Ebola is now running wild in America

[JimC]

The simplest and most vital procedure of hygiene is to wash your hands thoroughly before you eat or prepare food. Getting that sorted will deal with most non-apocalyptic disease issues.

[mistermack]

The simplest and most vital procedure of hygiene is to wash your hands thoroughly before you eat or prepare food. Getting that sorted will deal with most non-apocalyptic disease issues.

Steady on !

Ebola's not even here yet !!

[Tero]

I just saw on the tele that Obama said that he kissed and hugged and shook hands with some of the nurses that treated this Liberian guy. If Prez gets it, there'll be some panic! (Well, the tea-tards will praise God).

He won't get it as he has his own plane and toilet. Therefore, does not need to share toilet seats. Toilet seats have now been determined the most likely way to transmit ebola in America. You can even fly, just so you wear an adult diaper.

[piscator]

It looks like Seward's decision not to play ball with the cruise ship industry in a big way will pay dividends in the short term.
Cruise ships come and dock here, but their passengers get on the train or bus, and fuck off pretty quick. Only a few Princess passengers bound for the Windsong Lodge every now and then. This is because the City of Seward has declined to offer the 30-40 year tax breaks the cruise ship lines have asked for to locate infrastructure within the City. Moreover, local merchants have declined to give kickbacks to the cruise lines, because that's how it starts...

(Communities in SEAK opened their arms to the cruise ship industry, and now most of their downtown tourist districts are foreign-owned and seasonally operated by agents or proxies for the cruise lines, who act in the interests of their financiers in local politics, for instance voting to extend tax breaks and lower docking fees. Cruise lines consider a nickle spent in the local economy as (-$0.05 income) + (-$0.05 opportunity cost). Their passengers are as insulated from Alaska as they would be in Jamaica, rarely coming into contact with anyone not an employee or agent of whatever cruise ship line, who are likely working cheap and up for their first trip too. )

So, while there may be (ostensibly) 42 ships from Princess, Royal Caribbean, Royal Norwegian, Millennium, and Cunard Lines scheduled to arrive in my village next May-Sept, the loss of their business won't have much effect on our economy as it will in SEAK.

The loss of Ted Stevens International Airport, however, would render this State a disaster area. The Oilpatch would shut down, as most of the key positions on the North Slope, indeed the world, are filled by Texans and Louisianans and Mississippians who fly up then back every two weeks.

Come to think of it, a year or two of Ebola outbreak would flush out a lot of riffraff up here...Maybe even return this State to the Centrist-Progressive thinking that started the Permanent Fund and included the individual right to privacy and the resource management priority of Maximum SUSTAINED Yield in our State Constitution.

[mistermack]

This continuing fiasco in Texas, in one of the most expensive hospitals around, has shattered the myth that the US health system is ''the best''. It's been incompetence from the word go, and it's still running.
Firstly, Duncan was turned away from the hospital, even though he told them ebola was a possibility, that he had just come from Liberia, and he had the symptoms.
Then two nurses catch it, in spite of the so-called precautions by one of the most ''modern'' hospitals in the world. Then a nurse is told she's fit to travel by air, when she reports a temperature.
How much more incompetent can it get?

It seems like when there is no big money to be made, the US system is pretty crap. Which hardly comes as any surprise. It's all about money. Why are they going to spend money, on something that doesn't make money?

[Tero]

Them Texas hospitals should just stick to their new mission: abortions. Clinics no good for abortions now.

[mistermack]

Several international teams have gone to Nigeria, to study what they did right, to stop the outbreak in it's tracks.
They should send a team from Texas. It might help next time.

I would love to see that.

[cronus]

It's expensive being poor.

[Tero]

Watch out libertarians! Ebola causing science!
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz ... rn-science

[cronus]

Watch out libertarians! Ebola causing science!
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz ... rn-science

...but only for a while, until the lights go out and social collapse occurs.

[Tero]

Ebola testing begins for nurse's dog.

Sheesh. Collapse my ass. We are just sitting pretty, protected.

[mistermack]

I'm beginning to think that there might be something about this part of West Africa that make the Ebola spread. Something in their lifestyle and customs.

There has been several mentions of the funeral practices, of washing, and touching and kissing the body of the relative, before burial. If they are still sticking to this, it's not surprising that it's still spreading and expanding. Apparently, the virus is most contagious of all, in a recently dead person.

Maybe Nigeria doesn't have the same customs, or maybe the message got across better, to avoid this practice while ebola is about.

If it's something like that that's causing the spread, then Ebola might not be such a threat to the rest of the world, as it looks at the moment.

[pErvinalia]

Possibly just poor hygiene all around. The poorer an area the worse hygiene will be. Particularly when clean running water and sewerage sanitation is lacking.

[pErvinalia]

This is what hyperbole merchants like Seth don't understand. Proper sanitation and advanced health care means the threat to the West is currently very minor.

[mistermack]

This is what hyperbole merchants like Seth don't understand. Proper sanitation and advanced health care means the threat to the West is currently very minor.

That might be right. Although it didn't stop all those nurses from catching it.
Even in Spain and the USA. But they were dealing with very sick or dead people, with maximum viral load.
It might be that people with early symptoms are not that much of a threat to the general public, but people who are very sick or dead are pretty lethal with the slightest contact.