Ebola: I Guess We Are All Going To Die

Robin.
These healthcare workers do such selfless work then selfishly come into the UK without a self imposed quarantine before departure travelling through 2 airports and endanger everyone here!
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MadFlavour
Absolutely disgusting, leave them their or thoroughly check them before they're allowed back here. Of course the government won't do that though because theirs no profit in it.
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How dare they listen to the CDC and try to go home while doing so. We should make them stay for two more weeks in a country with an epidemic, then let them come home.
 
FoolKiller
How dare they listen to the CDC and try to go home while doing so. We should make them stay for two more weeks in a country with an epidemic, then let them come home.
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If you're already in there, you might as well try to isolate yourself there for three weeks just to be safe before coming back. You definitely don't want to be remembered in history as the one who managed to get Ebola out of Africa as a major disease.
 
Not_A_Guest
If you're already in there, you might as well try to isolate yourself there for three weeks just to be safe before coming back. You definitely don't want to be remembered in history as the one who managed to get Ebola out of Africa as a major disease.
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Yes, because if it becomes airborne and is a passive risk to people you just happen to share a space with then it is simple in a country without proper medical facilities for quarantine.

That's a better idea than following the CDC's instructions. I mean what does the CDC know about controlling the spread of disease, right?
 
Nobody knows for sure if it will happen but if Ebola does become airborne then we're all screwed no matter how we quarantine ourselves... so let's leave that out of the equation.

And the CDC only gives viable advice for certain situations... I mean it's common sense to stay away from a crowded space (i. e. a plane) when you might have Ebola lying dormant on your skin or inside you. I think that when the CDC says you should stay home, what they really mean is: Go back home and stay there while making as little contact with other humans as possible. Basically it works for people already in their home country.

P.S. This is more of a political issue but the CDC was very slow and unresponsive to Ebola in the first few months of the outbreak. Just saying.
 
Ebola is not contagious without symptoms. If you have no symptoms why not be allowed to take a flight home? Why are we so scared of this that we want to tell those who volunteered to help that them trying to get home, following guidance from the experts on the disease, are selfish?

Out of curiosity, what does the CDC's slow response to the outbreak have to do with their knowledge?

But let's go with the World Health Organization.
WHO
We know what is needed to stop this outbreak and it doesn’t include banning people from traveling from West Africa to the U.S. or Western Europe. Travel bans are detrimental and ineffective.
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Or you could read the New England Journal of Medicine and become educated on how Ebola actually spreads and when it becomes contagious.
NEJM
Health care professionals treating patients with this illness have learned that transmission arises from contact with bodily fluids of a person who is symptomatic — that is, has a fever, vomiting, diarrhea, and malaise. We have very strong reason to believe that transmission occurs when the viral load in bodily fluids is high, on the order of millions of virions per microliter. This recognition has led to the dictum that an asymptomatic person is not contagious; field experience in West Africa has shown that conclusion to be valid. Therefore, an asymptomatic health care worker returning from treating patients with Ebola, even if he or she were infected, would not be contagious. Furthermore, we now know that fever precedes the contagious stage, allowing workers who are unknowingly infected to identify themselves before they become a threat to their community. This understanding is based on more than clinical observation: the sensitive blood polymerase-chain-reaction (PCR) test for Ebola is often negative on the day when fever or other symptoms begin and only becomes reliably positive 2 to 3 days after symptom onset.
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And their thoughts on your ideas.
NEJM
We should be honoring, not quarantining, health care workers who put their lives at risk not only to save people suffering from Ebola virus disease in West Africa but also to help achieve source control, bringing the world closer to stopping the spread of this killer epidemic.
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Ultimately though, here is what you are suggesting, though you may not realize it: Healthcare workers who volunteered to save lives of people they don't know in places they have no connection to should stay in isolation in a country where the lack of proper facilities plays a huge role in the size of the outbreak. If they do prove to be contagious they are not in a place to receive proper care with the best medical facilities. Their risk of infecting others is higher. Their infection in that country will increase the risk of their death and the deaths of others.

I believe that if they are not symptomatic (examine them before they fly if you don't trust them) they can come home because the medical community agrees that they are not contagious. If they do begin to show symptoms they will be in a place with top quality medical facilities and able to receive the best care and have a high chance of survival. We could even have them do a quick five minute medical exam every two days for three weeks.


We should not treat these humanitarians as threats. If you truly wish to end an ebola outbreak you cannot treat those who would volunteer to help like a dangerous threat. Keep that up and you will not have enough medical professionals to go and help.


I do find it odd how I actually work with someone from the CDC who was in Africa and is now the state's leading expert in ebola and I had zero fear of him when he came back.
 
^sorry, tl;dr most of that post

Ebola has an incubation period of 21 days. If the specimen demonstrates no symptoms after 21 days since his last contact with infected individuals, then they can do whatever they want. But before that incubation period is done, no symptoms will be shown but the virus can still be spread. That is how I understand it and I believe that is why such long/ strict quarantines are necessary at all.

EDIT: ^^all that is wrong, I'm a little smarter now


While I am very thankful for what humanitarian workers are doing in Africa, I also think that it's for the best if they stay isolated, even if the facilities and supplies are not nearly as adept at handling the disease as they should be. I find that it is a better idea to put one life on the line than to risk the lives of hundreds or eventually thousands of people by travelling. Humanitarian workers already accepted the possibility of being infected before they decided to go to Africa-- last I checked, nobody was forcefully taken to Africa to help out.
 
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Not_A_Guest
^sorry, tl;dr most of that post
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We are all fully aware. Want to know why?

Because I quoted two major, medical organizations discussing ebola, even suggested you read one to learn how it works, and then you still said this:
Ebola has an incubation period of 21 days. If the specimen demonstrates no symptoms after 21 days since his last contact with infected individuals, then they can do whatever they want. But before that incubation period is done, no symptoms will be shown but the virus can still be spread. That is how I understand it and I believe that is why such long/ strict quarantines are necessary at all.
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What you understand and what doctors are actually saying are two very different things. You are repeating what the politicians and fear mongers are saying, not the medical experts.

Why do you think you know better than the top medical experts in the world? Please, at least click on the link to the New England Journal of Medicine. My ability to understand how ebola spreads, and when, is why I had no problems shaking hands with a man who had been in Africa working with ebola patients less than a week before.


last I checked, nobody was forcefully taken to Africa to help out.
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No but if you act like they are the boogeyman when they want to come back they will quit volunteering. When that happens can we put the thousands of additional deaths on the heads of people like you, calling for strict protocols that have been proven to be unnecessary?
 
Not_A_Guest
But before that incubation period is done, no symptoms will be shown but the virus can still be spread.
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Can you provide a source for this?

Because that's exactly the opposite of what Foolkiller's links from recognised health organisations say. Which you'd know, if you'd bothered to read them. In fact, symptoms will be shown well before the individual becomes contagious or the virus even becomes detectable in the patient.
 
Imari
Can you provide a source for this?

Because that's exactly the opposite of what Foolkiller's links from recognised health organisations say. Which you'd know, if you'd bothered to read them. In fact, symptoms will be shown well before the individual becomes contagious or the virus even becomes detectable in the patient.
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I stand corrected after reading a few words. Media lies.

FoolKiller
No but if you act like they are the boogeyman when they want to come back they will quit volunteering. When that happens can we put the thousands of additional deaths on the heads of people like you, calling for strict protocols that have been proven to be unnecessary?
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I don't act as if people are boogeymen. I act as if Ebola is the boogeyman. It doesn't sound too extreme to me considering the symptoms of Ebola.
The motivation for humanitarian workers is knowing that they are helping someone, not that they will receive awards for doing it. I think that most humanitarian workers don't care what I say, they'll carry on doing what they do. Help will not stop coming, whether from MSF, WHO, or from the White House. That isn't our main problem here.

The real problem is that the incubation period shows no symptoms. But how is it going to feel when after 3 weeks of being in your home country, you show the terrible symptoms of Ebola and you put everyone around you at risk since you didn't decide to quarantine yourself?

An unrelated question: During the incubation period, can you have a blood test done to see if you have Ebola lying dormant inside you?
 
Not_A_Guest
The motivation for humanitarian workers is knowing that they are helping someone, not that they will receive awards for doing it.
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And probably that they can do so without putting themselves in too much risk, I would say.

I think that most humanitarian workers don't care what I say, they'll carry on doing what they do. Help will not stop coming, whether from MSF, WHO, or from the White House. That isn't our main problem here.
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You seem very confident that people will continue to line up to help others regardless of the conditions which they have to do it under. I'm not so sure.

Some will. Some probably won't.

The real problem is that the incubation period shows no symptoms. But how is it going to feel when after 3 weeks of being in your home country, you show the terrible symptoms of Ebola and you put everyone around you at risk since you didn't decide to quarantine yourself?
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Read it again.

You're not putting anyone in danger. You get a fever, you take yourself straight to the nearest appropriate medical facility and have them quarantine you, well before you become contagious. You are then well contained (probably better contained than you would have been had you started getting sick in your room in Africa), and you're in a place where you can receive the quality healthcare that you've been paying taxes and insurance for the last however many decades of your life.

You're advocating increased risk for the healthcare workers to combat a non-existent danger.

Ebola is not a boogeyman. It's just a virus. It would probably help if you weren't so scared of it that you're worried about having people that have come into contact with it on the same continent as you.

You may remember how terrified everyone was of HIV+ and AIDS infected people when that first became big. This strikes me as not that different. You're not going to catch HIV just because you happened to sit on the same chair as someone with HIV.
 
Imari
You seem very confident that people will continue to line up to help others regardless of the conditions which they have to do it under. I'm not so sure.

Some will. Some probably won't.
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What some aren't considering when they say volunteers will still show up is that it isn't just about inconveniences, like isolation. You are asking them to take three additional weeks, unpaid, from work and family.

Sure people may still volunteer, but that three week period will come from their available volunteer doctoring time. If they can't work out enough time to be useful then they just won't go.
 
Well, then again, every epidemic dies off. I just hope that they actually do something to prevent another outbreak!
 
20832
I just hope that they actually do something to prevent another outbreak!
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Like what?

While we know lots about how the disease is transmitted, we know very little about where it originates from or how it makes the jump from animals to humans. West African governments have put bans on bushmeat - wild animals killed for food, particularly bats - in the past that have proven effective, but in this case, a team of doctors traced the outbreak back to a two year-old boy who became Patient Zero. They believe that he contracted the virus by playing in a hollowed-out tree that is sometimes inhabited by bats, but they having trouble figuring out exactly how he caught it.
 
Well that nurse who brought Ebola back to the UK is now under investigation for misconduct after some information has come to light about how she undertook screening at Heathrow. I.e. she likely hid her illness, faked her way through or convinced the testers not to report it.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article4362333.ece

As I said before... selfish selfish people! Undoing everything they did out there.
 
FoolKiller
She fatally infected more people than she saved?
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If there were now multiple cases in the UK due to her carelessness (a real possibility) this wouldn't even be a question. As I said before it amazes me that they go out there and save many infected people yet by risking healthy people it's like throwing the hard work back in peoples faces. Just because no one died in the UK doesn't mean it was OK for her to endanger people just because she saved others... it's not some set of scales.
 
If that is true, then it is unbelievably irresponsible.

It would be a tad incongruous though - why would someone volunteer to help out in a crisis region, at considerable personal risk, but then behave so recklessly as to deliberately conceal the fact that they were feeling unwell when they returned home, especially given the fact that they would be fully aware of the potential consequences? One action is completely at odds with the other.

You're completely right though - just because no-one was infected in the UK would not excuse such behaviour in any way, but it remains to be seen what actually happened in this case.
 
Robin.
Just because no one died in the UK doesn't mean it was OK for her to endanger people just because she saved others... it's not some set of scales.
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I'm not saying that IF she did this it is OK. I am asking if she actually undid anything, or are you being hyperbolic? Maybe you meant to use the word "risking" in that statement?

There was nothing I saw wrong with your post until you said that she undid something. What work did she undo?
 
FoolKiller
I'm not saying that IF she did this it is OK. I am asking if she actually undid anything, or are you being hyperbolic? Maybe you meant to use the word "risking" in that statement?

There was nothing I saw wrong with your post until you said that she undid something. What work did she undo?
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I meant undid metaphorically, like when in the eyes of someone you have undone something without any physical undoing.... probably could have worded it better.

@Touring Mars I'm also keen to see what comes out of the investigation and find out what exactly happened at the screening. I reckon fear or denial might have been a reason but as a medial professional you would think she would understand that there was a likely risk of infection going out there.
 
One of the three core nations of this EBOV outbreak (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea) is now classing itself as EBOV-free, with no new cases at all in a week. The other two reported a combined total of new infections of just over 130 in the last week of February - as low as it's been since July 2014.

Deaths now stand at just under 10,000 (9,807) - a bit less than half of the WHO's original estimate for the outbreak, though the CDC believes that cases in the three main nations has been underreported by a factor of 2-3, so it's likely that the total number of deaths (at a 40% mortality rate) is nearer to that 20k mark they originally estimated.


Anyone still panicking?
 
Famine
One of the three core nations of this EBOV outbreak (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea) is now classing itself as EBOV-free, with no new cases at all in a week. The other two reported a combined total of new infections of just over 130 in the last week of February - as low as it's been since July 2014.

Deaths now stand at just under 10,000 (9,807) - a bit less than half of the WHO's original estimate for the outbreak, though the CDC believes that cases in the three main nations has been underreported by a factor of 2-3, so it's likely that the total number of deaths (at a 40% mortality rate) is nearer to that 20k mark they originally estimated.


Anyone still panicking?
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Its brilliant how the media actually makes a living on making people panic, isn't it? :rolleyes:
 

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