Promoted by Steven D (with small title change). I have some personal matters which require my attention, and Martin is likely not going to be posting much today, so thank-you Marie.
The (MSM induced?) panic in this country over one man carrying the Ebola virus entering the US is from a health standpoint irrational. Not to dismiss the seriousness of the epidemic in certain western African countries nor that it doesn’t need to be contained as well as possible. Both given short shrift in the west from the early warnings issued by Médecins Sans Frontière (MSF). The danger is highest for health care workers treating Ebola patients and not the general public. It’s been spreading in areas with extremely limited health care resources, poor sanitation, and cultural practices that facilitates its spread.
Equally troubling, if not more so, is the ease with which people are engaging in unfounded conspiratorial thinking. And that’s not limited to those in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone.
Continue reading below the fold …
CBS News cites social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram as the promoters of fears and conspiracies. If they’d done a bit more investigation, they would have seen that the comment sections to MSM news reports are jam-packed with such assertions and rightwing conspiracy sites are having a field day. Most of them boil down into some organization, usually governmental, that is hiding the extent of the epidemic and/or difficulty of transmission and/or having created and/or disseminated the virus to kill off certain populations. A few reject that it’s a virus at all.
As someone who enjoys donning a tin-foil hat on occasion, I view these Ebola conspiracists as dangerous crazies. Pattern recognition is a valuable human (probably animal) quality. But only when the “dots” are real and the logic connecting them is solid. Otherwise it leads to nonsense like the Birthers. And one real dot is not a pattern either. That leads to dangerous illness as The Guardian reported: Polio outbreak reaches record high of 202 cases in Pakistan this year.
Pakistan has detected a record number of polio cases already this year, a senior government official said Saturday, as militants target vaccination teams and accuse doctors of being spies and sterilising boys.
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It’s true that the US unconscionably employed a doctor in the effort to track down OBL. Breaking the trust necessary for health care workers to do their polio vaccine work in rural parts of Pakistan is the fault of the USG and not the people that are now suspicious of health care workers. Restoring such trust will take time and effort. Unfortunately, in the interim many innocent people will become polio victims.
But how the hell did people make the leap to injections that would sterilize boys? Rumors from Indira Ghandi’s forced sterilization programme in the early 1970s? With a population over 186 million (up from 59 million in 1970), the government of Pakistan may wish that such a substance existed, but it doesn’t. Plus,
Widespread or systematic forced sterilization has been recognized as a crime against humanity by the Rome Statute in the Explanatory Memorandum. This memorandum defines the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court .
Not that Pakistan is a signatory to the Rome Statute (and the US hasn’t ratified it). But neither is China nor India.
All things considered, there is some legitimacy for certain populations to be suspicious of diseases and western medical treatments for them. But that doesn’t include white USians. They’re just in a subset that may exist in all populations that engage in stinkin thinkin.
Disease is the single most terrifying thing to me. There’s nothing I can do about it except count on my natural body to fight it and as I’m a little sickly I don’t have much help with that. At least I won’t die from immune system overreaction. That said I do think the government is soft selling the danger a little bit simply to prevent panic. Nothing they are saying is a lie but stuff like it is not possible to catch aebola if someone sneezes on you is unture, just very unlikely.
I do think travel from West Africa should be banned for anyone not in an NGO military or government capacity certainly family visits like that of Mr Duncan should not happen.
I understand your point but isolating the countries that are already overwhelmed with this disease is probably not the best response. Ebola isn’t the flu, it is not easily transmitted. We have an advanced medical system, which despite its flaws is much better able to contain any outbreak before it gets started.
What we need to be doing is a world-wide response to help the countries suffering the most – otherwise we are turning those people into lab rats. The longer we let it rage unchecked in Africa the longer it remains a crisis that could affect us much worse than it is now. If those societies collapse you will see migration, panic, even armed conflicts break out and of course the idea that the US is to blame for what happened will be heavily promoted. We waited far too long to help these folks, but isolation will only make matters worse for them and ultimately worse for us, should the virus mutate into a more easily transmitted form. At the very least we are condemning a large part of Africa to social unrest, governmental failures and worse for years to come.
I don’t understand how this post contradicts my suggestion. Obviously aid workers, US military,bLiberian officials etc. would be allowed in or out. But what possible good would allowing a citizen of Liberia to leave at their own whim (keep in mind Liberian officials mentioned in comments on Mr Duncan that a person in the very early stages could drive down their fever long enough to fool the scanner) do? How does preventing that contribute to letting epidemic rage unchecked?
Good thing you live in a developed country where the rate of transmissable diseases and water borne are lower. Get your flu shot and use caution when in crowded spaces/places and you shouldn’t have much to worry about.
Ebola doesn’t have a latent phase where the host is healthy and infectious. Victims are obviously very ill when they are infectious.
I’ve always felt fortunate that the polio vaccine became available before another epidemic rolled through the country. Otherwise, had to live through measles, mumps, and chicken-pox.
Actually I’ve noted that from the exact language of officials there maybe a chance (meaning more than zero essentially negligable) of transmission before symptoms are noted.
Also if you read a previous comment you’ll know I got a flu shot 10 days ago.
Okay, now combine that close to zero risk with your personal risk of coming in close contact with someone that has acquired Ebola and is in the asymptomatic and contagious window. In MN. Getting closer to zero.
It’s not difficult for me to recall all the panicked responses when AIDS was first recognized as a disease and how it was transmitted was undefined. But at that time, HIV was unknown and the disease already had a foothold in the US. Ebola is known and has been studied for longer than HIV. There’s still much not known if it gets beyond the western African region and into large slums, and preventing that is a priority.
Yes, in this instance Africa’s increased urbanization has contributed to the difficulties.
In all the countries you mentioned, the panic is being amplified by more than just the internet. It is being amplified as a political strategy to make people afraid and angry in order to distract from serious issues or to motivate action for some agenda — like closing the borders or legitimizing fundamentalist religion or medical quacks of all stripes.
In the US, Republican politicians are actively hyping the panic and trying to associate it with immigration. Some of those mysterious commenters and emailers could very well be hired folks who are part of the GOP information war in the run-up to this mid-term election.
There are actual events that propagandists can point to: the US political use of anthrax to gain homeland security legislation; the accusations that Saddam Hussein was preparing biological warfare, the forced sterilizations of US black women in the early part of the 20th century, and the events that you cited.
What the US panic combines is a quadruple punch: terrorists, ebola (incurable disease) epidemic, immigration at borders, and African (black) people “sneaking in”.
What they should be concerned about is the financial hobbling of our public health system through privitization, MBA managers of hospitals, hobbling cuts to expenditures for WHO, NIH, and CDC, and the anti-vaccine campaign against HPV vaccine (motivated by the usual sexual anxiety and wish for control of women). As the MMR vaccine panic has subsided, the HPV panic has taken its place.
With all due respect, absent faulty pattern recognition, propaganda to instill fear in a population that leads the people to engage in useless or counterproductive actions doesn’t work well. The “plastic sheeting and duct tape” buying frenzy after 9/11 is one of the clearest examples of this.
Couldn’t agree more with: What they should be concerned about is the financial hobbling of our public health system …. Safe, clean water, sanitation, vaccines, and properly used antibiotics have done more to make us healthier and longer-lived than all the rest of modern medicine. Huge bang for the buck. But it’s so taken for granted that most people don’t appreciate that the buck must always be spent.
It doesn’t work well with respect to actually stopping the virus. It works great for political grandstanding and suppressing votes for the other guy. Just watch ebola become a part of the next Max-Cleland-like attack ads on Democrats. The GOP is already lobbing ISIS ads at Michelle Nunn…the George H.W. Bush Points of Light Foundation former executive director. They found that Poppy Bush gave a little money to scary Muslims.
I suspect before November 4 we will be seeing “Minutemen” open carrying around airports just to make sure no “Ebloa immigrant” slips through.
Good infrastructure gets taken for granted. The conservative individualist over-emphasis denies that infrastructure exists except as an imposition by government that could be better privatized (ripped off at bargain prices, allowed to deteriorate, and sending the operating revenues right into the privatizer’s bank account). Not coincidentally what happened to most county hospitals in the US.
Nunn could use the picture of al-Baghadi and McCain, and McCain’s demand to increase funding for IS militias. Hell, add the SC pearl clutcher to the increased funding part.
And what are those airport “minutemen” going to use to profile suspected Ebola carriers? Race? As if they could begin to see the difference between a Liberian and a Bengali.
And then there’s the media eyeball-baiting.
Article was about CNN’s chyron with just that question. “Ebola: The ISIS of biological agents?”
If it bleeds, it leads. If it hemorrhages CNN (and Fox and who else) hype it.
Saw something today on a Brit paper site saying the UN Ebola chief is concerned that the Big E may mutate soon into an airborne-transmissible disease.
It’s all enough to have me concerned, so I second the worries of the poster upthread. I think some fall into the logical traps of extrapolating from a current, transitory snapshot of the situation, which seems limited in its scope, along with the usual calming statistical probabilities, which are entirely capable of changing quickly.
And this could be the rare time the RW wackos and racists latch on to something which is scientifically valid to further their own evil political ends. The fact they are doing this doesn’t necessarily mean the concerns of medical experts are exaggerated.
The scientific opinion on airborne transmission is “when pigs fly”. And pigs might learn how to fly some day.
The problem is the virus is not of a type that has become airborne, unlike the enterological D68 virus.
It the UN chief for Ebola outbreaks job to worry about the possibility of the virus becoming airborne and to collect the data to see if the virus ever does. But the major public health job is to isolate and treat the cases so that the spread of the virus stops with very few cases.
This is a virus that in the past has been easily contained by a minimal of effective health care infrastructure. The spread in Liberia is exactly because of the deterioration of that infrastructure under the austerity of the past two decades in support for international public health.
The RW is latching onto this as a “Obama is not keeping you safe” narrative right before a critical midterm election whose previous issue was raising the minimum wage. All they have left are bogus issues, but as we saw with Saxby Chambliss’s 2002 attack on Max Cleland, they can sometimes win with bogus issues.
Meanwhile FoxNews is scaring nursing home residents into not getting out of bed.
As one scientist cautions in the piece cited below by poster MNP, it’s important we not be too dogmatic in expressing what we think we know about the disease. I’m detecting a bit of that from some folks here. I wasn’t aware we had so many scientific-medical experts with specialties in Ebola at the site.
IMHO Anthony Babury’s comments were irresponsible and unhelpful.
Peter Piot who was the first to identify Ebola
said this in a Guardian interview
Again, see the LAT piece cited in this thread. Several non-UN experts express either concerns it could mutate and become airborne, or that it already is possibly being spread by airborne droplets from coughing and sneezing.
I don’t doubt they express a minority pov , at this stage, but I also don’t doubt we hardly know enough about Ebola to be making definitive statements about its nature and transmissibility.
And I hear on the radio today , in what should give Ebola skeptics pause, one Thomas Friedman has apparently confidently declared that Not to worry: we (the good ole USA) will nip this problem quickly in the bud.
Well, CDC head Tom Friedman apparently.
Still, he sounds a bit too overconfident. I’m hearing echoes of “light at the end of the tunnel” from officialdom.
Didn’t suggest or state anything different. Still one is highly unlikely to come in contact with a “highly viremic” victim of Ebola that isn’t very ill. And the contact would have to be very close because:
Ebola: Filamentous 970 nm long for Ebolavirus. Diameter is about 80nm. Not as big as HIV or a Hantavirus, but still damn big compared to influenza viruses.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-ebola-questions-20141007-story.html#page=2
This. I think it strikes a good balance with truth and caution without falling into fear mongering.
And add to that the incredible behavior of the Spanish and I think I made my point.
Do not fall into the trap of thinking that just because the media are a pack of sensation mongers there is no serious danger of an Ebola-caused problem in the U.S.
And neither should you fall into the equally erroneous trap of trusting our so-called “health” system. I spent several hours today with people who either work in that system, are married to someone who does and/or are in the clutches of it as patients, and all i heard from any of them was horror at how badly it is run, especially the incompetence at the bottom and top of the healthcare ladder. This is from the inside, from intelligent, unbiased people, well-meaning health workers trapped in a broken system. It wasn’t about Ebola; it wasn’t about politics or crowd control/mind control; it was about workers who are on the ground in the mainstream healthcare system and recognize just how truly fucked-up it really is.
So here we are on this blog with people saying that because we live in a supposedly advanced society with generally good hygiene and clean food and water, with doctors on every street corner and a hospital within 5 or 10 minute’s travel of most Americans,…just because of those facts we should not fear some sort of pandemic.
Lissen up, folks. As panicky as Americans are today…media driven panic, of course, just as is every other emotion that most Americans feel…and as desperate as the PermaGov is to maintain in charge with its rapidly fraying control system, the reaction…the so-called “cure” of an Ebola problem…could rapidly become worse than the actual disease problem itself. I am already reading about schools putting “automatic temperature readers” up in their halls. Guilty until proven innocent? A mainstream concept in the U.S. today. How about “infectious until proven well?” How rapidly could that idea metastaize into a public health fiasco? Every little kid with a runny nose being snatched away from its family and put in a hospital? (Especially in poor neighborhoods, of course.)
The U.S. can’t even operate a relatively small police force dedicated to protecting its own boss without numerous and continuing failures. You really think that it could:
A-Accurately identify the real scope of a problem of this sort without serious overreaction or underreaction?.
and
B-Mount an effective attack on the problem?
I don’t. They can’t even roll out a computer-run health insurance system without months of bureaucratically-driven snafus. If this…or something else…gets serious, why think that the government reaction would be anything other than equally incompetent?
C’mon.
People are damned right to be frightened.
Not necessarily of the Ebola Problem so much as the Incompetence Problem with which the next emergency will be met no matter what it may be. And this isn’t “politics” either. Both sides of the UniParty are equally incompetent.
And there you have it.
More about the ongoing decay of the American system, less about “Ebola.”
Watch.
‘Tain’t over yet.
Bet on it.
And then what?
Another and another and another and another and…
Whatever.
The name of this article:
Panic Coming To America
Justified panic, and not just about Ebola.
About a broken system.
Or…go take yer antidepressants and wait passively for the final, back-breaking straw man to descend, Doofus ex Machina.
Watch.
I’m in the north woods this week, and the smart ones can see it coming.
Watch.
Do something about it?
First you have to be able to see the woods for the Faux News trees.
WTFU.
AG
Some good concerns, AG.
For the media, when it bleeds it leads; when it hemorrhages, it’s golden.
Now a standalone post:
Panic Coming to America? Yes. JUSTIFIED Panic
Comment there if you wish to do so.
AG