Scotland gifts world with haggis, golf. World finally repays debt with Ebola

Reticently · October 21, 2014, 7:42pm

The argument against travel bans:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26427-why-closing-borders-wont-stop-ebolas-rampage.html

Spoiler

Pressure is mounting for governments to ban the entry of travellers from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, where the Ebola epidemic is growing exponentially with 5000-10,000 new cases per week expected by December, up from fewer than a thousand now.

They have a point. Calculations published this week show that at least three people carrying Ebola are likely to fly from the affected countries each month, two-thirds of them to poor countries with limited healthcare, where they could set off further outbreaks.

Despite this, health and development experts are unanimous that a ban on outward air travel would be disastrous. Privately, UN officials warn that such a move could lead to a panicked rush of people across land borders, where unlike air passengers their movements cannot be traced. It could also cause further economic damage to the countries, threatening the civil order essential to fighting the disease.

A dozen African countries have closed their borders to people from the affected countries, but other borders are open. The US, UK and Canada are screening arrivals for fever. Last week US President Barack Obama said he would not rule out further limitations. Many airlines have already cancelled flights, meaning that there has been a reduction of between 50 and 85 per cent in the number of airline seats available from the three countries.
Hidden symptoms

Even with those reductions, Kamran Khan at the University of Toronto in Canada and his colleagues report that on average, 2.8 people per month who are already infected with Ebola will fly from the three countries internationally – and that number will rise as case numbers grow. The team recommends improvements in the existing system: screening passengers for exposure history or fever before departure.

The problem is that Ebola incubates, without causing fever, for an average of nine days and as many as 21. Two-thirds of infected people, says the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in Copenhagen, would be symptom-free at departure, and if asked about potential exposure, could either hide it or be unaware.

So far exit screening hasn’t worked terribly well. Of 36,000 travellers in the first two months of exit screening, says the ECDC, 77 were stopped, most because they were running a fever. None turned out to have Ebola. One infected, pre-symptomatic Liberian man, Thomas Eric Duncan, got through the system, however, and reached the US.

The same problem limits the effectiveness of screening passengers on arrival. Entry screening failed to stop any cases of SARS moving in 2003.
Border closure

So if neither exit nor entry screening works, why not simply stop anyone leaving the countries while we get the epidemic under control?

The first reason is that travel bans are unlikely to be very effective. Steep reductions in flights after the 9/11 bombings only delayed the subsequent flu season, and closing borders to the HIV-positive in the 1980s did not slow the HIV pandemic.

In both cases, that was because people carrying the infection still managed to get through, and that is likely now. “It’s simply not feasible to build a wall – virtual or real – around a city or a country,” Tom Frieden, head of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, said last week. People stopped from flying out of the three affected countries will find other ways to travel.

Moreover, a travel ban would further reduce commercial flights to the region. This could discourage badly needed foreign healthcare workers from volunteering, as with no military airlift planned, they need commercial flights to get home.

Finally, a flight ban could make the epidemic much worse, by hastening economic and social collapse in the affected countries, says Thomas Homer-Dixon of the University of Waterloo, Canada, who studies social resilience.

This would be catastrophic, preventing any further organised effort to fight the infection. Moreover, a collapse in food distribution or public safety could send a flood of refugees across land borders, carrying Ebola to nearby, impoverished countries.
Elite exodus

Those most affected by a flight ban are what sociologists call “elites” – expatriates and locals who run major employers and infrastructure such as food processing plants, mines, plantations, banks and power plants. Various expatriate populations in the region are linchpins of commerce and the crucial mining industry, for example. Flight bans could cripple their operations; mining is already suffering.

As the epidemic worsens, Homer-Dixon says, these people will leave before a ban kicks in. “Provision of food, water and electricity could start to collapse, and international health workers would be forced to leave.”

That point could be hastened by the threat of a closed border. Elites have always fled plagues, says Peter Turchin of the University of Connecticut in Storrs, even in the Black Death of 1348. That means the classes that travel by air will strongly resist any limitation on their mobility.

The answer, he says, is an invention born of the Black Death. “You don’t stop flights from West Africa. You simply require travellers to spend the necessary time in quarantine before they are allowed to move on”. This way, anyone incubating the virus will become known – and can be isolated.

But there are no plans to do this because it would delay all passengers by weeks, to catch an infection known to have reached only 0.05 per cent of the population.

A modern equivalent could be testing travellers for the virus. Several companies are developing rapid tests using a pinprick of blood to reveal infection even during incubation. The World Health Organization is in turn developing a procedure for assessing which ones work well enough to solve the travel problem – but nothing will be available before next year.

Journal reference: The Lancet, DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(14)61828-6

white_shadow · October 21, 2014, 7:51pm

They get their opportunity during every biannual mass murder spree but they just seem to hit a racial wall when it comes to that kind paranoia.

aka Eliot Rodger

Spirit_Juice · October 21, 2014, 8:22pm

Femto_1 · October 22, 2014, 12:00am

When people en masse start calling them out on crimes against children.

MechWarrior · October 23, 2014, 3:31am

Gee. I can’t wait to be held accountable for shit the entirely white rich and powerful are responsible for.

Same shit, different scapegoat skin color. It is not funny nor acceptable, folks, cut it out.

a15kko · October 23, 2014, 10:00am

So one of the nurses is free of ebola

Reticently · October 24, 2014, 12:22am

Ebola NYC?

(CNN) – A Doctors Without Borders physician who recently returned from West Africa is at a New York hospital for isolation and testing for the Ebola virus, a law enforcement official briefed on the matter told CNN.

The 33-year-old physician, employed at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, developed a fever, nausea, pain and fatigue Wednesday night, the official said. On Thursday morning he was taken to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan for testing.

The unidentified doctor returned from West Africa about 10 days ago, the official said.

Investigators are taking the case seriously because it appears the doctor didn’t quarantine himself following his return, the official said.

The official said the doctor was out in public. Authorities are possibly going to quarantine his girlfriend, with whom he was spending time since his return from Africa.

The case came to light after the New York Fire Department received a call shortly before noon Thursday about a sick person in Manhattan. The patient was taken to Bellevue.

SoVi3t · October 24, 2014, 12:26am

Syke1 · October 24, 2014, 12:38am

Title approved

Wil · October 24, 2014, 1:06am

Ebola can’t kill capitalism. Two entrepreneu…trolls bought the rights to the website ebola.com in 2008 for $13k. They sold it for more than $200k with shares in a company that markets legal cannabis products. The two trolls have over 5,000 domain names under their portfolio including birdflu.com.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/23/ebolacom-sale_n_6036672.html?utm_hp_ref=technology&ir=Technology

ElderGOD · October 24, 2014, 2:24am

Lots of people coughing on the train today and I come home to read this thread title…

Reticently · October 24, 2014, 2:35am

For what it is worth, given the incubation period there probably isn’t anyone that he could have been infected that should be showing symptoms yet.

So for the people coughing on your train it’s probably just a cold.

The_Damned · October 24, 2014, 5:14am

(Haha at the latest thread title change. Well done, Reticently.)

Actually, well-done with keeping the thread updated in general. I need to read the rest of it even though I’m already tired of hearing about this in the fear-mongering national news. I think I just need to turn off the TV completely a month early before I usually do–fucking X-mas–between all the unhelpful coverage of this on a national level and all the blathering about the Giants in the World Series again on a local level. So fucking tiresome.

That said, I’m a bit surprised that it hadn’t (potentially) hit New York already given the amount of people there combined with the amount of people who are idiots. How the fuck are you going to be a doctor and not only not take proper isolation protocols, but not take any protocols at all just to be safe? Athena Christ, grant us the wisdom to be slightly less idiotic since stuff like this is why I don’t really trust doctors.

For the record, I don’t have any problem with people going over there trying to help stop the disease–in fact, I vaguely respect them–since it’s not exactly altruism on our part; the only other actual solution would be to burn West Africa to the ground since trying to isolate it wouldn’t really work with as porous and poor as (airport) security is. Shit like this, though, is part of why way too many people are overreacting about this in the first place. Granted, the main part of the overreaction is people being ignorant and idiotic, but stuff like this really isn’t helping.

At the least the nurses caught it because their hospital fucked them over on a protocol level and even then they self-monitored and turn themselves into the hospital. What’s this guy’s excuse?

(And, no, I’m not automatically calling anyone who is cautious of the government and CDC’s response as idiots. You should never 100% trust anyone, much less the government, especially when both bodies have shown what fuck-ups they can be; thankfully the CDC tends to screw up way less [catastrophically] than it could.)

Negative-Zer0 · October 24, 2014, 5:36am

@ElderGOD‌ Looks like all New yorkers are gonna have to train in the Arts of Hokuto Shinken.

owattjacob · October 24, 2014, 7:29am

Shin ain’t having it

http://i.imgur.com/RjH7Cgi.png

Hawkingbird · October 24, 2014, 7:36am

If people in NYC starts getting infected with Ebola fuck taking the subway and buses. I guess I actually need to learn how to drive.

The_Damned · October 24, 2014, 7:40am

(You edit that yourself, owattjacob?)

Fuck. It just occurred to me while I was on my nightly walk that I do actually know someone who might be affected by this and, lo and behold, the one person I know in New York City (that I actually still talk to) currently does indeed work at Bellevue Hospital where this idiot doctor got taken. Of course he had to work at the designated Ebola center for Manhattan. Of course.

Sigh. At least his place has actual procedures in place unlike the Dallas hospital that fucked over those nurses with its ineptitude.

Still, my dislike of this doctor easily at least doubled as soon as I realized this half an hour ago. I really would like to think guy just has the flu, but I’m prepared for the worst (since, again, people are idiots).

Updated EDIT: And, just having checked, he of course tested positive for ebola. Fucking idiot. Why would you not fully quarantine yourself given how easy it is to order-in urban areas, especially fucking New York?

hubcapsignstop · October 24, 2014, 7:46am

"Who is Craig Spencer?"
Hahaa, catching Ebola in the US is a ticket to fame.

SNAAAAKE · October 24, 2014, 7:47am

bye srk…nice knowing you all

Zatalcon · October 24, 2014, 8:13am

Several years back, I recall a friend of mine being diagnosed with Swine Flu (i think you all remember the whole Swine Flu scare years ago). He tested positive in about 3 hospitals in PA and then 1 hospital in northern NJ. My friend was told by all of them that he had to be confined because of the whole threat it is doing against his life. It was almost “uncurable”… he agreed to be confined but a week after. Before the following week, he went to France for about 4 days and got a check up at one of the hospitals. Turns out that he just had Influenza type C . They gave him some medicine and told him to just drink fluids and he was as good as new half a week later.

I recall another friend who was told to have anthrax but then was just told differently in another hospital in Brazil.

Every few years there is this “omg virus” that will hit the news. I’m not saying don’t take caution or be complete skeptic on it, but yeah media loves talking about some killer virus and American hospitals are so greedy now that they will tell you BS just to give you a bill.