sjfcontrol wrote:Dave2 wrote:sjfcontrol wrote:Ruh Row... The nurse has a dog.
Can dogs get Ebola?
The rumor is that dogs can carry Ebola symptom free. It is unknown if a human can catch Ebola from a dog. The French euthanized the dog of their health worker with Ebola, to the complaints of the animal rights people. (And others)
Spanish, not French, but yes, they did.
This is one of my typical long reads, but I think it will help to clarify what we are actually up against, and might help someone to figure out what their own response ought to be.
I am not any kind of expert in infectious diseases, but I worked in a major hospital long enough, around isolated patients long enough, to be perhaps more experienced than the average lay person in transmission avoidance.
Avoiding AIDS is easy. You follow the protocols, and you CANNOT be infected. In fact,
whether you follow the protocols or not, unless you share a needle or have violent sex with the patient, you have almost no chance of catching it. Even people who share infected needles do not necessarily catch AIDS. By the very act of walking into the room of a patient with a compromised immune system,
you are a bigger threat to the patient than he or she is to you. And unless you have some unresolved character issues, you are never going to catch it "in the wild".
Avoiding hepatitis is harder, but still very easy. Don't stick yourself with their needles, or have sex with them, handle their bodily fluids with gloves on, wear a mask, and you're good to go. An isolation gown is not a bad idea, but any droplet-borne hepatitis viruses are not going to survive on your clothing for more than a few seconds. So even if you get it on you, chances of transmission are very low. And again, unless you are being intimate with someone who is infected, you are not going to catch it "in the wild".
Either of those first two diseases are easy to avoid, as—0utside of an in-hospital patient-care environment—you are not likely to ever be in a situation where exposure is any kind of statistically significant risk. You don't catch either of those diseases from being in mere proximity to an unknown infected person. You catch them by either practicing behaviors which even the practitioners know are risky, or by being physically intimate with someone who practices those behaviors.
Avoiding the Flu is crapshoot. Even if you are working in a hospital in an isolation ward, you have no idea whom you might have been in contact with outside of that environment, and since the disease is contagious even before the patient becomes
overtly symptomatic, and since it spreads easily, you might have caught it from someone "in the wild" rather than from the flu patient you are treating......and you you have no way of knowing for certain which person was the actual carrier who infected you. Even if a family member is infected,
your particular vector might have been a total stranger in the supermarket, in an airliner, on a bus, at a concert, in a bar, at the post office, at church, in your doctor's waiting room, in a theater, at the mall, or even just the person who passed you on the sidewalk or the parking structure. No. Way. To know. At all. We DO know that it can be droplet-borne and spread by that means.....and we also know that the flu virus doesn't live that long in that droplet, once it has been expelled from the infected person's body. It can easily survive long enough that one person's sneeze can infect another person in proximity to that sneeze on whom some of the droplets land and are ingested or inhaled. But if that droplet lands on the handrail of an escalator at the mall, it is harmlessly inert in a very short amount of time.
So, as long as you don't have an already severely compromised immune system and zero access to medical care, the flu is highly unlikely to kill you. You might be sick enough that you
want to die, but that is a very temporary situation.....and barring those other health challenges, you are going to get better on your own in most cases.....whether or not you actually see a doctor.
The problem with Ebola is, it behaves much like the flu in terms of epidemiology,
EXCEPT that it is known to survive for as long as days outside the host's body, AND, it has more infectious opportunities. THAT is why space-suits and hepatically filtered rooms are necessary to its containment. But even then, it
can escape the confines of isolation. The nurse in Spain who was infected admitted that she
might have "violated protocol" after leaving the patient's room, by
possibly having touched her own face before she was completely disinfected. Even she wasn't absolutely certain of the mechanism of infection in her own case.
One of the problems with these things is that there are seldom any 3rd party observers who can actually see and detect the means of transmission when it occurs—so even if it is being second guessed by a trained mind,
it is still speculation. When you add up the facts of substandard medical treatment in the countries of origin, substandard medical
infrastructure in the countries of origin, and you combine that with native cultural practices which are practically
guaranteed to ensure the disease's spread, plus the fact that in the 21st century an airline ticket can put an infected person into any 1st world nation on the globe within a matter of hours, then it was utterly predictable that Ebola would
eventually end up in the U.S. and Europe and Australia and Japan and everywhere else.
But until now, Ebola has remained a "3rd world problem", and 1st world populations—despite all of our superior technologies and practices—have remained relatively ignorant about it. Oh sure, we
knew of its existence, but not its horrors......in the same way that, until cancer has directly affected your family or loved ones, you can never have more than a detached understanding of it. Now that the Ebola disease has broken out of its African continental confinement, people are afraid and there is a LOT of speculation with precious little knowledge on the part of the general population. The media, with their "if it bleeds, it leads" ethics, does a lot to ensure that this speculation is rampant, and to scare the crap out of people.
Here's the deal..... Ebola SHOULD scare the crap out of you......enough that, instead of simply swallowing whatever the talking heads say, you should
do your own due diligence, and then ACT on it. I have done some of that myself. Some of us here are either employed in,
have been employed in, or are related or close to people who are employed in the healthcare system. I'm in the second and third groups. I am NOT going to add to the panic by talking about a couple of the things I have been told in private,
because they would simply add to the speculation.
However, I AM going to talk about what we—the general public—already know if we do our due diligence.
- Ebola is blood-borne.
- By the time the infected person is symptomatic, their frangible tissues (mucosa, liver, heavily vascularized organs and 'other' areas) are already breaking down, and their blood is becoming mixed with other bodily fluids and excreta—i.e. saliva, semen, sweat, tears, urine, feces, etc., etc.
- That bloody infusion also exists in droplet-borne form as the product of sneezes and coughing.
- Unlike most other viruses, the Ebola virus can survive outside the host's body for extended periods of at least days (I don't think we actually know how long it actually will survive; we only know how long we have observed it to survive). I don't know the answer yet, but this being Texas, I think it is worth investigating if mosquitos or other biting insects can be a vector. There has been speculation about pets. I don't know if that's a real risk or not, but consider that there are at least two known animal vectors in Africa—monkeys and bats—which can carry it without being sick, and which are sometimes consumed as food and have been known to be sources of infection. I would suspect that if droplet-borne Ebola is a risk on a carrier's clothing, then it is ALSO a risk on a pet's fur if that pet was exposed to the sneezing, coughing, petting, of an infected person. Until it can be demonstrated that pets are not actual host vectors, and not just "surface" carriers, then sadly, euthanizing exposed pets is probably the responsible thing to do. If it can be proven that they merely carry it on their fur, then there is no reason why a good bath in a strongly disinfectant solution won't be enough..........if one has access to such.
- We know that it is at least possible for a human to be a vector without actually being infected him or herself, simply by having those droplets on their clothing or skin and then coming into contact with another person who manages to somehow ingest the content of those droplets.
- We know that even though this disease is extremely aggressive and that it takes the healthy as well as the vulnerable. We have extremely vulnerable populations with the elderly and infants who might be at even greater risk. We therefore have a moral burden to be extra careful to protect those of us who are dependent upon the rest of us for their medical well-being.
- We know that Ebola, much like other extremely virulent diseases, does not maintain its virulence for very many generations before it burns itself out. However, this may irrelevant this time around because of an unhealthy reliance on globally-minded institutions. I do not know if this is authoritative or not (in other words, it could be speculation) but according to a statement on the Gallup polling website:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/176096/quali ... tries.aspx
Implications
Rather than showing signs of dissipating, the worst Ebola outbreak in history appears to be only spiraling further out of control. Though
it took nearly five months for the World Health Organization to declare the outbreak a public health emergency, there are signs that the international community is awakening to the seriousness of the outbreak. Citing the potential for profound political, economic, and security implications, President Barack Obama dramatically upped the U.S. commitment to battle Ebola this week.
WHY did the WHO NOT declare it a public health emergency for FIVE months? One word: FECKLESSNESS. The larger explanation is that these organizations do not exist to serve mankind; they exist to justify their own budgets. Consequently, until now the rest of the world's nations had not treated Ebola as a serious consideration because it did not directly threaten them. They were content to leave management of global pandemics to an organization more concerned with political correctness, not offending anybody, and promoting whirled peas. As long as Ebola remained confined to subsaharan Africa, the world's nations were content not to invest too much in its eradication.
The sad fact is this: until 3rd world diseases become 1st world problems, they never get eradicated; and then the 1st world panics when those diseases rear up to bite them on the ass.
- We can no longer afford (G). As a newly minted philosophically libertarian person, I have a slight tendency toward isolationism. But the bitter truth, whether or not I like it, is that this is no longer a subsaharan African problem. It is in DALLAS........Near where I live and MY loved ones live. Therefore, I have to adjust my expectations.
- Our government categorically refuses to protect our borders, and unlike the days of Ellis Island, the government refuses to quarantine the immigrants it uses as political pawns as it has disbursed them to all 50 states, and then released them into the general population....often without, or with only the most cursory medical examinations. Our government's own representatives—INCLUDING THE VERY AGENCY TASKED WITH CONTAINING THE SPREAD OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES—insist that closing our airspace to commercial air traffic from affected countries would not protect us, and that it would prevent us from sending medical help AND guidance to affected nations.........on the absolutely insane reasoning that being forced to use specially chartered or military flights would prevent them from getting there and back. This has an ominous implication: that protecting the U.S. population from Ebola has become politicized issue.
- Therefore, our government cannot be counted upon to:
- be truthful about it
- protect us from it
- tell us what we must do to protect ourselves if they cannot protect us
- THEREFORE: we must protect ourselves, our families, and our communities, in that order. I cannot devote myself to protecting my family if I am sick. I cannot devote myself to protecting my community if my family is sick. It starts with me, and that is not selfish, that is self-sacrificing. It means that I have to make inconvenient choices and adopt inconvenient behaviors so that I can protect myself, so that I can protect my family, and protect my community.
- You don't have to be panicked to do these things, but you DO have to be irresponsible not to.
The OFFICIAL line is that Ebola is not airborne. But I submit that it is only a semantic difference, and a very small one at that, between "airborne" and "droplet-borne" in terms of a disease which can survive in droplet form for days......in any densely populated area.....like Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, etc., etc., etc. The PRACTICAL difference between "airborne" and "droplet-borne" for most of us as we go about our daily business is irrelevant, and
responsible people will behave accordingly.
What this means for me is that I have gloves and masks, at home and in my car. I will go about my normal day, but I will be MUCH more attentive about using hand sanitizers,
PARTICULARLY after having handled surfaces that have been recently handled by other people. For example: I went to Costco on Saturday, and I totally did not think to sanitize my hands after pushing a shopping cart around, and I DID stop by a couple of the sampling stations and sample something being offered.....without thinking to sanitize my hands which had just been pushing that cart. I have exactly ZERO idea of who had handled that cart before I did. Beginning today, I will be carrying a packet of those Lysol hand wipes with me everywhere. You can take it to the bank that I will be more careful going forward. I'm not really a crowd-friendly kind of guy anyway, but I will be MUCH more likely to avoid crowds going forward. I haven't figured out what to do about church yet, particularly as I am very actively involved in mine, but I will be doing less hugging, and more hand sanitizing for sure. My wife and I have already agreed that we would rather babysit our granddaughter than to have our son and DIL take her to places where she might be exposed, thus freeing them up to do the things they need to do. I will be looking today into getting some of those "baby bags" (I don't know what else they are called) that are like a giant face-mask/bag that you put the infant inside of which gives them the same protection as a face-mask does to an adult. We will be flying to Los Angeles as a family in early December. If this thing hasn't burned itself out by then, I don't care HOW dorky it looks, my family and I will be wearing face-masks on the airplane. I'll never see those other passengers again, so I don't really care what they think about me.
These are all simple strategies which, in the long run, will not significantly impact my life in any kind of negative way, and which, in the short run may save it, or save the life of someone precious to me.
I think that we should all brush aside the panic, BEHAVE as if Ebola is at least some kind of statistical risk to us no matter how small, and take some simple measures to protect our families and our loved ones, because for damned sure, the government is not going to do the things it
should do to protect us......because it doesn't want to offend anyone who isn't an American citizen.
