Ebola Outbreak

Right

 

My lone concern is we're trusting Atlanta with this. If there is an American city purely capable of screwing this up, it's Atlanta.

Also, is this covered under Obamacare?

 

Only if it was a preexisting condition. But you won't be able to use your normal doctor

 

No way I would WANT to use my normal doctor.

 

I see this, IP. Personally, I don't think that these infected persons could be in more capably qualified hands, than those of the CDC.

But, however capable the care or secure the facilities, why take any risk - however remote, unlikely, etc. - with something of this potential lethality and magnitude, barring any other available option, whatsoever. Bringing them to the US may pose a infinitesimally small risk to others, even should it break containment, but it seems to be a wholly unnecessary one, IMO.

Put them on a ship 200 miles off shore. Make a containment room at the GITMO facility. There seems to be billions of options that would be more preferred than "downtown Atlanta".

Simply, I can't think of a worse idea than bringing infected persons to the US, in the middle of a major metropolitan city, and one which boasts one of the largest - and busiest - international airports in the world.

I'm not trying to rail on you, or the CDC, but it just seems like a stupid decision, on the face of it, and which was likely made for convenience and not necessity.

 

When is this plan going down? I need some time to escape to my bug out location.

 

I thought this earlier today, but why in the blue blazes isn't the CDC in the middle of some cornfield in Nebraska.....just in case? We can build a runway next to it to accommodate any planes and stuff, but this just seems like it's a bad idea inevitably waiting to happen.

I mean, I am sure there is a reason, I'm almost as sure IP is about to tell me what it is, but still.............

 

I fully understand your position, and in a perfect world we probably wouldn't have CDC there. But we do. And we have treated these two with an experimental technique that generally has promise far beyond even Ebola. We took an ebola virus, broke it up into 3 specific pieces, injected that into 3 different mice genetically engineered to seem "human" to the virus, then had a tobacco plant reproduce those antibodies. This is the sort of radical new technology that will change the world. We need those people being studied and monitored in the best facilities.

Also, there is this naive idea that we (America) are somehow isolated from the infection. No country is isolated from any infection anymore. We already had people returning from the hot zone, possibly infected. The stories out of Morristown and NYC confirm this. There are hundreds coming in from this area every day, as there has been for a decade. We have millions flying all over the globe all the time. We didn't bring Ebola here, we brought two patients here. The infected we know about are not the threat. The ones who don't know and we don't know are.

 

Probably infrastructure and the fact that no one would want to work in corn land.

 

I don't know of a good reason, other than perhaps when the CDC was founded Atlanta WAS kind of the middle of nowhere. Also, it would be very, very expensive given the number of employees and such to locate them in the middle of nowhere. And given the gestation of this disease is 21 days in an era where you can get anywhere on the planet in less than 24 hours, I don't know that it matters where the CDC is.

 

Fair points, every one.

 

Article on the serum, in case I got the details wrong in my summary:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidkr...rum-small-biopharma-the-army-and-big-tobacco/

 

That's amazing

 

The Canadian thing may be coming on the heels of an article I read yesterday concerning a case where airborne transmission was believed to have happened from pigs to chimps (I believe anyway) to other chimps. I was distracted while reading, but I got the impression that this was a while ago.

 

Just let me get my wife and kids to leave first, and let me get home from work.

This will never pan out as a good excuse though. I can appreciate the enthusiasm, but the truth is, unless family members had been exposed, the risk of bodily fluid passing from person to person there is fairly low.

 

I know of two examples of this, and each time it seemed likely it was spreading through aerosols from spraying water/fluids. Which is a sort of short-range "airborne" mechanism, but isn't the same as truly being airborne (which by definition indicates the microbe can survive outside of liquid, such as anthrax spores).

 

If this got a foothold in a prison or a refugee/immigrant camp, it would be ugly. For normal Americans, this is avoidable.

 

So we are hoping that a Pharmaceuticals company will have the solution to the Ebola problem. How can that be?!? Democrats have preached to us for years about how they are evil, greedy, SOBs who only look out for themselves. Now they want to be saved by one?

 

Don't forget that Big Tobacco actually played a role in this. Truth is stranger than fiction.

I am not convinced this is truly a solution to the current Ebola problem regardless of the efficacy of the serum. It is expensive and time-consuming to make even on this small scale right now.

Also, note that it is the military giving the grants for this: government funding. And eerily, this could theoretically be useful if one were to weaponize the virus. -- not that I believe the US military is interested in doing so, but rather interested in being prepared for the possibility of someone else doing it. We like "smart" weapons, and biological warfare couldn't be any less "smart."

 

No. Democrats are pissed that they charge you a kidney for medicines, that in many cases, were developed with public money or at/with the NIH.