Posted on 12/07/2001 1:46:46 PM PST by Patriot
This is why this disease is bad. You don't need hi tech stuff to transmit it to unknowing and innocent people. A Hudson Bay Blanket was very low tech!!
Hopefully this will never happen. If it does, it will bring out the worse in people. The vaccines will have to watched by armed guards. If we can make it 6 months out, we should have enough for us and Canada and most of Mexico!
The gay and impaired immune response population will be goners if this happens. They probably would contract the disease or have serious and probably fatal side effects if they are vaccinated.
CDC needs to be vaccinating all first responders, both health and police; all main line/street cops, er and primary docs, nurses and staff asap. Then start vaccinating pediatric patients, young children, teens, young adults and the parents of all of these populations. Teachers should be vaccinated to make sure that they don't spread the disease.
Then they can start giving to the rest of us. Start with the younger and work up the age ladder! I'm 63, and that puts me up the ladder. However, they should not use vaccinations on older adults who aren't parents, front line responders and health care providers until there is an adequate supply! Unlike you, I live in a surburban/metro area!
That is utterly laughable coming from someone who has yet to post a reference. Everything I've said is backed up by text from the major health organizations of the world.
That was 1972 in Yugoslavia.
You mean Tito's Yugoslovia? Well there's a credible source. Yep, no CYA going on over there.....
Was the smallpox outbreak anything like the last Anthrax outbreak? It occurred in the Soviet Union when a release occurred at a bioweapons factory.
For years the Soviet government blamed it on "eating contaminated beef", so they wouldn't give away the bioweapons lab.
In one of the last outbreaks in Yugoslavia
Strange you pick "one of the last" outbreaks, one that looks especially bad, when we have more recent data. I posted it before, but I'll post it again:
The researchers cite the last case of naturally occurring smallpox in October 1977 as further evidence of the difficulty for one person to infect others. Of the 161 persons who had contact with the infected person, 12 unvaccinated persons had face-to-face contact. None of the 12 became ill with clinical cases of smallpox.
There was a very interesting post here, wish I had kept it. It outlined how back in the olden days, people would use an infected person, scratch their own arms, and apply a small amount of the pus from someone who was recovering and almost healed up from the pox-in effect giving themselves a field expedient vaccination. Mrs. Jefferson? I have forgotten now, maybe someone bookmarked the information.
You know, you've made a few posts like this, accusing me of being ill-informed, or stupid. But in this thread all I have done is repost information from the world medical experts, over and over again.
Now, you can tell me I don't know what I'm talking about, but it is up to you to refute the information presented. And you haven't done that.
You are scared to death of smallpox, and it seems you want everyone else to be also. Smallpox is a very dangerous disease, horribly dibilatating with a 30% mortality rate. It is much more contagious than anthrax. And it was responsible for millions of deaths throughout the centuries. The Soviets concentrated on it as a cornerstone of their bioweapons research.
However, because of its etiology, it can be swiftly contained, and because the vaccine can prevent the disease if given soon AFTER exposure, it is uniquely treatable from a public health standpoint. Also, because of the tremendous amounts of money spent on anti-viral drugs since the beginnings of AIDS, there is a real belief that the disease itself can be treated.
You see the glass as half empty, while I see the glass as definitely half full.
Everything I have stated is accurate and the references you cite show that.
You seem not to actually read the things you cite, not understand them.
You ignore the words always associated with bilogicla questions such as "usually" and "generally".
You post things that contradict each other, at least seemingly in the context of your argument, and make the false argument that the references you cite reflect your discussion and presentation, which they don't.
Your last post was actually fine, I agree, excpet that I think you are the one who has an emotional problem talking about it. You don't want to actually discuss the nuts and bots, what has happened in the past in real life, how possible is it that it could be passed from person to person unknowingly -- things like that which are the questions people have.
You seem rather to want to shut down discussion by citing technical refernces and quoting words you cannot even explain or understand.
I actually think you are the one scared and are projecting it and hiding behind the veil of experts say all is safe and then covering your ears.
Going back, the initial question that begins this is can a person be infectious and not know he has small pox.
You reference this: A person infected with smallpox and overtly sick usually transmits the virus face-to-face in a closed dwelling. There is no infectious subclinical state.
No subclinical state, as if it is the end of story. But the same reference disccusses the difficulty in diagnosis even calling it a "clinician's nightmare".
Great diagnostic difficulties arise through wide variations from this characteristic pattern. Very severe disease may result in death even before the focal rash is fully developed and sometimes, as in haemorrhagic smallpox bleeding into the skin and from the body orifices wrongly focuses attention towards some severe and acute blood disease. Mild smallpox naturally occuring - or more likely modified in this direction by residual immunity resulting from an old vaccination - also presents great difficulties in clinical diagnosis, so much so that it was described by one witness as "the clinicians nightmare".
So, you are not really providing information, but are using technical jargon to clamp down on analysis and discussion and understanding.
DA enderson has said how virtually no Doctor would recognize a small pox case today. Sure, it may not be infectious subclinically, but if a clinician cannot recognize it that means little.
Anyhow, as I think abou your posts and how intellecually dishonest they have been, how you have been spcious and partaken in the lowest forms of cheap debate, I am wondering why I have tried to be civil with you.
One of your good ones was changing the topic and the quote. I say people can spread small pos without knowing they have it.
You then change the statement to something else and attack it.
Just cheap low stuff. Man, what's wrong with you?
You really seem to have a persecution complex, don't you?
It is interesting to note that at NO TIME did I mention you as the source of the information I consider misleading.
Go on, go back and look. I only say "some around here needlessly trying to scare people." And you jump in soon after that defending yourself. I must have touched a rew nerve, no?
Back on subject, with a few exceptions, I have stayed on topic. I would like to see how I "change the subject".
The topic is, of course, smallpox. There are some facts that are easily verifiable, and I have merely tried to transmit them. The fact remains that that the disease does not become contagious until a rash forms. Usually that rash forms originally in the pharynx and oral cavity. I have seen slides of cases, and while I'm sure there are cases that diagnosis would be difficult, in a situation where the is a confirmed outbreak of smallpox, it would not be difficult to differentiate.
Now, you seem to keep coming back to the difficulty of diagnosis. It is a troublesome disease to distinguish for a few reasons, first of all the rash, in its early stages it mimics chickenpox. Therefore if a child presents at an offices with fever, malaise, and a body rash, at this point in time, the physician would think chickenpox. That is to be expected because smallpox is not around anymore. However, if a case is diagnosed anywhere in the country today, every doctor around will immediately take precautions he normally wouldn't take. Essentially you are looking at cases in a vacuum, I'm trying to look at the bigger picture.
The other reason smallpox is difficult to diagnose is that the early symptoms mimic the flu or common cold, and the inital infective stages the rash MAY be confined to only the oral cavity. However, once it is know that smallpox it present in the community, every doctor will treat these seemingly innocuous cases as smallpox, probably with vaccinations and isolation
You see, as I've said earlier, the etiology of the disease, makes identification and isolation a little easier than, say, polio, where infective people can walk around perfectly fine while spreading the disease.
1. There is a 7-17 day incubation period, with no apparent symptoms and no contagiousness.
2. The first syptoms of smallpox mimic the flu, however the person is still not contagious at this point.
3. Smallpox first becomes contagious when lesions/pox appear, AFTER the flu-like symptoms have existed for a day or two.
4. However, those lesions/pox generally first appear in the throat, and not on the skin, and therefore may not be immediately detectable.
5. After they appear in the throat, they then appear on the body at the face and extremities, and at that point confirm that the person has smallpox.
From that data, it would seem that:
1. An infected person, once lesions occur in their throat, may not immediately see them, or may think they are something else such as strep, and may not take immediate steps to quarantine themselves.
2. Meaning that in the period, that any lesions are in their throat ONLY, there is a window of time where they may be spreading the disease and unaware of it, even though that window is probably only a day or two.
3. Meaning that the zero patient may infect others during that window, but as soon as doctors realized there was smallpox in the area, would be on alert to quarantine people as soon as they came down with flu-like sypmtoms, but before they had lesions in their throat. This may mean a local or regional outbreak, but it would burn out quickly.
4. Meaning that the smallpox threat is moderate, not terribly high or low.
Would that be a correct analysis?
I wish I had said that. A very concise wrap-up.
Thank you.
So just where are the anti-immunization folks anymore?
Bumping for any new info. Anyone in Seatlle heard yet whether or not this guy is quarantined, or who the heck he is?
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