Someone has to ask/ Ebola--How concerned are we ??

[quilbilly]

Ever since I heard about the disease spreading in West Africa earlier this year, I concluded that the virus has mutated to become more communicable and possibly airborne. Am I concerned - you bet I am. Political correctness virtually guarantees it will get our shores and the ACLU will make sure it spreads unchecked (quarantines are an infringement of civil liberties to the PC crowd). It will be years before there is a vaccine. Political correctness is a suicide pact whether it is dealing with terrorism or this disease.

[Outpost75]

http://20committee.com/2014/10/03/th...-intelligence/

…..Given that the death rate among those infected with Ebola is roughly fifty percent — and a good deal higher in underdeveloped regions like West Africa — serious concern is warranted…..Our self-reporting system for preventing diseases entering the United States has failed, and investigators are reaching out to a hundred or more travelers who might have been exposed to Ebola as Thomas Duncan made his way from Liberia to Texas....

The Department of Defense (DoD), possesses the only full-fledged medical intelligence outfit on earth. The National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), a component of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) located at Fort Detrick, Maryland. It’s been around, in one guise or another, since the Second World War, doing intelligence analysis of medical threats to the American military. DIA was given the medical intelligence mission in 1963, and since 1979 it’s resided at Fort Detrick…..being rebranded as NCMI in 2008, getting a $7.8 million facility upgrade two years later, since the agency had outgrown its spaces; in a typical Intelligence Community story, NCMI lacked sufficient office space and, critically, parking for its 150 staffers.

NCMI is made up of personnel from all the armed services plus DoD civilians. Many are doctors of various sorts, both M.D.s and Ph.D.s, specializing in the full range of relevant disciplines, above all epidemiology. Its mission is producing medical intelligence (known, of course, as MEDINT for short), which is defined by the Pentagon as:

That category of intelligence resulting from collection, evaluation, analysis, and interpretation of foreign medical, bio-scientific, and environmental information that is of interest to strategic planning and to military medical planning and operations for the conservation of the fighting strength of friendly forces and the formation of assessments of foreign medical capabilities in both military and civilian sectors….. NCMI tracks medical threats to the U.S. military and, more broadly, the United States. The Pentagon every day sends men and women into regions teeming with weird and often deadly diseases that are seldom encountered in the developed world, and it’s NCMI’s job to provide senior military and civilian decision-makers the specialized intelligence they need to understand and mitigate these threats…..

NCMI is made up of analysts, not collectors, and most of them are medical professionals who learn the intelligence trade, not the other way around. As NCMI’s director explained in 2012, “We take these very smart people and turn them into intelligence officers.” This center, while tiny by the standards of America’s vast seventeen-agency Intelligence Community, punches well above its weight, partnering closely with many IC agencies — there are liaison officers from the whole range of IC alphabet-soup agencies at NCMI, while they send experts out to work at those agencies in return — as well as a wide range of U.S. Government entities, including the Department of Agriculture and especially the Centers for Disease Control, who have fully cleared people embedded at Fort Detrick to facilitate collaboration and information-sharing. As an all-source intelligence analysis organization, NCMI is dependent on raw intelligence provided by other agencies — signals intelligence and satellite imagery, especially — as well as open-source reporting from many places. Surprising as it may sound to many Americans, the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Geospatial-intelligence Agency, among others, have longstanding intelligence requirements for things such as disease and epidemics, and it’s the job of NCMI to make sense of what’s coming in, since there aren’t many epidemiologists working at Langley or Fort Meade.

While NCMI puts out some very detailed and specialized reporting, it also provides DoD and the IC with assessments that, I can attest, are written in refreshingly normal English, since the average consumer of medical intelligence isn’t a medical professional, but a layperson who needs to understand the complex issues. NCMI has worried about Ebola for a long time, and here its Infectious Disease Division, which assesses potential epidemics in literally every country on earth, walks point. We can be assured that NCMI is providing Washington, DC, with detailed medical intelligence about the nature of the Ebola threat, both in West Africa and to the American homeland. This is vitally important, given the remote yet extant possibility that Ebola might mutate and be transmitted in any airborne fashion, which represents every epidemiologist’s nightmare scenario. No doubt NCMI has some classified assessments on that too.

America has been spared serious worry about Ebola, and let’s hope that remains so. But hope is not a strategy, as every wise strategist knows, and we must soon begin contemplating unpleasant things like quarantines and travel bans to stave off catastrophe. Here NCMI and its medical intelligence will be critical to decision-makers in Washington, DC. Given recent revelations indicating a cavalier attitude towards intelligence in the Obama White House, let’s hope that NCMI reports are making their way to the highest levels of our government, and are being read closely.

[legend 550]

Not to worry, the CDC says only transmitted by body fluids therefore hard to spread. Isn't that what they said about AIDS ?

[ole 5 hole group]

Ebola infected people coming in undetected, in an attempt to get better treatment in the USA - that's troubling for sure but:

How would this play out? A dozen suicide bombers carrying the ebola virus instead of bomb vests. They go to northern Mexico and fraternize with inbound aliens. Or our own home grown jihadists meet with these ebola carriers in western resort areas and return with infected luggage, clothing etc and go about their daily activities.


Evil doers could do a little evil in this world right now, if we allow it.


Yup - one can come up with a lot of scary thoughts, but the scary thing about it is, it could actually happen with very little effort on the evil doers part with our current PC society. We'll all know a little more about this ebola thing in the next 90 days or so.

[PB234]

"On any given day, more than a dozen flights from Liberia are available. Travelers may purchase a ticket for as little as $1,386 that gets them from Monrovia, Liberia, to Washington, DC. In many cases, the flights include layovers in heavily populated US cities, such as in New York's John F. Kennedy Airport. "

[AZ-JIM]

Is it concerning ....absolutely

When I was a kid you got the measles(I think), city put a quarantine label on your house. For everybody, no school, no work etc. basically, Fed, state & local screwed up. Just like cholera outbreak in the past. He knew he was exposed, lied his way to the states to get treatment. Needs a few years in AZ pounding rocks.

No thanks, Texas can keep him. If you want to put him on a chain gang or something, which I fully agree he deserves, have him start working on the border fence and getting that closer to being done. When he is cured he can work his way west on the fence.

So where were the Customs agents when he went to Belgium from Liberia? Why didnt they staple a return to sender label on him and send him back? Where was Customs and the ever vigilant TSA when he came into the US?

az-jim

[Wise Owl]

USA Today had an article on the front page about a second ebola case in Texas. Sorry, no link to that at this time. I do have the following reports tho.
OH and there is supposed to be one at Bethesda in Baltimore.

Concerned yet?

Possible case in D.C. Link: http://washington.cbslocal.com/2014/...bola-symptoms/


Traveled from Nigeria to the United States and is now at the Howard University Hospital. Patient is exhibiting Ebola symptoms at this time.

http://atlanta.cbslocal.com/2014/10/...ted-for-ebola/

Report: Inmate At Cobb County Jail Being Tested For Ebola
October 3, 2014 12:44 PM

COBB COUNTY, Ga. (CBS Atlanta/AP) — An inmate at the Cobb County Jail is reportedly being tested for Ebola.

WSB-TV reports that the man told jail officials he recently traveled to Africa after developing a fever while in custody.

He was arrested overnight and charged with DUI.

WSB reports that the jail is no longer accepting inmates at this time.

[Wise Owl]

You folks are not going to believe your eyes. The picture at the link is today. Oct 3rd. They are now going to go into the apartment and clean it 5 days after Duncan was sent to the hospital in the ambulance and 8 days after he went the first time around. Remember there are 4 people still in there that were exposed to him and under quarantine right now.

http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showt...39#post5370039

If this wasn't so scary, it would be funny. Maybe sad?

And I have another pic for you.

http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showt...04#post5370004

These guys are the head director and collegue from the Texas dept of health coming out of the apartment yesterday. No, they are not wearing personal protection gear. And the one guy in the purple shirt has a stethascope in his hands meaning he got close enough to these 4 people to listen to their hearts and lungs.

Lord help us.

[Wise Owl]

Video at link below

Fair use Cited
-----------------
Hazmat team is at quarantined Dallas apartment where Ebola patient stayed

By Jacque Wilson and Faith Karimi, CNN
updated 4:08 PM EDT, Fri October 3, 2014

(CNN) -- A hazardous materials team has arrived at the Dallas apartment where four contacts of U.S. Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan are under quarantine.

The family members -- Duncan's partner, who asked to be referred to only by her first name, Louise, along with her son and two nephews in their 20s -- have been ordered to stay home until October 19.

Cleaning Guys, a private company that specializes in hazardous materials and biohazard cleaning services, is collecting sheets, clothes and towels Duncan used, Dalls County Fire Mashal Robert De Los Santos said Friday afternoon. The materials will be placed in bags and then transported to a secure location; the entire process should take 30 to 40 minutes, he said.

Ebola can live outside the body on those kinds of materials, says CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta. The length of time it remains active depends on the environment -- from hours to days -- but it is possible for someone to contract the disease from touching those materials.

De Los Santos also said health officials plan on moving the family members to a new location but did not reveal any information on where or how this movement will happen.

A permit issue had been delaying the cleaning process, Brad Smith of Cleaning Guys said. Smith says a specialized permit is needed to transport this type of unprecedented hazardous waste on Texas highways.

Hazmat teams still do not have permits to dispose of the soiled items taken from the apartment, Dr. David Lakey of the Texas Department of State Health Services said Friday at a 1 p.m. telebriefing.

Ebola can spread through contact with an infected person's bodily fluids like blood, feces or vomit. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spokeswoman Abbigail Tumpey says the CDC considers materials contaminated with Ebola as regular medical waste, and as such, can be disposed of as medical waste. But she said the Department of Transportation considers Ebola to be a Category A agent, which means it's illegal to transport.

"The CDC and the DOT regulations have been in conflict. It's been an ongoing issue that we've been dealing with."

A federal Department of Transportation official with knowledge of the situation told CNN that by the end of the day, a special permit will be issued for a waste management company to remove Ebola-contaminated material in certain areas around Dallas.

More,

http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/03/health...-us/index.html

[Wise Owl]

I think I may be sick to my stomach after reading this one.....please do read it tho. These people in charge down there in TX are seriously stupid. OMG. This is a horror story. Bolded parts are my doing. Forget the bolding stuff. Just read it carefully then re-read it again.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/nation...6a0_story.html



For quarantined relatives in U.S. Ebola case, extra cautions, hope and prayer

The family that hosted Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan could be confined for three weeks. Health officials are reaching out to as many as 100 people who may have had contact with Duncan or someone who knows him. (AP)
By Amy Ellis Nutt October 2 at 8:54 PM

DALLAS — Thomas Duncan shivered in the king-size bed, even though he was tucked under the covers and fully dressed — pants, socks and two shirts. It was Sunday morning, Sept. 28, and Duncan, from Liberia, had been in the United States visiting Louise Troh at her Dallas apartment for the past week. He felt weak and cold, he told Troh’s daughter, Youngor Jallah.

So Jallah took a quick trip to Wal-Mart and bought a $50 brown cotton blanket. When she returned, she draped it over Duncan’s shoulders and then gently lifted him by his back to try to get him to drink some hot tea. That’s when she looked into his eyes and knew in her heart that things were very bad.

“I’ve been seeing Ebola on TV, how it starts, with muscle pain, red eyes. When I see his eye, it is all red, and I think maybe this time it is Ebola virus and I should be careful,” Jallah, 35, said in an interview with The Washington Post at her nearby apartment, where she and her family have been quarantined.

She took his temperature — 102 degrees.

“I’m going to call an ambulance,” she said.
1 of 40
Man in Dallas diagnosed with Ebola virus
Sept. 27, 2014
Sept. 24, 2014
Sept. 22, 2014
Sept. 20, 2014
Sept. 19, 2014
As the overall death toll has risen to more than 3,300, the first U.S. case of the Ebola virus is diagnosed in Texas.
Oct. 3, 2014 Medical staff wearing protective clothes transport a man suffering from Ebola to the isolation ward at the University Clinic in Frankfurt, Germany. The man had been in Serria Leone, where he was working as a doctor. Boris Roessler/AFP via Getty Images

Duncan tried to resist. He had been to the hospital once already, several days earlier, and all they had done was send him home with antibiotics. Jallah didn’t listen to him. She dialed 911.

“My daddy is going to the bathroom constantly,” she told the operator, referring to Duncan, whom she considers her stepfather.

Fifteen minutes later, two paramedics knocked on the door. Jallah greeted the two men but told them that they couldn’t enter until they put on gloves and face*masks.

“He just come from Liberia,” she explained. “For safety, don’t touch anything. Viruses.”

She didn’t use the word Ebola, she said, because she didn’t know whether it was the lethal virus. All she knew was that Duncan was very ill and that Liberia was being devastated by the hemorrhagic fever. The paramedics asked Duncan to walk to the ambulance, which he did, but they would not let Jallah give him the blanket.

“He was still cold, and they had nothing to cover him with,” she said.

Jallah didn’t wait to watch the ambulance leave. All she had on her mind was getting to the hospital as quickly as she could, she said. She headed to her red Toyota minivan with the blanket in her arms, joined now by two cousins she had picked up earlier on her way to the Ivy Apartments and her father, Joe Joe Jallah.

(The Washington Post/Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

An hour later, the four family members were still sitting in the ER waiting room at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, waiting to hear when Duncan would be given a room.

“We’ll let you know,” a nurse said each time Youngor Jallah asked.

So the family continued to wait, watching people come and go through the emergency room. All the while, the neatly folded blanket that hours earlier had covered the first person in this country to be diagnosed with Ebola lay on the chair next to Jallah. The virus can be contagious on surfaces from a few hours to a couple days depending on the material and exposure to sunlight.

[Related: Can you catch Ebola from an infected blanket? Honestly, it depends.]

Finally, she was told that Duncan had been moved into a room on the first floor.

“But he’s in isolation,” a hospital staffer said. “No visitors.”

Reluctantly, Jallah and the others left the hospital and returned to Troh’s apartment. While a cousin swept the floors, Jallah placed the blanket she had bought back on her mother’s bed, sprayed disinfectant throughout the apartment and sprinkled liquid Clorox on the furniture.

“Don’t sleep in that bed,” she told Troh.

“Oh, you just bought that blanket,” her mother complained.

But Jallah was insistent. Later, she bought her mother sanitizers, a makeshift mattress and two new blankets.

No one in the family has seen Duncan since he left the apartment Sunday morning in an ambulance.

Also living in Troh’s apartment at the time were her son Timothy Wayne, 13, and two men in their 20s, a relative named Oliver Smallwood and a friend named Jeffrey Cole. The four are now quarantined in the apartment.

The night before Duncan was taken to the hospital, Jallah and her partner, Aaron Yah, had left their daughter and three sons, ages 2 to 11, with Troh for the night.

The children usually spent part of each evening with their grandmother because Jallah’s job as an overnight nursing assistant overlaps with Yah’s as a health aide. That Saturday night, the four kids slept overnight on their grandmother’s *couches.

On her way to the Ivy Apartments on Sunday morning, Jallah had called Yah to tell him that Duncan was ill and that he should come right away to take the children home.

Three days later, on Wednesday evening, Jallah and Yah were visited in their second-floor apartment by health officials from the state and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The officials took everyone’s temperature and told them that they should not leave the apartment.

“We don’t have any food,” Jallah said. “What do we do?”

She was told that she and Yah, but not the kids, could go to the store. The two health officials also said they would return every day to see how the family was doing.

On Thursday afternoon, as their 6-year-old daughter drew in a coloring book, the other children were flopped on the couches in the family’s living room, the big-screen TV turned to CNN. Crushed crackers and bits of toys littered the dark-brown rug.

Both Jallah and Yah seemed to be taking the restrictions in stride, although neither is able to go to work. More important, they say, all of them remain healthy.

On Wednesday, Jallah spoke with her mother, who told her daughter that she was feeling fine.

“Just pray to God,” Jallah said to her mother. “There’s nothing we can do. Ask God for everyone to be okay.”

Jallah and Yah are careful not to shake the hands of visitors and when someone leaves, they use a sanitizing wipe to turn the doorknob to let the person out.

[smokeywolf]

All travelers from Liberia should be required to take the White House tour within 48 hrs. of arrival in this Country. And, for an extra treat, be sure they get a good, "comprehensive" tour of the food prep areas.

I live in a State where our governor is the white version zerobama. On top of that, we've got the likes of Pelosi, Feinstein and Boxer. We're a border State where gov. moonbeam has laid out the red carpet for criminal aliens to come on across and we will forcibly take money away from U.S. citizens to pay for your irresponsible acts of reproduction.

Irresponsible president, irresponsible Sec. of State, irresponsible governor, irresponsible representatives, a porous Southern border, yeah I'm a bit worried.

smokeywolf

[shooter93]

On the up side????????....I'm sure the vaccine is being made in vast quantities.....enough for POTUS and the politicians and alphabet agencies of the US and of course the IRS so they can collect taxes from the few people in the population who survive.....just not enough for you. See....the country can survive a pandemic.

[Blacksmith]

It has not hit the fan yet but it is getting close. You might want to stock up for an extended period away from other people, I don't want to be making multiple trips to the store where there are a lot of other people.

Here are some resources for you:
WHO Information resources on Ebola virus disease
http://www.who.int/csr/resources/publications/ebola/en/

How to clean and disinfect. Something to print out while you still have the internet and power.
http://www.who.int/csr/resources/pub...r982sec5-6.pdf

[GhostHawk]

If I lived in Texas I'd be a LOT more concerned than I am.

By the time it makes it's way up here it is going to be COLD out.

If and when it happens it might be that I have to meet people at the door and decide if they can come in or not.
But, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

I do have a couple of worry's.

A They keep saying that it takes transfer of fluids to pass it. But fluid's can be in theory as small as a droplet created by a sneeze.

B What if now is the time it decides to mutate into something airborne?
In theory it is possible for infections to change their means of attack.

I have no intention of going anywhere. But this home just might get turned into a castle.

[tja6435]

I don't find this to be something to be nonchalant about, it has very real possibility of becoming a huge event that could cripple the country.

[BrassMagnet]

All of the epidemics start with "patient" zero. We are there with many people exposed. I am very much concerned.

If you do a little digging, it should be clear that ebola has become airborne transmissible. This is a huge jump in contagion risk. It is no long "bodily fluid contact only."
With enough patients, modern medical care becomes impossible.

Now look at the care in containing ebola the patients received:

Patient 1 went to ER reporting ebola and travel in Liberia. Associated with patients and staff. ER sent him home.
Returned in much worse condition, vomiting in ambulance. Exposed three ambulance staff. Ambulance quickly cleaned and used to transport more patients before being withdrawn from use. How many more exposed?

Patient two, an associate of #1.

Patient #1 or #2 associated with children. Didn't these children go to school?

Now how well are they clamping down on it?

Are you sure you are complacent?

Not just a little panic stricken?

I am so glad our Gov't knows exactly what they are doing and have all of the hospitals in America doing such a great job with ebola.

[Wise Owl]

Cold weather is actually better for ebola to survive in. Hot weather kills it in the wild faster. It takes 8 hours of direct sunshine to kill the virus. It will survive in wet substances for around 40 days. On dry surfaces about 50 days providing there is no strong UV on it.

Getting to know entirely too much about this virus. Way more than anyone should have to know unless they are a microbiologist that is.

Very happy to see you folks are awake and keeping track of this. We are also in a nice spot to just stay home and avoid people. It helps to be retired in this instance.
You don't want to be in any crowded places.

[MaryB]

Wonder how well it survives at below freezing temps? Like below zero f?

[HarryT]

I wonder if Jallah really kept the $50 brown blanket or did she return it to Walmart when she purchased the sanitizers, mattress, and two blankets. Mr. Duncan's blanket could be on someone else's bed.
Emergency rooms will soon be swamped with people who think they have Ebola symptoms.

[Dakoma]

I am reading in a case of a bad outbreak of this Ebola Marshal can be ordered by the President and gun confiscation !
This come from a Tea Party email I got , Congress has given Obummer the go ahead should it happen !
I did not like the idea of 2 Doctors flown in from West Africa with Ebola to Atlanta , GA. , if they wanted to study the Virus they should have left them there and went to study it and not bring it here ! On Fox news there was one case of Ebola but they would not say where in TN it was and now it is in Texas too !