NOTE: These posts are not an attempt to be comprehensive in coverage of the Ebola story, nor of the Polio story. They just contain some items that have caught my eye [which is still not hemorrhaging blood, I'm happy to report — that only happens when I look at Valerie Jarrett].
-A triple shot of Iowahawk:
The Center for Disease Bureaucratsplaining
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) October 12, 2014
And…
National Institute of Health blames Ebola on America’s most dangerous terrorist group, the Lacka Fundeen — David Burge (@iowahawkblog) October 13, 2014
And…
I’m not afraid of Ebola, I’m afraid of a government that responds to it like this.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) October 12, 2014
So is anyone who is possession of that now rarer attribute: Common Sense.
The Bureaucrats are running the Ebola/Polio-Enterovirus prevention program, under the supervision of a cocooned lounge faculty of coffee house philosophers.
Be worried — be worried enough that you take your own steps, independent of the government.
-The Enterovirus: What did this Administration know and when did they know it? What did this Administration do with said knowledge?
The Conservative Treehouse has published a very disturbing analysis that must be read in full in order to see the whole picture.
A few highlights from Sundance’s post [tip of the fedora to Paco][any reformatting mine]:
• The UAC’s were known to be coming.
• The UAC’s were known to carry a risk of introducing uncommon strains of respiratory virus.
• And the strain of virus is the same as the EV-D68 currently being dealt with.
…
• The administration knew the Children were coming,
• they knew a respiratory biological outbreak was possible,
• and they knew quarantine would possibly be needed as a containment tool.
However, in addition, there would be a risk of “Hot Zone Identification” if the U.S./Mexico border region was the only proximity where the EV-D68 outbreaks were known to be occurring.
…
How to dilute that risk?
Enter “The Bathtub Principle”= Transfer the EV-D68 (UAC) carriers throughout the country to dilute the origin of the outbreak.
I strongly urge you to take the time to click here and read the full report and analysis.
-Dr. Thomas ‘The Bureaucrat’ Frieden issues a non-apology apology for his CYA remarks about the Dallas nurse who caught the Ebola Hemorrhagic Virus.
From Reuters and the Washington Free Beacon, Lisa Maria Garza and Terry Wade reporting, we learn:
Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said health authorities are still investigating how the nurse became infected while caring for Thomas Eric Duncan in an isolation ward at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital.
Duncan died last week and the nurse is the first person to contract the virus on U.S. soil, taking concerns about containing its spread to new heights.
She is “clinically stable,” Frieden said, and the CDC is monitoring others involved in Duncan’s care in case they show symptoms of the virus.
“We have to rethink the way we address Ebola infection control. Even a single infection is unacceptable,” Frieden told reporters. “The care of Ebola is hard. We’re working to make it safer and easier.”
Frieden also apologized for remarks on Sunday, when the nurse’s infection was first disclosed, that suggested she was responsible for a breach in protocols that exposed her to the virus. Some healthcare experts said the comments failed to address deep gaps in training hospital staff to deal with Ebola.
“I’m sorry if that was the impression given,” Frieden said. He said the agency would take steps to increase the awareness of Ebola at the nation’s hospitals and training for staff.
Call him ‘Dr. POS’.
-Over at the American Thinker, Doctor Ronald Cherry comments on the current Ebola Protocol:
Clearly the CDC Ebola “protocol” is inadequate. The “protocol” doesn’t work. Either the virus is so virulent that the “protocol” is ineffective against direct contact with the body or body fluids of an Ebola victim, even while “protected” with gloves, gowns, masks, etc., or, more likely, the “protocol” ignores the fact that Ebola is very likely transmitted in certain circumstances by airborne means – as contaminated microscopic droplet nuclei. This should come as no surprise for everyone not drinking the CDC Kool-aid, because in the confined spaces of hospital rooms, where the Ebola victim is vomiting, having diarrhea, flushing the toilet, coughing, and sneezing, we should expect production of infectious microscopic airborne particles.
“The potential for transmission via inhalation of aerosols, therefore, cannot be ruled out by the observed risk factors or our knowledge of the infection process. Many body fluids, such as vomit, diarrhea, blood, and saliva, are capable of creating inhalable aerosol particles in the immediate vicinity of an infected person. Cough was identified among some cases in a 1995 outbreak in Kikwit, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and coughs are known to emit viruses in respirable particles. The act of vomiting produces an aerosol and has been implicated in airborne transmission of gastrointestinal viruses. Regarding diarrhea, even when contained by toilets, toilet flushing emits a pathogen-laden aerosol that disperses in the air… Being at first skeptical that Ebola virus could be an aerosol-transmissible disease, we are now persuaded by a review of experimental and epidemiologic data that this might be an important feature of disease transmission, particularly in healthcare settings… Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy
We are also told by Dr. Frieden that:
“We have the ability to prevent the spread of Ebola by caring safely for patients.”
In the absence of widely available effective treatment, such as ZMapp, I don’t believe it will be possible to safely care for Ebola patients or prevent its spread in any American hospital not equipped with BL4 containment capability. Our doctors, nurses, orderlies and other health workers are not vaccinated against Ebola, so we are vulnerable to Ebola, and when healthcare workers become infected they themselves quickly become a threat to everyone around them, and are no longer able to care for the normal influx of other patients. I am worried that we will not be able to prevent an Ebola epidemic in the United States, because the mode of transmission is far more efficient (dangerous) than the CDC says, so much so that we could experience an exponential increase. CDC-level protective measures against direct contact with the body or body fluids of Ebola victims are not sufficient to prevent transmission, either because those protective measures are essentially impossible to follow day in and day out at the local hospital, or because there is also an airborne mode of transmission which defeats CDC-level protective measures, or both.
The screening regime that the Obama administration has set up is clearly inadequate. Even if we could adjust Duncan’s timeline so that if he left Liberia today and entered the U.S. through JFK under the new screening procedures, the first airport to begin the new screening procedures, it would miss him again. He would defeat it by arriving ahead of showing any Ebola symptoms, and by lying on his Liberia exit form.
What we are getting from the Obama administration are the same things that we always get — arrogance, incompetence and dishonesty. The president himself foolishly downplayed the threat. He said that there were “extremely low” odds that Ebola would break out in the U.S. Well, we have a transmission on American soil. Obama said that the United States was taking all of the “necessary precautions” including increasing passenger screening at airports in the Ebola-stricken countries.
This is the same president who said that the Islamic State terrorist group is just “jayvee.” They now threaten Baghdad on one side, and Kobane, Syria on the other, and hold territory roughly the size of the United Kingdom.
Ebola remains a difficult disease to catch, but we now have two cases in the west of healthcare workers who have contracted it by giving care to Ebola victims under strict procedures. That will send shivers of fear through the healthcare industry, our front-line defense against the disease.
Ebola is a real threat. The cases in Dallas and Spain, of healthcare workers who apparently followed protocols and yet got the virus anyway, suggest that we may not know as much as we think we know about it.
To sum up: At this point, we are trusting the Obama administration, which is known to politicize and lie about everything; thousands of front-line healthcare workers whose training may not be up to snuff, and most of whom are not working at the four Ebola-equipped hospitals; TSA screening theater; and overseas Ebola victims who have every reason to lie so that they can get to the United States to give themselves even a slim chance at surviving the virus. And if they don’t survive, their families can claim “racism” and sue the living you-know-what out of the hospitals that try to care for them — at great risk to their own staff and perhaps the communities around them.
Why does the phrase ‘well and truly screwed’ keep repeating in my brain?
-The latest from frequent Belmont Club commentator Subotai Bahadur:
Actually, the CDC does have several SWAT teams, MRAPS, etc. as part of the militarization and arming of the “civilian” Executive Branch. [BOB: Of course...should we call him 'General Doctor Thomas Frieden' from now on?] What they do not have, apparently, is the ability and desire to react to diseases outside of the framework of what is politically desired by the regime.
I will throw in something I heard this morning, the source being a surgeon and surgery professor:
Dallas Presbyterian Hospital [ground zero for treatment of the outbreak] has closed its Emergency Department. The reason is a failure of staff to show up for work. They are now using the down time for a major decontamination, they claim.
Hospitals are not designed as a whole for isolation. They are public buildings designed [except in combat zone neighborhoods at time of design] to be open and welcoming to the public. The CDC has a Quarantine Facility in Dallas, one of twenty in the country that were built a long time ago in case someone came in with a nasty disease we did not want to spread. There is a list of the nasty diseases they are supposed to be quarantined for. It includes Viral Hemorrhagic Fevers.
Anybody seen anything in the State-Controlled Media referring to that Facility being used? Why not? Would not a purpose designed Quarantine Facility have been better for the situation than a public hospital?
Hmmm.
-Paul Rahe [tip of the fedora to Instapundit]:
…Honesty would require that the director of the CDC tell the truth — which is, that he does not know how this particular individual contracted Ebola.
But this he cannot say. For that would cause us to worry, and his responsibility, as he and those above him conceive it, is to cover for the President of the United States. In fact, he works for thee and me. Our taxes make it possible for him to draw a paycheck. But this, in company with nearly everyone in the Obama administration, he has somehow forgotten; and so, in a servile fashion, he goes out in public to defend with forked tongue a policy he and every medical professional in the country knows is madness.
The truth is simple. There is an epidemic in Africa. The disease that is spreading like wildfire is horrible beyond imagination. We have suspicions as to how it spreads, but we do not know for sure. The only certain way to avoid its propagation is to avoid contact, and the President of the United States, who operates in an intellectual bubble, is unwilling to do what it is necessary to do to prevent people in the country he is sworn to serve and defend from coming into contact with contagious individuals who have the disease.
It is the duty of public servants, such as the Director of the CDC, to speak the truth in public. We are, after all, a self-governing people, and we ought not to be treated as little children who need to be reassured even when the news is anything but reassuring. But speaking the truth in all frankness and admitting ignorance seems beyond this man. Were he to do so, were he in public to say what every competent medical professional understands — that to prevent this plague from coming to North America we need to refuse for a time to accept visitors from much of Africa — he would no doubt be cashiered by the man whom, at the ballot box, we put in charge. And being cashiered he fears far more than deserving to be cashiered.
Of course this is Frieden’s main fear because he is suffering from Bureaucratitus — a particularly virulent strain, it seems. And Obama and his fellow Leftists do believe that we, the un-Illuminated Ones [aka: the 'bitter clingers' who do not and will not buy into their Utopianism] and those who vote in lock-step for Leftists are, in fact, ‘little children’ [although I suspect many Leftists believe that we act like little children because we are, in their minds, retarded somehow].
-That’s all I have time for now, even though I have more to post. Duty calls.
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