|
ResidentSadist -> RE: Should the US close airports from Ebola ravaged countries? (10/14/2014 12:41:36 PM)
|
My friend in California saw the news on TV about the Ebola Scare At SoCal Airport last night. She dreamed everyone at work got Ebola. She takes a bus to work and said it made her nervous to be sitting with all those people. She was a little high strung by the time she got to work where she discovered 4 people were out sick . . . she freaked out! I previously wasn't concerned or following any news about Ebola until I empathized with her concerns saying they were valid. I recalled to her the time the flu spread through my company. It hospitalized my VP (10 days) and his wife (7 days), infected all 8 employees and 4 sub contractors, me and my wife, resulting in the unmanned business shutting down from late December all the way through January until February 1st.
With that reminder of my own brush with flu contagion and the fact my slave works in a hospital, I decided to look into the current Ebola outbreak. I feel sorry for medical staff because treating Ebola patients is a deadly job. More than 233 doctors and nurses have caught Ebola and died in Africa this year. In Spain, Maria Teresa Romero Ramos wore a protective “space suit” on the two occasions she came close to an Ebola patient in a Madrid hospital, but she inadvertently touched her cheek with her gloved hand while removing the suit. Now she has Ebola and is clinging to life.
So here I am in a thread where some replies are joking about germaphobes and other replies propose impractical quarantines. I think the OP asks a valid question about closing borders, it's the right response. Liberia and Sierra Leone already have closed borders, but Guinea had only closed its borders to neighboring West Africans. Guinea now has over a thousand cases. Our response is important and in April, if WHO had not downplayed the Ebola concern at the Geneva conference, things might be a lot different right now. They certainaly changed their stance but it was too late. I found a nice summary timeline of what went wrong (ref - Huffington).
~~~~~~~~~~~~
April 1, 2014 - Outbreak Or Epidemic: What's In A Name? - Wary to call the Ebola outbreak "an epidemic," World Health Organization (WHO) spokesman Gregory Hartl plays it down at a news conference in Geneva, saying, "Ebola already causes enough concern, and we need to be very careful about how we characterize something which is up until now an outbreak with sporadic cases."
June 4, 2014 - Doctors Without Borders Warns Ebola Is "Not At All Under Control" - After explaining the unprecedented geographical spread of the disease, Bart Janssens, the director of operations for Doctors Without Borders, tells reporters in Dakar that despite assumptions to the contrary, "the epidemic is not at all under control."
June 20, 2014 - The Consequences Of Not Acting - Janssens tells The Idependent, “There needs to be a real political commitment that this is a very big emergency. Otherwise, it will continue to spread, and for sure it will spread to more countries.”
June 23, 2014 - A Call For Help And Hands - In a joint press release from Doctors Without Borders headquarters in Brussels and New York, the organization says that "bringing the spreading Ebola epidemic under control in West Africa will require a massive deployment of resources by regional governments and aid agencies." It continues by warning that the organization had "reached the limit" of what it could do to fight Ebola on its own.
July 17, 2014 - Budget Cuts Mean World Health Organization (WHO) Can't Handle Ebola - "The situation in West Africa should be a wake-up call to recognize that this weakening of this institution on which we all depend is not in anybody's interest," said Scott Dowell, the director of disease detection and emergency response at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in a Washington, D.C., briefing. "In my view, there's no way that WHO can respond in a way that we need it to."
August 8, 2014 - WHO Changes Tone, Says Ebola Is 'International Health Emergency' - "A coordinated international response is deemed essential to stop and reverse the international spread of Ebola," WHO says. Doctors Without Borders says that the statement is a start, but it needs to translate into action, adding that "lives are being lost because the response is too slow."
August 15, 2014 - Affected Nations And Doctors Without Borders Say Efforts By WHO Are Not Enough - In a press conference, Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma urges WHO to "increase their responsiveness." Sierra Leone Information Minister Lewis Brown adds in an interview with Reuters, "The reaction quite frankly is not where we would want it to be to give any serious level of comfort."
August 19, 2014 - World Leaders "Fail To Step In" - "Globally, the response of the international community is almost zero. Leaders in the west are talking about their own safety and doing things like closing airlines – and not helping anyone else," Doctors Without Borders Operations Director Brice de la Vigne says in an interview with The Guardian. "The solution is not that complicated but we need to have political will to do so."
August 23, 2014 - Lack Of Fundraising - "One reason for the tepid philanthropic response to the Ebola outbreak is that large aid agencies like the American Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders have decided against creating dedicated donation pages for their Ebola responses, partly due to a lack of interest from people outside Africa," writes Gillian Mohney, reporting for ABC News.
August 27, 2014 - Time Is Of The Esssence - "It is simply unacceptable that, five months after the declaration of this Ebola outbreak, serious discussions are only starting now about international leadership and coordination," Doctors Without Borders Director Of Operations Brice de le Vingne tells USA Today.
September 16, 2014 - CDC Testimony Admits We Could Have Done More - “We must do more, and do it quickly, to strengthen global health security around the world, because we are all connected," says Beth Bell, the director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases at the CDC, in testimony before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. "If we do not act to stop Ebola, we could be dealing with it for years to come. If even modest investments had been made to build a public health infrastructure in West Africa previously, the current Ebola epidemic could have been detected earlier, and it could have been identified and contained."
September 30, 2014 - First Case Of Ebola In The United States - The CDC confirms the first diagnosis of Ebola in the United States.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
... and we now have our second case. We are euthanizing the patient's dog and screening people for fevers in our airports. Plains with sick passengers are being met with emergency response crews and being isolated upon landing. The plain that landed at LAX airport yesterday had a passenger that was recently in Africa vomit on the flight. It scared the hell outta' the other 142 passengers.
As others pointed out, closing off certain countries can and would be circumvented by travels that can afford to make two hops to get to the USA. Quarantine is impractical because of the huge numbers. It's the affect countries that need their borders closed. As shown in the timeline, not taking proper action hasn't worked out well has it? I am all for regulation, but where do you put the line for closing off the country?
>0
>1
>10
>100
>1000
If we draw the line at greater than 1, the USA would have closed borders right now. Would you consider Spain an Ebola risk country with only 1 case? Why is it that when CDC and others in the medical community talk about Ebola they mention the lower death counts instead of the full case load?
Current Cases (ref - BBC)
3,929----LIBERIA
2,246----SIERRA LEONE
1,199-----GUINEA
70-----DRC
20-----NIGERIA
2-----USA
1-----SENEGAL
1-----SPAIN
Well, that's how I spent my long lunch hour today and what I have learned about Ebola so far. Now I am a gremaphobe too. If Ebola hits Florida, don't be surprised if I buy some bio hazard suits and start hosing my slave off in the driveway when she comes home from the hospital.
[:)]
|
|
|
|
