. A family friend describes him as caring more for others than for himself. This kind of altruism and courage is becoming rare these days, among physicians and society in general, but it is just as important now as it was in the 1980s, if not more so.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
No palm sweating panic here. The disease is now here and we will deal with it if it spreads. Just questioning the prudence of bringing a contagious untreatable disease here when we dont have to. It will probably arrive by air soon anyway, but at least we did not do that intentionally.....
>> Lower mortality but easier transmission <<
Definitely. That’s the evolutionary mechanism at work. If the virus “wants” to survive, it’s got to stop killing almost everybody it infects. It needs to have victims who are walking around and infecting others, not corpses buried in the ground.
Then as time goes by, the virus will tend to get even weaker, until ordinary public health and sanitary measures can keep it under control, at least in developed economies like those of the USA and Europe.
Bottom line:
Such a virus may never disappear entirely, and there may be occasional bad outbreaks, but it is very unlikely to become the “monster” pandemic of sci-fi movies.
Smallpox never became non pandemic on its own.
We have no idea if this will either.
It may mutate and become totally airborne before it lowers its mortality rate.
Still, even a 30% mortality rate and airborne would be a herd thinner fur sure.
>> the prudence of bringing a contagious untreatable disease here <<
Myabe it’s a bit late to be concerned, because the fatal version of the virus was brought to the USA some time ago (in “test tubes” to be sure) for research purposes.
The fact that Ebola has been here so long with no fatal consequences shows that proper handling in secure facilities (something lacking in West Africa!) can eliminate major dangers.
Also, a very weak version of the virus, “Reston Ebola,” was brought into the USA via research monkeys from the Philippines, and at least four humans in Virginia and Texas developed antibodies to this form of the disease. But none of these four people actually got sick.
Small pox destroyed the American Indians. Whole tribes died in a fortnight. Do we want to see that again?
Absolutely not.
But nature will happen. Usually helped along by human hubris.
So we have been lucky so far. Just like with the smallpox fond in the back if a closet. So much for our sophisticated specimen handling
It seems that those of us with a science/research background are having more difficulty believing this will be ‘OK’.
It’s the ‘only takes one time’ that we’ve actually seen happen at least one time in our jobs/research that causes to doubt. Lab accidents happen all the time. Usually the victim is the only victim. One of my friends in school lost part of her hand in a ‘only takes one time’ miscalculation.
>> Smallpox never became non pandemic on its own <<
On the contrary, I think it did grow weaker. It developed a strain called “cow pox” — which then became the basis for the earliest vaccinations.
>> We have no idea if this will either. <<
Sure. You’re right, insofar as we can’t make an exact prediction.
But you can say the same about ANY possible threat. All we can go on are the probabilities, which tell us that most viruses eventually weaken.
>> even a 30% mortality rate and airborne would be a herd thinner fur sure <<
In Africa? No doubt about it.
But in the USA? Just won’t happen, in my opinion, because of our modern means of sanitation, public health monitoring & controls, good hospitals, good docs and so forth.
(Remember a few years ago when West Nile disease first hit our shores? The news media were full of apocalyptic predictions about the looming death rates. But like so many other diseases, West Nile just faded into the background. It’s still there, but simply not a major threat.)
>> Just like with the smallpox found in the back if a closet. <<
That incident was a terrible and unacceptably careless mistake. Absolutely.
On the other hand, if the germs in question had somehow “escaped” into the public and had caused an outbreak, we’d be very unlikely to see a pandemic because our modern means of monitoring and control would probably have confined the outbreak before it could grow to monster proportions.
(Not to mention the fact that a lot of us still have some degree of residual immunity to smallpox, thanks to vaccinations received years ago.)
“On the contrary, I think it did grow weaker. It developed a strain called “cow pox” — which then became the basis for the earliest vaccinations.”
Which explains why millions continued to die of smallpox right up to the 1970’s...
>> Which explains why millions continued to die of smallpox right up to the 1970’ <<
But almost nobody was dying in developed countries like the USA, Northern Europe, Japan, etc.
In the meantime, whatever happened to all the recent monster diseases that were going to wipe out humanity? AIDS? SARS? H1N1? West Nile?
I’m not worried about any of them, nor am I worried about Ebola — UNLESS some outfit like al Qaeda or North Korea succeeds in spreading a “weaponized version” in our midst.
We would see a pandemic. I would be ok and the other codgers my age would be fine but anyone younger would be in trouble. I have watched the bow wave of 2 infectious diseases through a naive population in the last 10 years. H1N1 and west Nile. While neither had high death rates, the system was swamped. Something more serious will collapse the medical system in this country very quickly
Done.
Pray for him and suggest that he not have sex with any aids patients, drink a shot of scotch with his cough syrup before be every night.
Isloated does sound like something you could catch from Jaba the Hut.
TSA Allowing Illegals to Fly Without Verifiable ID
Illegal aliens are being allowed to fly on commercial airliners without valid identification, according to the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC). “The aliens who are getting released on their own recognizance are being allowed to board and travel commercial airliners by simply showing their Notice to Appear forms,” NBPC’s Local 2455 Spokesman, Hector Garza, told Breitbart Texas.
So why do ebola patient(s) need to be flown back on a special plane?
And you think they don’t have people down there, getting samples ???
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