patrick.net

jturtledove says

Seems to me that the same people who think that we should single-handedly take on the Ebola problem are the same ones who advocate that everyone should stop having children because it puts stress on the resources of this planet. Doesn't the Ebola problem serve your concern that the world is overpopulated? I might add, precisely where birth rates are among the highest? We shouldn't have children... But Africa's right to grow at a rate that eclipses most of the world must be preserved and the US must lead the charge.

It looks like Afghanis are having as many kids as the busiest Africans.

Now we know what they've been doing with those billions of dollars.

Just imagine what the world would be looking like had China not its one child policy.

Anyone ever watch the Vice Guide: Liberia?

http://www.vice.com/the-vice-guide-to-travel/the-vice-guide-to-liberia-1

They still frigin eat each other there. Street food isn't maybe just dog like you worry about in some countries. There is may be human. With the warlords fighting (see video) we have a very real recent case of cannibal anarchy.

Ebola is going to spread... There is nothing General Butt naked, General Rambo, General Mosquito or General Mosquito Spray can do about it either.

HydroCabron says

Wouldn't the hand of the free market be the most suitable to bring succour [sic] to these unfortunates?

Yes. You are so lost in sarcasm that you don't even realize when you stumble across reality. You won't even know about this comment because I am among the 10 PatNet users you Ignore. You prefer ignorance and misspelled sarcasm, which make a really pathetic combination.

"The calls started coming in August to the office of GlaxoSmithKline Plc Chief Executive Officer Andrew Witty from the head of the World Health Organization, Margaret Chan. The Ebola outbreak was raging out of control and Chan needed the drugmaker’s vaccine as quickly as possible.

The sudden sense of urgency for an Ebola vaccine was an about face from a few months earlier when Glaxo contacted the WHO, asking whether its vaccine could help with the outbreak. At that time, the company was told the focus was on containment and the WHO didn’t have a policy for using vaccines in this type of situation. “We’ll get back to you” was the message, said Ripley Ballou, head of Glaxo’s Ebola vaccine program.
***
Glaxo and Johnson & Johnson are preparing thousands of doses of their experimental vaccines to test in Africa as early as January."

BUT, if Ebola got converted to a chronic condition requiring daily pills for life, and if those pills could be subsidized via mandatory insurance, then there would never be a vaccine, because that would disrupt the revenue model.

just_passing_through says

Ebola is going to spread... There is nothing General Butt naked, General Rambo, General Mosquito or General Mosquito Spray can do about it either.

General Butt Naked, come on. You won't lose a war with a name like that.

Vicente says

Plus, there's all that cheap brown labor all around them when they realize they need someone to do actual WORK.

Posted before but bears repeating...

thunderlips11 says

General Butt Naked, come on. You won't lose a war with a name like that.

Nor fighting like that.

curious2 says

Glaxo and Johnson & Johnson are preparing thousands of doses of their experimental vaccines to test in Africa as early as January.

Note the "experimental" part there. Many experimental vaccines do not work, some are not even safe. What if the vaccine makes people sicker, how do you think that will help the already-thin reputation of healthcare people in the area?

Containment has worked best in the past as primary focus, thus they would repeat that and minimize dilution of thin resources. There are not exactly droves of healthcare workers standing in line eager to work in this situation.

From your article:

"When Glaxo contacted the WHO in March, the vaccine was seen as a “diversion of energy” at a time when it was believed the outbreak would be controlled with traditional measures, such as contact tracing and safe burials, that have helped contain every previous outbreak, said Marie-Paule Kieny, the WHO’s assistant director-general for health systems and innovation. At the end of March, there were about 100 cases of Ebola in Guinea, with early reports the virus was spreading to Liberia and Sierra Leone, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."

Vicente says

What if the vaccine makes people sicker, how do you think that will help the already-thin reputation of healthcare people in the area?

Current "traditional" containment measures can never really solve the problem, because the virus returns year after year. The only solution is a therapeutic (retroactive) vaccine to eliminate the virus. If the first vaccine doesn't succeed, try another.

As for reputations in central Africa, people there believe all sorts of crazy things, and you can't waste your time worrying about what they will think of you. A vaccine would protect us in case one of them gets on a plane with the virus. While you wring your hands about what central Africans might say amongst themselves, I think American resources should protect Americans.

Vicente says

If you have reasonable certainty that you can have 2 kids survive to adulthood, there's much less incentive to have 6.

They are under fatwas and other religious orders to multiply as fast as possible. As a result, they lurch from one disaster to the next: famine, disease, war, etc. If you solve one problem, they crash into another. Even elliemae has described the Utah BMWs: Big Mormon Wagons, full of more kids than the family can feed, even with America's low rates of infant mortality. The actual causation for stabilizing population is giving people (especially women) access to contraception, e.g. the pill and RU486, which is why religious potentates oppose it. You've put the cart before the horse: reducing infant mortality doesn't reduce population growth, but stabilizing population can reduce infant mortality by making more resources available per child.

curious2 says

Even elliemae has described the Utah BMWs: Big Mormon Wagons, full of more kids than the family can feed, even with America's low rates of infant mortality.

Utah fertility rate is 2.449. Anecdotes are not data.

Vicente says

Utah fertility rate....

Only 40% of Utahns are active Morons. Fertility rates among Morons are consistently higher than the general population: even in the UK with its NHS and a lower infant mortality rate than the USA, Moron fertility dwarfs British and exceeds even South African, where infant mortality is 10x higher.

Substitution does not resurrect your false claim. You wrote, "Areas of Africa with the best healthcare, see declining birth rates." To the extent those variables correlate, the causation is precisely opposite of the claim you were trying to make. In Africa as elsewhere, areas with declining birth rates are better able to take care of their population and achieve lower infant mortality and greater prosperity. That is why China implemented a "one-child policy," which many families continue even though allowed to have more. It is also why serious efforts focus on providing people (especially women) access to contraception, but struggle due to pseudo-liberal cultural "respect" for religious potentates' insistence on prohibiting it.

The issue in central Africa comes down to forest vs trees. If you react by "generously" using western bounty to "contain" each problem, you don't solve the fundamental issues of kleptocracies and general refusal to reason together and cooperate successfully. Instead, you enlarge those problems, as each "aid" effort enables the next crisis. The perennial largest per capita recipient of foreign aid is Haiti, where generous pseudo-"aid" infects people with cholera and crushes local enterprises. At least if you develop a vaccine against ebola, or HIV, you can end that particular crisis permanently, instead of merely staving it off temporarily to grow even larger.

I've also learned (through experience) that if you feed stray cats you get more stray cats to feed.

curious2 says

In Africa as elsewhere, areas with declining birth rates are better able to take care of their population and achieve lower infant mortality and greater prosperity.

Mexico similarly has a reputation for turning out lots of babies. Which is no longer true. Better healthcare, sanitation, and water quality are followed by lower birth rates. You have the cart before the horse.

Last figure I found for Mormons was 3.0 in the 1990's. Anecdotes about BMW filled with dozens of kids, is not useful population trend data.

Call it Crazy says

If 18% represents the 6200 current cases.... just do the math...

The math says 30k in a continent with a population of 1 billion. My calculator can't do that small a percentage.

Quigley says

I've also learned (through experience) that if you feed stray cats you get more stray cats to feed.

Spay and release "fixes" that problem quite effectively.

Also fixes your rodent problems.

bob2356 says

Call it Crazy says

If 18% represents the 6200 current cases.... just do the math...

The math says 30k in a continent with a population of 1 billion. My calculator can't do that small a percentage.

Try scientific notation. :P

Vicente says

curious2 says

In Africa as elsewhere, areas with declining birth rates are better able to take care of their population and achieve lower infant mortality and greater prosperity.

Mexico similarly has a reputation for turning out lots of babies. Which is no longer true. Better healthcare, sanitation, and water quality are followed by lower birth rates. You have the cart before the horse.

Vicente, copying and pasting the cart/horse metaphor from my comment to yours begins to seem too childish even for a digression about birth rates and infant mortality, like saying "No I'm not you are." If you are actually interested in this topic, you might want to read about the extensive empirical research considering multiple hypotheses including your preferred assumption. "In contrast to the remarkably unambiguous empirical evidence supporting the existence of an impact of fertility on infant and child mortality, evidence of an effect of infant and child mortality on fertility has been stubbornly elusive, with different data and models yielding very different results." It's a longer topic for a different thread, not particularly relevant to your OP about Ebola, except possibly in the Malthusian sense where the relevant populations increase inexorably until reduced by catastrophic famine or overcrowding/disease.

Call it Crazy says

OK, get out your calculator and use your 30K TODAY and map it with this chart through Nov. and Dec and tell us what you get..

The absolute worst case anyone has projected is 1.4 million. Is that the number you are looking for? If this epidemic hadn't happened in the poorest most war torn part of Africa with almost zero facilities to deal with an elboa outbreak it would already be under control.

It's not a pandemic, it's not going to be an epidemic in any country with reasonable medical facilities, so what are you panicking about?

we are all children in Uncle Al's Playhouse.

curious2 says

Vicente, copying and pasting the cart/horse metaphor from my comment to yours begins to seem too childish even for a digression about birth rates and infant mortality

The moment you place food in front of a stray cat, it is no longer classified as "stray". You have taken ownership by providing for the feline in it's time of need. It is now your pet.
Therefore, any kittys your cat burps out are technically your GrandPets, also under your financial umbrella, and are not 'stray cats'.
Your statement below does not hold water.

Quigley says

I've also learned (through experience) that if you feed stray cats you get more stray cats to feed

Vicente says

If Sierra Leone is completely depopulated, they could move it and make it a White Conservative's Utopia. A shining beacon of Gold Dollars & Freedom.

Yep ye oh whittey he be opining fo dis

Call it Crazy says

How come in every other outbreak in that area, they were able to contain it at a few hundred people?

What's different this time?

In what area? There's never been an outbreak in western Africa before. Zaire/drc, Ugunda, Gabon, Sudan are over two thousand miles away (at least) from Guiana, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. That's like NY to LA.

What's different this time is just what I said. The countries are crowded, poor, war torn, with almost non existent medical facilites to isolate the virus victums.

Call it Crazy says

thunderlips11 says

General Butt Naked, come on. You won't lose a war with a name like that.

But I bet he throws some great parties!

General Butt Naked is about as evil as the definition of evil gets:

] Blahyi now claims he would regularly sacrifice a victim before battle, saying, "Usually it was a small child, someone whose fresh blood would satisfy the devil."[1]

Blahyi claimed to a South African Star reporter that he "met Satan regularly and talked to him" and that from age of 11 to 25 he took part in monthly human sacrifices.[11] In his account of a typical battle Blahyi claimed, "So, before leading my troops into battle, we would get drunk and drugged up, sacrifice a local teenager, drink the blood, then strip down to our shoes and go into battle wearing colorful wigs and carrying imaginary purses we'd looted from civilians. We'd slaughter anyone we saw, chop their heads off and use them as soccer balls. We were nude, fearless, drunk yet strategic. We killed hundreds of people--so many I lost count."[12]

http://en.www.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Butt_Nake

Party on.

New Renter says

Call it Crazy says

thunderlips11 says

General Butt Naked, come on. You won't lose a war with a name like that.

But I bet he throws some great parties!

General Butt Naked is about as evil as the definition of evil gets:

He says that when he was a cannibal, he preferred meat from the back.

Call it Crazy says

bob2356 says

There's never been an outbreak in western Africa before.

So, does that mean there won't be a large outbreak like the past outbreaks. Can you say "Normalcy Bias"?

What past outbreaks in west africa?. What large outbreak? This is the first large outbreak there has been. Look at your own chart for christ sakes

Call it Crazy says

That could be just the opposite why it hasn't spread faster. These poor people lack the ability to travel around and are usually confined to their villages and small towns.

You don't travel around much do you? Poor people in in third world places like west africa travel quite a bit. Buses, mopeds (with 4-6 passengers), the ubiquitous toyota hiace van with 25 passengers and 50 chickens crammed in are everywhere in the third world. Africa and the third world isn't a bunch of mud huts. The cities are where the outbreak is and where the new cases are popping up. Being in the crowded dirty cities with very limited medical facilities is why it's spreading so fast.

Call it Crazy says

In other parts of the developed world, people move and travel around a lot easier, which would allow the spread of the infection to a larger group of the population. An example is how the seasonal flu is spread in this country.

Get a grip. Morovia isn't London. Ebola isn't the frigging flu. It's not that easy to transmit. The couple cases that showed up with people traveling to lagos and nigeria are already contained with no new cases since. You caught the contained in lagos and nigeria part didn't you? If they can contain it in nigeria and lagos then new jersey shouldn't be a problem. Well maybe not.

bob2356 says

What's different this time is just what I said. The countries are crowded, poor, war torn, with almost non existent medical facilites to isolate the virus victums.

Most countries do not have funerals where family is expected to embrace the corpse.

Basic hygiene and awareness of transmission methods, mean this is not a major threat to developed countries. It is still a tragedy for the areas involved, which we should take this chance to help.

CaptainShuddup says

Vicente says

If Sierra Leone is completely depopulated, they could move it and make it a White Conservative's Utopia. A shining beacon of Gold Dollars & Freedom.

Yep ye oh whittey he be opining fo dis

No problem. After Rand Paul is elected President, he can annex Sierra Leona and it will look like this in no time.

Vicente says

bob2356 says

What's different this time is just what I said. The countries are crowded, poor, war torn, with almost non existent medical facilites to isolate the virus victums.

Most countries do not have funerals where family is expected to embrace the corpse.

Basic hygiene and awareness of transmission methods, mean this is not a major threat to developed countries. It is still a tragedy for the areas involved, which we should take this chance to help.

This combined with the distrust of the aid workers is why it is ravaging west Africa. Yep yep. You got it.

Vicente says

we should take this chance to help.

You can't save people from themselves, no matter how much money you are fooled into spending on a fool's errand. We can however protect ourselves by developing a vaccine, and once we have that we might as well distribute it to eradicate the virus permanently as was done with smallpox. All else is revenue maximization, where the real beneficiaries are the revenue recipients who manipulate your desire to feel good by "helping" without really helping. Even the international hospitals over there report a 70% Ebola mortality rate, i.e. the same as or worse than if people were simply isolated at home. (Hospital patients are not usually isolated from each other, which might explain hospitals' worse mortality rate compared to home isolation, but you won't hear that from Bob the medical biller.) The principal advantage of hospitalization is that hospital workers bury the corpses without hugging them, and if you could drop the pseudo-liberal cultural "respect" for other religions then you could just tell people "bury the dead without hugging the corpses" and let Darwin do the rest. A fool and his money are soon parted, there's a sucker born every minute, and some people (ahem, OP) seem to lurch from one ideological extreme to another without objectively analyzing or even acknowledging actual data. Sarcasm doesn't help, spending money on futile gestures pretending to "help" doesn't really help, and mocking the "other" side isn't an effective substitute for analyzing data.

curious2 says

(Hospital patients are not usually isolated from each other, which might explain hospitals' worse mortality rate compared to home isolation, but you won't hear that from Bob the medical biller.)

Why don't you go fuck a mosquito or something? Leave me out of your idiotic bullshit.

Revenue maximization in west africa? What a joke. Obviously you've never traveled further than the state fair. Isolation in third world shitholes like morovia doesn't exist. That's why this has turned into an epidemic in the first place. The very few clinics and hospitals for the poor are massively overcrowded in the best of times. Hugging the corpse, even bigger joke. People in the slums live with extended family in one room tin shacks with no running water or sewage. Taking a shit means going behind the house, wiping with your hand mostly, then going back in and cooking dinner for the family. If anyone gets ebola then the entire shack gets it. As well as a big part of the surrounding area.

Hey CIC if you don't live in atlantic city or patterson (the only places in NJ I know of where people live like that) then you're safe. So relax.

bob2356 says

Revenue maximization in west africa?

The money doesn't come from there. The money comes from other places where people are more easily fooled into maximizing spending addressed to everywhere, and some of the resulting products and services can go there, if that result supports the prevailing existing political/economic revenue model. Otherwise, the answer is, "Don't call us, we'll call you."

bob2356 says

Zaire/drc, Ugunda, Gabon, Sudan are over two thousand miles away (at least) from Guiana, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.

At last, we agree on something: Guiana, being in South America, is definitely more than 2k miles from Africa. I don't know where "Ugunda" might be, but since you can't even spell "areas" I won't expect lessons in geography from you. If you do follow through on your plan to go to Uganda, or now maybe "Ugunda," I hope you'll at least leave the kids safely at home so they can have their own futures instead of sliding sideways at 80mph+ while you try to pick fights with tire manufacturers.

bob2356 says

Obviously you've never traveled further than the state fair.

Well, I haven't had to flee as many medical malpractice victims (and their families) as you and Dr. Mrs. Bob, but I have traveled much of the world including Africa. Your misplaced anger that you can't drive your Mustang because Dr. Mrs. Bob's malpractice became uninsurable in the USA is not my fault, nor is your toxoplasmotic need to troll for fights all over the World Wide Web. Get help for the toxoplasmosis, and let someone else do the driving before you cause injury to yourself and everyone else on the road.

curious2 says

At last, we agree on something: Guiana, being in South America, is definitely more than 2k miles from Africa. I don't know where "Ugunda" might be, but since you can't even spell "areas" I won't expect lessons in geography from you. If you do follow through on your plan to go to Uganda

Guinea,Uganda. Does the typo nanny feel better now? Since I smashed my left hand I make a lot of typos. I don't always bother to correct them.

I've always wondered how it feels to be a total douchebag. Since you are the worlds foremost expert could you describe the experience?

curious2 says

I have traveled much of the world including Africa.

Sure right. Nice to be on the internet where you can pretend to be anyone you want. Your parents say it's time to get hot chocolate and got to bed now. Your homeroom teacher wants you to have a good nights sleep.

The bottom line remains, we should develop a vaccine to eradicate the virus instead of turning it into a chronic revenue model.

Below the bottom line, buried like old cat litter, is yet another troll comment from medical biller Bob that I should have ignored but will reply to.

bob2356 says

Does the typo nanny feel better now? Since I smashed my left hand I make a lot of typos.

There is no way a left hand injury could put an apostrophe (right side of keyboard) into "areas" almost every time you type it, so your latest comment shows your self-delusion and provides yet another example of your toxoplasmotic need to pick losing fights like a toxoplasmotic mouse searching for cats. All those injuries should be telling you something: get help for the chronic behavioral consequences of toxoplasmosis, which persist long after infection. The life you save may be your own, or someone you care about.

curious2 says

The bottom line remains, we should develop a vaccine to eradicate the virus instead of turning it into a chronic revenue model.

The cost of developing new vaccines, starts at hundreds of millions of dollars. Previously it's been thought the costs of containment and treating specific outbreaks was cheaper than a vaccine. There are tons of diseases, where there are too few sufferers to rate much real research. Ebola up until now was one of those.

It's only a priority now, because people are baselessly shit-scared it might run wild in New Jersey or something. Thus the skinflints who don't believe in foreign aid suddenly open the purse. You want $600 million? A billion? For a disease with victims so far well below 10,000 cases since 1970's? Well OK!

"Newsweek: The U.S. Is Sitting on Promising Ebola Vaccines
***
Today, several vaccines and drugs are on the edge of becoming useful—they have shown promise in animal studies, and some are so far along that human clinical trials could probably have begun at any time in the past several years, Feldmann says. One promising vaccine he helped develop was shown in lab tests to fully protect rhesus macaques against contracting Ebola-Zaire, the strain now tearing through Central and West Africa. It even worked as a treatment—it saved four out of eight animals infected with the virus. For an infection that can sometimes reach a kill rate in humans of around 90 percent, those are excellent results.

“What is frustrating is that we have another outbreak where potentially none of these treatment options are being used,” Feldmann says. “The thinking has to change now. We can’t just wait and wait and wait. Some of these vaccines have been stuck in this position for 10 years.”

That article and others report DoD has been funding some Ebola research efforts for years, based on its potential for use in bioterror and biological warfare. Unfortunately, certain people insist on selling traditional maintenance rather than making real progress towards actual solutions.

The real crime and horror here has been in watching the president ignore the problem until his eyes were bleeding. Don't think for a minute that you can put a positive spin on this one. Ebola is the devil's masterpiece and we waited until the paint was dry. eab

http://www.click2houston.com/news/dallas-hospital-isolates-patient-for-possible-ebola-symptoms/28325978

curious2 says

There is no way a left hand injury could put an apostrophe (right side of keyboard) into "areas" every time you type it, so your latest comment shows your self-delusion

areas isn't spelled area's anywhere in this post by me or anyone else. I may have done it somewhere else at some time. I can make a typo with either hand but most are left.

You are are really a creepy and deranged individual. Calculating which hand my non existent typo was on is really disturbing stuff. I can certainly see why you would be afraid of mental health professionals. You don't want to lose you imaginary (and only) friends if you got treated. Anyone with the desire and enough time on their hands to be stalking around looking at old posts for a possible typo is what (in the non PC days) we used call just plain old nuts. I'm starting to wonder if I should be using a proxy server for patnet with you around. Hopefully you are just obsessive and deranged, not dangerous.

Call it Crazy says

Sure... There's no way it's coming to the U.S. There's an ocean between us and Africa. How would the virus even get here, swim??

Oh we've had cases come across, it may have escaped your notice we brought some here for treatment. Where's the epidemic? Keep cowering under your bed.

Ever notice the more politicians needs a distraction, then the bigger the Asian, or African epidemic.

Call it Crazy says

CDC Confirms Patient In Dallas Has The Ebola Virus

THis is the first time an Ameircan President was so incompetent that he just sat on his stuipid black ass and just waited for ebola to make it to the states.

I mean we do have those FEMA camps just sitting vacant, and bunch of horny gun nuts in POlice departments all over the country with assault weapons and battle tanks. They would love nothing more than to have an excuse to round up everyone with a cough and send their whole family and everyone they ever came in contact with and lock them up in a FEMA camp.

"Woody you did a heckuva job!"

Call it Crazy says

Looks like their odds were better than 18%...

Where's that epidemic with thousands of infections? Oh right, there isn't one here.

The title of this thread was inexact. At the time I wrote it (and was dismissed), it was clearly headed out of control in West Africa. Not here.