I was just going to add another comment to my previous post on whether Ebola can be airborne but comments are now closed. The CDC has now changed its guidelines on transmission. I linked to Patterico because he has a good post on this. The guidelines are out now as public knowledge.
“If you are sniffling and sneezing, you produce microorganisms that can get on stuff in a room. If people touch them, they could be” infected, said Dr. Meryl Nass, of the Institute for Public Accuracy in Washington, DC.
Nass pointed to a poster the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quietly released on its Web site saying the deadly virus can be spread through “droplets.”
Why is this stuff coming out in drips (sorry for the pun) like it was Benghazi ?
“The CDC said it doesn’t spread at all by air, then Friday they came out with this poster,” she said. “They admit that these particles or droplets may land on objects such as doorknobs and that Ebola can be transmitted that way.”
I won’t duplicate any more of Patterico’s post as he has been on the case nearly as long as I have.
As for the idiot nurse from Africa who defied authority about quarantine and is suing, she has more trouble today.
Maine state police were stationed outside the home of Ebola nurse Kaci Hickox Wednesday as Gov. Paul LePage said he was seeking legal authority to force the “unwilling” health care workers to remain quarantined for 21 days.
The 33-year-old nurse, who has shown no symptoms of the deadly virus, arrived in Maine on Monday after being forcibly held in an isolation tent in New Jersey for three days under that state’s strict new law for health care workers who have recently treated Ebola patients in West Africa.
There is actually little risk as she is a CDC Epidemiology Fellow with little contact with patient care.
She is also a lefty Obama supporter.
It turns out that Kaci Hickox is a registered democrat and Obama supporter who works for the CDC. “The nurse currently quarantined in New Jersey is an employee for the Centers for Disease Control and a registered Democrat with a history of left-wing advocacy,” reports GotNews.com.
The CDC Epidemiology Fellowships are http://www.cdc.gov/eis/index.html not patient care positions.
EIS officers are on the public health frontlines, conducting epidemiologic investigations, research, and public health surveillance both nationally and internationally.
She has an number of published papers on epidemiology that are statistical studies, not clinical care.
With the CDC chaning their facts on a weekly basis any wonder their credibility is low?
After blaming the two infected nurses in Texas for not ‘following protocol’ it may be the egg on the CDC’s face is starting to smart.
Science realizes that viri do not care what is politically correct, and will infect you regardless of your party affiliation. The CDC should be doing science rather than politics.
They have no proof to my knowledge of the reservoir of Ebola in the wild. If their ‘correctness’ allows it to get into the wild in USA, they should be fired and imprisoned. IMO.
Funny how Kaci Hickox demands that SHE not be quarantined as if she were ‘special’. Sauce for the goose, and for the gander, too.
Phooey on them all.
Why is this stuff coming out in drips (sorry for the pun) like it was Benghazi?
Because the current meritocratic Elite Rulers think they need public belief in their omniscience in order to
leadcontrol. The drips occur because information can no longer be contained for ever. The truth drips out and when it does, the ER have to concede the minimum amount necessary to feel like they are still omniscient. But more and more people are seeing that the emperor has no clothes (see also Anthropogenic Global Warming). And when too many people figure it out, we’ll get a new elite.Obama Quarantines Soldiers, but Ebola Doctors, Nurses Can Do Whatever they Want
Conclusion: We are ruled by people towards whom we have no moral obligations.
This is suicidally stupid.
————
Obama holds photo op with doctors who worked in west Africa — and who are still in the Ebola monitoring period
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/10/29/obama-holds-photo-op-with-doctors-who-worked-in-west-africa-and-who-are-still-in-the-ebola-monitoring-period/
Michael Kennedy,
Ebola “Droplet transmission” is not “Airborne” in the strict technical sense the CDC or WHO uses the term.
It is a distiction w/o a difference for non-medical folks operating in an indoor, airconditioned environment.
See the pictograph of droplet transmission versus airborne at this link —
http://virologydownunder.blogspot.com.au/2014/08/ebola-virus-may-be-spread-by-droplets.html
This is Hurricane Katrina standards of competence. On second thoughts, it’s worse. These dimwits have had nine months to organise against the risk of the arrival of Ebola, and many years to organise against potential viral pandemics. Dear God they are clueless.
The NY Post says it all below —
———
Ebola’s ‘science’: Why it’s so hard to manage
By Betsy McCaughey October 28, 2014 | 7:51pm
http://nypost.com/2014/10/28/ebolas-science-why-its-so-hard-to-manage/
Key passage:
Here’s the science:
• About one in seven people infected with Ebola doesn’t have a fever before diagnosis. Airport screening relies largely on temperature-taking. Data from over 4,000 Ebola cases (the most complete analysis ever) published Oct. 16 in the New England Journal of Medicine show that 13 percent of patients don’t develop fever early on.
• Doctors and nurses can’t be depended on to spot Ebola in themselves faster than other people. Relying on them to monitor themselves assumes they will catch any sign of illness quickly and avoid spreading it. But the New England Journal research found doctors and nurses with Ebola don’t get to the hospital sooner.
• Health-care workers who treat Ebola patients are at risk of getting it, despite wearing protective gear. As of Oct. 25, the World Health Organization reports that 450 health-care workers contracted Ebola this year, and 244 have died.
• One staffer at Doctors Without Borders in Guinea who worked with Spencer called him a “rigorous man” who carefully followed procedures in removing his protective gear and decontaminating it, adding “we understand that we are also at risk despite the measures.”
The most important fact about Ebola is how little we know. There’s no cure for the infected, no vaccine and no knowledge of how the virus might behave in colder temperatures. Doctors, nurses and missionaries who nobly volunteer in Africa could inadvertently be bringing Ebola home to every continent, giving the virus wings.
Plus
Equals:
I don’t have to feel guilty about my Schadenfreude if he spikes a fever on the golf course or in the Hamptons.
Subotai Bahadur, who notes that he already thinks that if the NY Doctor or the CDC “special snowflake” nurse who is too good for even self quarantine get it, there will be some karmic justice involved.
“Ebola “Droplet transmission” is not “Airborne” in the strict technical sense the CDC or WHO uses the term.”
The difference is not significant. I remember when, early in the AIDS epidemic, an orthopedic surgeon at San Francisco General, at the heart of the early epidemic, did a study that showed HIV (not that it was known as such at the time) could travel in blood spray created by the power tools orthopedists used. She was vilified for pointing this out. She later became deranged and I always wondered if the experience had something to do with it.
This is an amazing display of political management of a disease and I remember the early days of AIDS well. It is very familiar.
There is an interesting interview with Stephen Hatfill who knows something about biosafety in the Atlantic.
For one objection, Hatfill wants it known that, while it must be emphasized that airborne droplet and particle transmission between humans has not been evident in this outbreak, aerosol droplet transmission of Ebola virus has been shown in animal studies. “It is therefore irresponsible for government health officials to emphatically state that aerosol transmission does not occur,” he writes. He also believes the argument against a national quarantine is “inexcusable in light of the size of the current West African epidemic.”
Trouble is growing, not resolving.
People that have been trapping bats and other animals in these high biodiversity areas are finding viral sequences, and we don’t know what they’re from. This is not in the GenBank database. So there are things lurking out there we don’t have a clue about. How do you get a rabies virus that causes hemorrhagic fever? Well, going back through the literature, there’s a fish virus that can cause hemorrhagic septicemia. The frequency that these things are happening is very disturbing. Just remember, our population’s doubled in 27 years. So you encroach on animal habitats, or you fragment those animal habitats, you disrupt the ecology, the normal food sources.
There’s more and it is scary.
Hatfill: [Thomas Frieden, CDC director] has become a political animal, in my opinion. And when you’re dealing with this type of agent with no cure, no real vaccine, you must always err on the side of caution. They ignored a lot of published data. We’ve known for years now that the skin is a site of viral replication. The Langerhans cells, the antigen-presenting cells in the skin, are major targets for Ebola. The strains we know of.
What that means is, you’re shedding virus from the skin to the point where Bob Swanepoel [a professor of medical virology at University of Pretoria] and some people actually found you could come up, take a swab, just a cotton swab off the skin, and diagnose [Ebola] with a non-PCR method, something like immunohistochemistry, and get a positive result from a live virus.
The African epidemics are burning out like the Black Death did. Why ? Quarantine.
“This is suicidally stupid.”
No one else in Dallas, no matter how foolishly they behaved, had Ebola: not the police officer who went to the local clinic, not the politician who entered the apartment, not….
Psychological, biological and economic warfare. Class warfare and race baiting, non pareil. Saturation scandal. Combine all that with the Trojan horse of mass colonization and jihad apologism, I’m thinking we need to come up with a different term for incompetence.
Psychological, biological and economic warfare. Class warfare and race baiting, non pareil. Saturation scandal. Combine all that with the Trojan horse of mass colonization and jihad apologism…
All in a days work for Leftists.
Day-by-day very on topic….
http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/1031141.jpg
Conclusion: We are ruled by people towards whom we have no moral obligations.
Correct.