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Sunday, October 26, 2014

I've Got Flu, Not Ebola

I'm sick as a dog, though. Sickest I've ever been with flu. It's going to turn out to be a double viral infection. Also, I should rest more.

I'll post in a bit when I recover a bit. In the meantime, it appears as if the CDC nurse who is outraged that anyone would dare to quarantine her is part of the new Center for Disastrous Complacency. Are these people nuts? 

This woman is actually having hysterics in print because when the non-contact temp scanners used in the new screening protocol registered a high temp, they followed their own protocol? She's nuts, right? Or perhaps she's a smoker and is having the most publicly neurotic nicotine fit of the year?  WTF? Ask for a nicotine patch, you bimbo!

Well, Christie and Cuomo did the only rational thing, thus earning the nearly 100% support of the doctors and nurses who actually treat people, but the outrage and disdain of the Centers for Disastrous Complacency and all the Kool Kidz.

The Center for Disastrous Complacency has now lost its street cred among the working medical crew. I miss the days when that outfit was about controlling infectious disease, but it's clearly not about that any more and hasn't been for some time. 

In the meantime, the danger of this thing getting out and about in the US increases week by week. Call your Congressman and ask for a policy of an automatic three-week supervised quarantine for all travelers originating from countries with sustained lines of transmission, with antibody testing on the 20th non-symptomatic day, followed up by further detention if one is positive. And some will be. The reason TPTB don't want to do this is that they expect sustained lines of transmission in the US. Well guess what, our current course is how to get there. These loons must be stopped. 

If we get sustained lines of transmission in the US, other countries need to shut us down. We do not want to go down in history this way.

Ebola will spread MUCH faster in the US than it will in Africa, because we have such broad access to medical facilities. There are non-detected infectious people spreading it through the non-Ebola treatment wards there. The same will happen here. 

The only way to eventually control the situation here will be to have widespread testing. We don't currently have the ability to do it, so quarantine is the only option. 

"Direct Contact" doesn't mean what the public thinks it does. Remember this in 2011? That's direct contact for Ebola:
 An investigator swabbed high-traffic areas, including countertops and the handles on the self-serve milk dispensers. All had received a grade of “A”—the highest rating given by inspectors with the City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Specimens were sent to Philip Tierno, director of Clinical Microbiology and Immunology at New York University Langone Medical Center. About half were contaminated with “fecal organisms.” 
...
Samples taken from milk containers in three separate Starbucks stores tested positive for traces of Enterococcus, fecal strep, E. coli, and Klebsiella.
The early symptoms of Ebola are not easily distinguished from other viral illnesses, and milder cases will never be picked up at all. It's likely that low levels of the virus will be shed from tears (runny eyes), transferred to people's hands, and passed on that way. 

Well, I would love to hear the conversation between Christie, Cuomo and our Dear Leader. One suspects it might get a bit "Sicilian".

Comments:
A few dozen diagnostic machines, along with a few hours quarantine would do the trick.

If the White House wanted to stop this, they could.

 
Lawsuits trump quarantines, apparently.
 
Too late. The CDC shrieker has been tested and released.

My best guess is that OBarfo has some nefarious info on Christie; so when push-comes-to-shove, Christie folds.

Medicine, and the fact that we KNOW, ABSOLUTELY, THAT QUARANTINE WORKS, be damned.

Heaven help me, I really HATE these people.
 
Anything that calls into question the open-border paradigm will not be tolerated. Obama's ebola policy is as simple as that.
 
To answer your question, yes they are insane. No rational person would pursue the course they are on, given the downside risks and the costs of trying to recover from that downside.

BTW, the shrieking quarantined nurse is a former CDC worker. Anyone want to bet whether her phone log shows calls from the CDC telling her to play up the abuse of civil rights nonsense?

According to the Dallas Morning News, which published her article impugning her quarantine, the nurse was “until recently” a CDC employee in the Epidemic Intelligence Service, a two-year epidemiology fellowship.

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/metro/20141025-nurse-former-uta-student-is-quarantined-in-new-jersey-despite-testing-negative-for-ebola.ece
 
Mark, loved the Onion gag. Too close for comfort, but funny.

Brian - this is an extraordinary moment - no medical establishment wants these returned workers in its offices before the incubation period is up, so instead we'll send them out to ride the subway? October 2014 - The official date when the average medical worker realized the top guys are nuts. Or pod aliens, or something.

The shrieking nurse is going to get a reality check when she gets back on the streets.
 
I suspect the discussion from Obama was "Sicilian" with offers they "could not refuse". I also think Obama is hot on this "no quarantine" stuff because of amnesty, illegal immigration, and the enterovirus which seems to have entered via immigration from Sout America. But, if there is an Ebola outbreak in the US, Obama and the CDC will own it. Usually, bureaucrats are too cautious to be put in that position. If that happens, then, the only thing you can do is lie. Obama is so good at lying.
 
If you can stand another "interesting" article about Ebola, may I recommend:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/21-days/381901/?single_page=true

Dr Steven Hatfill worked with the Reston Ebola outbreak among primates.
Some teaser comments for you: people with active Ebola are actively "shedding virus from the skin"; also, "12.5 percent of patients don't run a fever" even when acutely sick with Ebola.

Lots of thought-provoking stuff in this article.
 
This sums it up well, particularly the ineptness of Frieden the guy who spent four years laser focused on the dread menace called the Big Gulp, which required invasive modification of an individual’s beverage consumption behavior to perhaps impact life expectancy by a year or two, but can’t bring himself to inconvenience a few people who pose a high risk of infecting a large number of people with a disease that is 70% lethal:

"Never mind. Trust the experts.

Like Centers for Disease Control chief Thomas Frieden — who was death on doughnuts when he was Mike Bloomberg’s health commissioner, but who seems completely overmatched by the arrival of Ebola in America.

After all, he had months to write a plan for dealing reasonably with suspected Ebola carriers — and yet the administration was frantically attempting to “develop protocols” as recently as the weekend.
(In that respect, Cuomo and Christie have been the only rational actors in the room — whatever their motives.)

Frieden, like so many others, worries about the effect restrictive policies — quarantine domestically; travel embargoes internationally — will have in the Ebola hot zones. The concerns of New York straphangers seem not to matter much at all."

http://nypost.com/2014/10/27/trust-deficit-why-public-is-twitchy/
 
Sorry to hear that you are ill. I got the four way flu shot this time. I hope they got the right strains in there. I think I'm getting the pneumonia shot too. I just really don't want to be sick this year.
 
Haven't read the Atlantic article yet, but I did read the book "Hot Zone," which was the definitive story on the Reston, Virginia, Ebola outbreak in a monkey-import quarantine house back in 1988 or '89. Interestingly that strain only infected monkeys, and it did seem pass via air. Actually, it's been known for 25 years ebola can be transmitted via air. It's not as easy or as common, but it is possible. It was proven in a laboratory setting with two monkey kept in separate cages some 10 or 15 feet apart.

If not for the seriousness of the situation, it would be comical how inept the nation has become. You read that book and back then mere mention of the word would cause folks' blood to run cold. They wouldn't go anywhere near Ebola without a Level 4 bio-containment suit.

I watched 60 Minutes Sunday night and the nurses from Texas said the original protocols that came from the CDC were face shield, mask, apron, and gloves. Looked just like a dental hygienist to me. Incredible. I'm surprised no one at Fox has dug up the last generation's experts on this, except they are too stupid to know there used to be real experts. A mere 25 years and feels like the whole country is run by imbeciles. Knowledge is not a one way street. Sure, we've always had idiots and always will, but it used to be they kept the imbeciles away from the really important stuff, like the CDC. The CDC is like Bush's FEMA, but you'll never hear anyone in the media put it that way. Too embarrassing to both sides.
 
There's one big difference between FEMA's performance after Katrina, and CDC's performance now. The Bush administration was begging the state governors to deal with the situation and accept federal help before, during, and after the event.

Now, the administration is actively preventing the state governments from dealing with the problem.


 
Five days on, I am hoping that you have passed the "I-want-to-die" phase and are moving into the merely sick but might recover world.

The very best of health to you. Is the Chief OK?
 
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