Anyone else worried about Ebola?

[Phil Thien]

There is a timeline at Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_v...ses_and_deaths

It seems pretty clear that the rate of infection is actually slowing. Things were worsening quickly until about 8/31/14, but now appear to have turned the corner.

But we don't have much data, and we don't have any previous experience with Ebola in large cities to draw upon. But experts can make worthwhile generalizations based on experience with other infectious diseases.

News reports indicate some experts fear a large wave (14k newly infected) may be coming, but hard to know if that is just a cash grab scare-tactic or what. I hope nobody would be too surprised if at least a few organizations were going for the green.

I'd say the next few reports of total infected will be very telling.

[Moses Yoder]

i
have doubt that they really understand its transmission. For example - how can they be SURE that it is not airborn? I just think they are over-selling their knowledge.

Lets assume though, that you are not worried. I can appreciate that. What will it take to make you worried?

If I was hand cutting a tenon 3" long and all I had was an 18 tooth crosscutting back saw limited to a 2-1/2" depth of cut, I would be worried.

[Pat Barry]

And fresh off the L.A. Times press, experts, qualified experts on the subject saying they have no idea how it spreads. A lot of what they say is the same thing the guy said on the radio that I mentioned. One of the guys ran test on monkeys and they said they didn't exactly know how it was spreading, but in the end, it spread so fast, they had to kill all the monkeys to stop it.

Humm....experts saying the same thing the guy on the radio said......go figure. I guess they are just looking for media attention too. A lot of what's been said is contradicted by this article today :

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-...ry.html#page=1

Thanks Scott - Excellent article. Lots of reputable sources saying similar things. They really don't fully understand the transmission characteristics. Its easy to say things like "The CDC remains confident, he said, that Ebola is transmitted principally by direct physical contact with an ill person or their bodily fluids." That covers most of the bases, but it leaves open the explanation that direct physical contact is not the ONLY method of transmission. The CDC is not certain, reputable persons are willing to state that. That means that we are at bigger risk than the CDC reports might be wiling to acknowledge. We need to get in front of this thing and we need to do it very aggressively and it needs to happen very soon.

Washington Post article excerpt: ""In retrospect, we could have responded faster. Some of the criticism is appropriate," acknowledged Richard Brennan, director of the WHO's Department of Emergency Risk Management and Humanitarian Response. But he added, "While some of the criticism we accept, I think we also have to get things in perspective that this outbreak has a dynamic that's unlike everything we've ever seen before and, I think, has caught everyone unawares.""

[Pat Barry]

So now they are concerned that a deputy sheriff who had minor exposure to the residence of the Dallas victim may have somehow contacted the disease. He must have touched an infected doorknob or something. Lets hope this is a false concern but none the less this poor sherrif is going to be quarantined for quite a while. This shows the biggest problem is positive early identification of the disease. That's the scary part. Now they are going to check people getting off flights in just 5 US cities, and by the way, the airplane cleaning crews are going to strike because of unsafe work conditions. The CDC has had 30 years to figure out a detection method and failed. That alone should scare folks.

[David Weaver]

Figure if that deputy was in the apartment for a half hour (which is how long he said he was in there), he could've done just about anything (touching door knobs, whatever).

I don't believe that it's that easy to transmit (or it would be affecting a lot more people than it is), but I still wouldn't take my chances that there isn't a surface that's got something on it.

What will be interesting is to see if one, that deputy has it, or if it's just mental (which he has every right to be if he was in there a half hour). And then, whether or not any of the people who literally spent days in the same place as the guy end up contracting it. I'd be surprised if there wasn't someone who was in the apartment for days who touched something infected and got it. The guy had to have been coughing, vomiting and touching things.

[Jim Becker]

Don't take it personally.

My BIL is NIOSH.
You should hear the abuse he fields.

Not that anyone accusing him of malfeasance has a clue what he does.
(Epidemiology).

Professor DR SWMBO is in the same work as your BIL...
----

Folks, there have been complaints about some politicizing in this thread. Do not do that. You know the rules.

Jim
HGS Moderator

[ray hampton]

Professor DR SWMBO is in the same work as your BIL...
----

Folks, there have been complaints about some politicizing in this thread. Do not do that. You know the rules.

Jim
HGS Moderator

If I ask you whether you are healthy, wealthy and wise , will someone claim that this statement are politicizing

[Pat Barry]

Its interesting that there are now two Dallas nurses who have contacted Ebola from the original Dallas West African victim but the family who lived for several days with this guy unprotected are still OK. I think the CDC has been caught with their pants down on this one. Even their recommended gowning and ungowning procedures or the basic protective equipment isn't doing the job. Sure they can blame a breach in protocol but they better be getting things in order pronto or no one will be willing to even treat a suspected Ebola patient.

[Myk Rian]

We're flying to Phoenix next month. I'll be wearing a mask. Not just because of the ebola issue, but I'm a heart patient and can't afford to take chances.

[David Weaver]

It appears that some of the nurses have come out and made an anonymous statement that a whole bunch of people were treating Duncan for several days without using the right equipment.

I hope that they all live. It sounds like the Nina Pham girl is doing pretty well, and still communicating readily with everyone.

AS much as I don't like to see the CDC coming out and just saying "well, their fault, they must've done something wrong", that's the most likely scenario, and the nurses coming out at this point saying people weren't following protocol makes it even more likely. It doesn't sound like that hospital was adequately ready for an ebola patient, and duncan probably should've been shipped to one of the 4 hospitals that was (they have treated several other patients who have arrived well into the throws of the virus, and we haven't heard anything about infected health care workers from them).

[Malcolm Schweizer]

Its interesting that there are now two Dallas nurses who have contacted Ebola from the original Dallas West African victim but the family who lived for several days with this guy unprotected are still OK. I think the CDC has been caught with their pants down on this one. Even their recommended gowning and ungowning procedures or the basic protective equipment isn't doing the job. Sure they can blame a breach in protocol but they better be getting things in order pronto or no one will be willing to even treat a suspected Ebola patient.

I thought the same thing, but remember- by the time he was in the hospital he would have had diarrhea, vomiting, and bleeding. When he was at home he only got fever. The worst was yet to come, and the possibility for exposure for nurses cleaning up his body fluids was much greater than when he was at home with just a fever.

[Phil Thien]

About the only protocol that will safely prevent the spread of a disease that results in projectile vomiting and diarrhea is a flame thrower.

I'm afraid we're fooling ourselves if we think these patients can be maintained in hospitals in any numbers without the disease spreading.

Separate facilities, much like the tuberculosis sanatoriums of the earlier 1900's will likely be required if the disease spreads in any significant way.

And I'm not saying it will spread. A couple of interesting notes: The person that was updating the table at Wikipedia I linked to earlier hasn't updated it since the 8th. I tracked down the latest #'s from the WHO and it doesn't look like there has been significant growth. I'm still hearing/reading news reports of expected waves of 10k/week newly infected, but I've been hearing/reading those reports for a few weeks now. With every passing day, the credibility of those projections becomes more questionable.

Here is a link to the page w/ the WHO situation reports:
http://www.who.int/csr/disease/ebola...on-reports/en/

Here is the latest situation report (the 10th):
http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/1...4_eng.pdf?ua=1

Total infected (for the three main countries) was 8376. Total dead 4024.

The #'s don't perfectly jive with the #'s on the Wikipedia table. The Wikipedia #'s include eight countries, but five of the eight have single-digit values. And the Wikipedia tables show slightly higher values on the 8th than the WHO tables do for the 10th. So someone was getting the #'s elsewhere. From WHO, likely, but a different set of tables.

[Scott Shepherd]

Each day, it's something new that we weren't told, or told wrong. I read something yesterday where a doctor said that it is well known that people can transmit this disease when they are pre-symptomatic. That means if you have the virus, it's inside you, but not reaching a level it's starting to make you ill, you are contagious. The virus is alive and can be transmitted. So you could have it, not know it, give it to someone else, prior to you showing any symptoms at all. That would mean that all the precautions you are seeing are stepping in too late.

Here's an interesting (and terrifying) article posted this morning. It says they nurses have claimed that the specimens of the Ebola patient were sent through the hospital's pneumatic delivery system, which would contaminate that entire thing as well. If you read this article, you'll easily understand how the nurse contracted it. That's pretty horrific stuff for people in charge of making sure this doesn't spread and treating sick people.

http://mashable.com/2014/10/15/dalla...-sloppy-ebola/

[Malcolm Schweizer]

Now they said the nurse flew the day before diagnosis. UGH. I fly internationally with my job on a regular basis. I worry about these kinds of things. Also I worry about if this were to make it to the Caribbean on a boat or plane, it would wreak havoc, much like Chickungunya already has. (Mosquito borne virus that makes you ache and have dengue-like symptoms- it came from Africa by the way.) Every day cruise ships drop off thousands of people on our island and when a flu goes around it spreads very rapidly.

[Pat Barry]

Now they said the nurse flew the day before diagnosis. UGH. I fly internationally with my job on a regular basis. I worry about these kinds of things. Also I worry about if this were to make it to the Caribbean on a boat or plane, it would wreak havoc, much like Chickungunya already has. (Mosquito borne virus that makes you ache and have dengue-like symptoms- it came from Africa by the way.) Every day cruise ships drop off thousands of people on our island and when a flu goes around it spreads very rapidly.

Yes - here is a quote from an article on this subject :

"On Wednesday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said it wanted to interview the people who flew on Frontier Airlines flight 1143 from Cleveland, Ohio, to Dallas, Texas on 13 October.
It said it was taking the measure "because of the proximity in time between the evening flight and first report of illness the following morning".
The nurse, who has yet to be identified, was not showing symptoms of the disease when she flew, the crew has told CDC investigators."

If I believe the standard CDC 'line', they should not be worried about those 123 people (they must be forgetting all the people that sat in the same waiting area, went to the same restroom, etc) because she wasn't symptomatic at the time she travelled.

I just wish they would tell the truth as they know it, not what we wnat to hear, not what they wish is actually true, just tell us the real truth.

Another scary quote from the same article:
"In a statement, the airline said the plane "remained overnight at [Dallas] airport... at which point the aircraft received a thorough cleaning per our normal procedures which is consistent with CDC guidelines prior to returning to service the next day. ""

I can't tell you how many times I have gotten on an airplane that was literally filthy. God only knows how the armrests, pull down seat back tray, restroom, etc on that plane were contaminated or not.