Ebola Coming to America? No Thanks!

It's like a cute &mpersand that will make your insides leak out of your orifices.

It’s like a cute [&] ampersand that will make your insides leak out of your orifices.


For the first time in history a live human with infectious Ebola virus has set foot on American soil, and another one is on her way here.  While there is some alarmist thinking surrounding the event, I fall firmly on the side of OH HELZ NO when it comes to importing the virus for the sake of treating the two infected charity workers who were somehow exposed at about the same time while treating Ebola victims in Africa.

Why?

Because despite the minute chance of an accident or release of the virus into the wild, the gravity of those events and the sheer number of people who could be harmed simply outweigh the slight improvement in chances for treatment of the two victims.  We should send resources to treat them on-site IN AFRICA, not put them on a plane to the busiest airport in the United States, which is also the busiest airport in the entire world.  If you were a virus that wanted to hit the big leagues, Atlanta is where it’s at.  And we’re not safe just because the plane didn’t crash or the ambulence get smashed on the way to the hospital.  Every single person who comes in contact with those patients is just a plane ride away from the entire world.

And if you think that highly trained specialist doctors don’t get infected, why are these two people infected?  At least one is a doctor who has specialized in Ebola for years and the other is also quite experienced.  And just last week the top Ebola Virologist in Sierra Leone died of Ebola after being infected earlier in the month.

See, both the USA and Russia have been implicated in improperly storing and securing the last remaining samples of Small Pox — which killed 300 million people during the 20th century alone — I have no faith in the decision to put two people with incurable and violently painful and super deadly EBOLA virus on to an airplane to the USA.

Just last month, the FDA in America suddenly discovered hundreds of vials of noxious, lethal, and otherwise entirely unpleasant infectious agents in a forgotten corner of some refrigerator and guess what, the Small Pox vials they found therein still contained LIVE VIRUS that was able to grow more virus when tested at the CDC.

Federal officials found more than just long-forgotten smallpox samples recently in a storage room on the National Institutes for Health campus in Bethesda, Md. The discovery included 12 boxes and 327 vials holding an array of pathogens, including the virus behind the tropical disease dengue and the bacteria that can cause spotted fever, according to the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees the lab in question.

“The fact that these materials were not discovered until now is unacceptable,” Karen Midthun, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), told reporters Wednesday. “We take this matter very seriously, and we’re working to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.”

… and …

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration revealed that more than 300 other sealed vials containing biological materials such as dengue, influzena, Q fever, ricksettsia and other possible unknown viruses were found alongside the six forgotten smallpox vials in the storage room on the National Institutes of Health campus.

Every single other plague that has EVER killed massive numbers of humans has traveled great distances via then-modern navigation tools to infect non-resistant populations by the tens and hundreds of millions.

This is how the Native Americans, Incans, Aztecs, etc. were destroyed (Measles and Smallpox) and how they returned the favor to Europe by sending back Syphilis.

The Bubonic Plague was likely brought into Europe over the silk road from Asia or southern Russia and decimated generation after generation for hundreds of years. The most recent version, the “Third Pandemic” radiated out of Asia between 1850 and 1950. Various incarnations are global and stretch back to ancient times with almost all flare ups due to the dislocation of people due to conflicts.

Ebola_Atlanta

Did no one read The Plague, or The Hot Zone? Why can’t advanced medical care be brought TO THEM instead of two infected people who are harboring billions of copies of the virus be put in the AIR (where everyone gets sick by traveling on planes with infected people!) where anything could go wrong and unleash the virus to the world?  Of course a specialized jet that’s basically a flying condom is different than you sitting next to a toddler with head-plague in coach for a 4 hour flight.  But only in so much as the cold and flu virus are endemic and rampant all over the world and infect hundreds of millions of people every year.  Fine, you get a cold or the runny shits for a day or two.  And these are already Djinn which are out of the bottle.  Ebola is still mostly contained to a few small pockets in pretty remote third world countries.  And it should stay that way until we find a treatment and can eradicate it.

The alarming thing is that before these two Americans were infected and before Sierra Leone’s top virologist died, there were already reports that Ebola is getting out of hand even in the areas where it has been endemic.  A new strain, perhaps?  New conditions that have made it more lethal?  Or perhaps it’s always had an explosive growth model and we’ve just lived through the early stages where it seems slow but then really lets you know it’s exploding.

27 June 2014 – The United Nations health agency and partners are working with the Governments of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone to control an outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, an official today said, announcing an international meeting next week to agree on a coordinated regional response.

“The situation is not out of hand,” Pierre Formenty told journalists in Geneva on behalf of the UN World Health Organization (WHO). “WHO has been supporting the three affected countries and their Ministries of Health staff, and are working with them on a daily basis to try to contain the outbreak.”

The two infected people had the BEST protection and training money could buy, and they still got infected. There is little to nothing we can do for them and the virus is so nasty it liquefies your innards which bleed out of every orifice in your body. Why do we think this is a good idea?

I don’t for a second think that anyone is going to catch Ebola on American soil from this. I don’t think that it’s a high probability of escaping into the wild. Maybe a fraction of a percent.  But that’s a chance that gets run through the Russian Roulette gun every single time someone comes near that live virus.  And how long might it live in those vials they are putting it in… inside the needles that they are using to introduce fluids into those patients… in the blood from their stool in the sputum they expectorate?

And if that very minute chance ever does come up, the consequences could be global.  AND FOR WHAT?  What’s the balance here?  The only balance I can see is that there is a positive delta in the quality of treatment that we can give these two Americans.  Well, why does that weigh more than the risks?  Why do they deserve to put the rest of us here at risk when the care they were giving in Africa should be sufficient for them.  That’s the Christian thing to do, nay? Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself.  Why is the clinic where they became infected able to treat Africans but unable to effectively treat Americans?

See all the ugly questions crap like this brings up?  I’m sorry these two people have Ebola but I don’t want it in my backyard.  And if you think that this is somehow different than two Africans getting Ebola, why?  And at what cost?  And are you going to pay that cost?

One day, old Christopher Columbus made the choice to bring along a crew member who was “just a little tired” or “under the weather, but feeling fit for service, Captain” but was actually carrying a lethal virus that would in only a few months time begin to kill upwards of 95 of every 100 people living in the Americas.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.  Was it?

Update: Not 10 minutes after I published this, it looks like the Phillippines just might have their first cases of Ebola from people who, guess what, flew from Sierra Leone to the Phillippines!

* * *
Comments and disagreements are welcome, but be sure to read the Comment Policy. If this post made you think and you'd like to read more like it, consider a donation to my 4 Border Collies' Treat and Toy Fund. They'll be glad you did. You can subscribe to the feed or enter your e-mail in the field on the left to receive notice of new content. You can also like BorderWars on Facebook for more frequent musings and curiosities.
* * *

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...

About Christopher

Christopher Landauer is a fifth generation Colorado native and second generation Border Collie enthusiast. Border Collies have been the Landauer family dogs since the 1960s and Christopher got his first one as a toddler. He began his own modest breeding program with the purchase of Dublin and Celeste in 2006 and currently shares his home with their children Mercury and Gemma as well. His interest in genetics began in AP Chemistry and AP Biology and was honed at Stanford University.