Date: October 13th, 2014 11:16 AM Author: useless maroon dilemma
Seems like the threat of Ebola coming to the US would be an issue that everyone can agree on. The fact that people are catching Ebola and dying from it in our borders is chilling and something that should be at least not dismissed as NBD. Especially when medical personnel are getting it.
Yet strangely, libs, including xoxo libs, are zealously arguing that Ebola is NBD and is some republican scare tactic scheme.
Yup! Someone posted an article earlier where the NIH was lamenting how they'd have a cure for Ebola by now if not for the cuts. In the same article it said Obama's 2015 budget had basically the same amount of funding for NIH.
Date: October 13th, 2014 11:25 AM Author: snowy wonderful cruise ship
Kind of, not really a lib here:
Honestly, my lack of concern comes down to math. The disease kills too quickly and the risk of casual transmission too low for this to become widespread. Sure, if you are a medical professional dealing directly with a patient you need to be very careful, otherwise it's nbd.
Why haven't Dallas d00d's family come down with it? How did Senegal seem to stop it?
We have containment mechanisms in place that Liberia doesn't have, not to mention a smaller percentage of fuck nuts who will turn to local "healers" when they get a fever
Date: October 13th, 2014 11:33 AM Author: snowy wonderful cruise ship
She was dealing with "explosive" diarrhea and projectile vomiting before ebola was officially diagnosed and hazmat suits employed. Like I said, if you are directly caring for a victim you need to be careful as hell. But unless you plan on changing stranger's diapers on the bus you will be ok.
Date: October 13th, 2014 11:33 AM Author: Ungodly location friendly grandma
africa has the best natural containment mechanism - remote harsh terrain difficult for poors on camels to tavel. america has zip cars & arena music festivals every day. we're fucked
Date: October 13th, 2014 11:36 AM Author: animeboi
The issue was never that ebola could become epidemic in the US, but that even a few isolated outbreaks would cost millions, needlessly kill Americans and create a panic. All this could be largely avoided by imposing a travel ban on a couple of irrelevant cannibal republics. But no, because shitlib open borders/anti-raciss ideology trumps prudence and common sense.
Date: October 13th, 2014 11:56 AM Author: snowy wonderful cruise ship
Because its safer for everyone if they stay put and die/survive. If they scurry off into nearby villages/countries then containment becomes that much harder.
Date: October 13th, 2014 11:51 AM Author: bearded state
You think some nignog in Liberia know or cares what US travel policy is when they are mostly concerned with the apocalypto world they are living? How dumb are you, brother? They all want out.
I didn't come up with this, I can point you to the World Health Organization. Unless they are "in on it" and then we are in 9/11 truther, Al gore global warming conspiracy territory and this conversation can end.
For whatever reason they are staying. Either it's not really that bad or they have some belief the west can help them. It doesn't cost anything to panic and run away if you thought you were facing certain death.
Date: October 13th, 2014 12:02 PM Author: Mauve stage
stop being logical bro we are all going to die because obama engineered ebola to kill white christians so that gays could abort straight children in benghazi.
Date: October 13th, 2014 11:31 AM Author: demanding home main people
How serious is the disease? Didn't Obama mention that we shouldn't be concerned. But, then I saw a headline from teh CDC guy saying that it could be the next HIV/AIDs.
Date: October 13th, 2014 11:55 AM Author: Mauve stage
I get the conservaheroes on this board and elsewhere love to act like every bad thing that happens on Obama's watch is (1) one of the greatest calamities of all time; and (2) part of Obama's secret muslim plan to murder the white race. But let's not be stupid here. As someone that has been obsessed with Ebola for a long time (since reading "The Coming Plague" in high school), a few thoughts:
(a) Ebola is not easy to transmit. That is especially true because Ebola doesn't have any natural reservoirs here like, say, the fruit bats in Africa that are largely responsible for African outbreaks. That means person-to-person transmission is our only risk.
(b) Because person-to-person transmission is its only mechanism here, there are strong limits on its ability to move in the US. It is hardly surprising the nurse got sick--caregivers are some of the first people to get sick when there is an outbreak. The public awareness of Ebola, combined with our health infrastructure, and the lack of non-human transmission vectors here (not to mention the fact that our culture doesn't encourage touching dead bodies) renders it virtually impossible for this to be an epidemic unless the virus rapidly mutates to go airborne. And if that happens, closing the fucking borders won't make a difference any way.
(c) Closing the borders is a dumb, symbolic, counter-productive gesture. You could make a better case for closing inter-state borders in places where d68 has been killing kids. As long as you're employing basic screening overseas and stateside, the odds of more than one or two isolated cases is highly unlikely. There is a real risk that taking steps like this could also dramatically worsen the african ebola crisis.
Date: October 13th, 2014 12:05 PM Author: Mauve stage
That doesn't matter. What matters is that those bats DO NOT CARRY EBOLA and WILL NOT CARRY EBOLA just because some rando in Dallas has ebola. Do you know how disease reservoirs work?
first sentence of (a) seems overstated, but even if it's truly difficult to transmit, why do we need to risk any american cases at all? lack of natural reservoirs is obviously one reason that an epidemic is unlikely, but there's a lot of daylight between "epidemic is unlikely" and "nothing to see here, you are all mind-poisoned slaves of the republican party"
(b) seems to hinge on first sentence of (a). person-to-person is perfectly adequate for a disease outbreak, so the question then becomes what the person-to-person risk is. one obvious concern is that ebola can live in your jizz for a few weeks after you've recovered, so what if it starts to act as a lethal STD?
> Closing the borders is a dumb, symbolic, counter-productive gesture
if it's counter-productive, it's dumb and symbolic. but you don't really explain why it's counter-productive
> There is a real risk that taking steps like this could also dramatically worsen the african ebola crisis
you don't explain this either and it's hardly intuitive
Date: October 13th, 2014 12:08 PM Author: Mauve stage
If you have a basis to say that (a) is overstated or (b) is wrong, please advise. I didn't pull this out of my ass--I've been obsessed with Ebola for years.
Ebola living in semen is not that big of a deal when you only have two cases in the US. I'm not even sure how your point really gets to my points at all, brother.
It is counter-productive because we are getting essentially no benefit in the US aside from the symbolic gesture, and in the process are creating an environment that will only increase panic in Africa. That will further worsen containment there and further expand the epidemic. The more ebola outbreaks there are, the greater the chances it mutates over time into something worse. I know conservaheroes are on that "LOL FUCK THEM ITS AFRICA" tip, but we all have a global stake in minimizing the number of times this virus infects humans. More infections will likely have a modest downward pressure on its lethality, but a strong upward pressure on transmissibility.
"transmitted in bodily fluids" isn't quite the same as "hard to get". transmission via jizz is exactly how aids, which is also a bodily-fluids virus, got across the atlantic.
anyway, i'm not saying that you're actually wrong that it's hard to transmit, i'm saying that even if it is, we shouldn't take unnecessary risks because there is little upside and significant downside.
>> It is counter-productive because we are getting essentially no benefit in the US aside from the symbolic gesture, and in the process are creating an environment that will only increase panic in Africa. That will further worsen containment there and further expand the epidemic.
someone said this upthread, but it seems really convoluted to argue that africans will be more panicked by a US travel ban than by their relatives and neighbors dying horribly. nigeria dealt with the issue by quarantine, isn't quarantine pretty much how you handle disease outbreaks generally?
i'm aware of the official position, but i want you to credibly explain the reasoning behind it, because the idea that a US travel ban will actually CAUSE an epidemic seems like bullshit
as for the rest, i haven't heard anyone in the media address the ebola-as-STD issue at all, do you have any thoughts of your own on this subject
Date: October 13th, 2014 12:50 PM Author: Mauve stage
i've explained it above. travel bans will increase panic and mistrust of western medicine, and encourage migration even among people that wouldn't have the option to travel by plane. that will increase transmission rates, and the more people that get ebola the more likely it mutates in dangerous ways. we get virtually no benefit in the US from a travel ban aside from the symbolic gesture, and run the risk of worsening the african crisis in a manner that increase the risk of a global problem. and regardless the infected in africa are largely the destitute, who can't afford to get on a plane anyway.
the STD bit has been reported even by lefty rags like mother jones, so don't act like its some conservahero secret. and that is only an issue if you have appreciable infections in the US in the first place. we don't, so while it is an interesting dynamic in how transmission works it doesn't have much to do with our current discussion in re US policy.
i think you're way off on this stuff, but in all seriousness thanks for engaging reasonably rather than just screaming "shitlib" or "nignog" over and over again.
>> the STD bit has been reported even by lefty rags like mother jones, so don't act like its some conservahero secret.
i haven't heard it reported by anyone, lib or conservative, so i'm glad to hear it's being talked about. i don't think that it's some "conservahero secret", just an aspect of the disease that isn't being widely discussed. it seems obvious to me that this is the most dangerous thing about it, because sexual transmission by (currently) asymptomatic carriers is exactly how we got a serious aids problem.
>> travel bans will increase panic and mistrust of western medicine, and encourage migration even among people that wouldn't have the option to travel by plane... regardless the infected in africa are largely the destitute, who can't afford to get on a plane anyway.
i just don't get this part. is this something that we have some kind of evidence for? the logic seems unconvincing, and the last sentence seems to contradict the first (people who can't travel and live in villages will suddenly panic because they are now banned from traveling?)
>> [the STD point] is only an issue if you have appreciable infections in the US in the first place
or if carriers who are by now asymptomatic come to the US and have sex with americans, which doesn't seem impossible
>> in all seriousness thanks for engaging reasonably rather than just screaming "shitlib" or "nignog" over and over again
same to you, except for that "conservahero secret" crack. you might want to slow your roll a little, based on memphis bleek's subthread it's not playing well to other liberals who are not up on the latest agency positions
this has been explained a few times, and no point in doing it further. if you don't buy it, you don't buy it. i have yet to see any public health official or epidemiologist worldwide that disagrees with this logic, but i'd be happy to hear a sane counterpoint other than "who cares as long as we can save even a single american life."
i hear what you're saying, but as i understand it that only applies after you've gone symptomatic and up to 90 days post infection.
my crack isn't at everyone worried about ebola. i'm not saying it's not a worrisome issue that we shouldn't take seriously. it is directed to the fucking idiots above that just want to take political shots and feed panic, rather than making any effort to rationally consider this stuff.
you haven't explained what you're claiming to be the universal consensus among epidemiologists, you've just restated what you claim to be their conclusions a lot of times. i'm sure that scientists have indeed reached those conclusions, but the logic seems facially bizarre, and i would be much more convinced with some kind of detailed reasoning or, better, epidemiological data about counterintuitive effects of travel bans or something. maybe this is a commonplace in epidemiology or something, but to a layman (or at least this one) it comes across as labored and unconvincing.
>> i hear what you're saying, but as i understand it that only applies after you've gone symptomatic and up to 90 days post infection.
that's pretty scary, bro. idk if there is any possibility of asymptomatic carriers typhoid mary style, but these days, jizz moves pretty freely
Date: October 13th, 2014 1:27 PM Author: Mauve stage
here is one recent example of a high level NIH guy saying "this is stupid," though when elizabeth hasselbeck is supporting your position that should already be a strong sign it is pretty dumb.
I don't particularly have the time to collect scholarly literature on this, but you'll have a hard time finding any health officials that disagree.
Your last paragraph kind of gets to my point: most people's reactions to this are based on "what a scary idea" and not facts. Like I said, my understanding is that your scenario of a pre-symptomatic dude passing ebola around with semen is a fantasy because the viral loads wouldn't be sufficient to cause infection. happy to be shown that i'm wrong if i'm wrong.
lol at fox, i have never watched it and it's pretty lulzy. also i just looked up the host, is she seriously from "the view"?
i get his point about the traffic volume and it's a good refudiation of the common-sense position that we should "close the border" if the disease really is NBD, able to be contained with low-tech airport screening measures (though that doesn't reach the STD question since that is post-recovery). like i said, i'm willing to accept that a consensus exists among experts. i'd just like more color on it (and in that clip, he doesn't get into the question of worsening an epidemic through travel bans).
bro, reread the thread. your position is basically the equivalent of thinking that the president is a SEKRIT MOOSLIM because HE SHUK TEH MARINE'S HAND!!!!
i think the line goes that there's no real risk, but a travel ban would cause harm by panicking the africans and thus actually spread the disease more. however, conservative racists just want to close the border because they hate niggers and want to embarrass the president.
Date: October 13th, 2014 1:11 PM Author: Mauve stage
my position =/= not being concerned about a possible outbreak of ebola. my point is that closing the borders and panicking will do more harm than good.