Thread: Ebola

Originally Posted by Phrank

In her opinion, anyone travelling from an area exposed to Ebola should be automatically quarantined for 21 days. Those that decide to travel to an area exposed should be told they do so at their own risk and will be responsible for paying and certifying that they are disease free before being allowed re-entry.

She feels the nurse in this case set a terrible example, that it lends credence to the lack of importance / urgency,

This is almost exactly word for word what I am hearing from Friends and Family in the Medical field too.. Other then the personal cost, they think that the Org that sends them should pay

Originally Posted by MajorEthanolic

And even if everything you say is true, every expert says it will stop nothing. So we can spend millions of $$ and inconvenience millions of travelers to stop nothing.

Short of posting images of my passport on the net, which you could imagine I will not do, you can believe that the stamps are there and my passport was scanned numerous times. Believe me too that I have been asked questions crossing into the USA since that time because of those stamps by vigilant US Border Patrol Officers. They know where and when I have been places. Returning US citizens would have to present a passport at point of entry back into the USA also so Visas really do not enter into it for them.

I do not think that there are millions of legitimate travelers originating out of the Ebola hot spot destined for North America. If a traveler has been absent from the Ebola hot spot for more than 21 days before presenting their healthy selves for entry then there is no problem. An inconvenience, yes, but not to millions of people surely.

In the end it boils down to how safe and protected a country's population thinks they should feel and what an acceptable risk is to them. Personally I think the risk is fairly small as it is now but would feel a lot better if measures were tightened up more.

Bob

Originally Posted by gugi

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Of course, one solution is as suggested to pander to the lowest common denominator - that's what the news and unscrupulous politicians love. I still would rather have policies grounded more in reality than in people's ignorance.

It's interesting to compare and contrast attitude towards the risk of ebola and the risks of straight shaving - there is no panic about HIV, anthrax, hepatitis C, tetanus and hundreds other dangerous pathogens which people could fear just as much.

Just to lead out with this, the news correspondents & politicians are so closely tied to each other these days that neither can be trusted to serve the better interest of the majority.

I too,, would much like to have the response to Ebola constructed in reality based fact/ science if you would, but the day to day, sometimes hour to hour , shift in current polices, lack of universal policies in our healthcare facilities, lack of preparedness to handle the few cases that we now have, the appointment of a political hack (Czar) instead of a qualified medical professional to spearhead the formation of an effective policy,,,, leaves to no confidence/trust, which leads to the public outcry that you see here.

The pathogens that you mentioned above, did lead to panic in their infancy, but the medical professionals responded in manner that stifled the fear of these pathogens, for the most part. Medical professionals in the trenches of this Ebola situation are working hard, I don't doubt that one bit & God bless them for their dedication & putting their life on the line. To see the same professionals hurt by individuals at the top of their own profession for political self interest, is the root of the problem here.

Arrogance + Ignorance + Greed = The situation we find ourselves in now.

LOL pretty much exactly what we said here in this thread

Only three Ebola-infected travellers per month are likely to fly from west Africa | World news | The Guardian

Well my mind works a little slower than you guys,,,, didn't have an advantage in English comprehension, as I did in my science class,,,,,,,,

Originally Posted by BobH

Short of posting images of my passport on the net, which you could imagine I will not do, you can believe that the stamps are there and my passport was scanned numerous times. Believe me too that I have been asked questions crossing into the USA since that time because of those stamps by vigilant US Border Patrol Officers. They know where and when I have been places. Returning US citizens would have to present a passport at point of entry back into the USA also so Visas really do not enter into it for them.

I do not think that there are millions of legitimate travelers originating out of the Ebola hot spot destined for North America. If a traveler has been absent from the Ebola hot spot for more than 21 days before presenting their healthy selves for entry then there is no problem. An inconvenience, yes, but not to millions of people surely.

In the end it boils down to how safe and protected a country's population thinks they should feel and what an acceptable risk is to them. Personally I think the risk is fairly small as it is now but would feel a lot better if measures were tightened up more.

Bob

There is no requirement to stamp the passport of a returning U.S Citizen. It's only if they request it. There is also no universal requirement to stamp a passport entering each country. Most do it but some don't.

Have you ever seen the passport of a real world traveler? There are so many stamps on every page you really can't decipher all of them. Many stamps are poorly stamped, blurred, partly missing and totally unreadable.

Originally Posted by Hirlau

I too,, would much like to have the response to Ebola constructed in reality based fact/ science if you would, but the day to day, sometimes hour to hour , shift in current polices, lack of universal policies in our healthcare facilities, lack of preparedness to handle the few cases that we now have, the appointment of a political hack (Czar) instead of a qualified medical professional to spearhead the formation of an effective policy,,,, leaves to no confidence/trust, which leads to the public outcry that you see here.

You can't have a patchwork of healthcare providers inherent in the US system and and universal policies and practices. Everybody being largely independent means they get to decide how they handle things. Countries with centralized healthcare systems under the government umbrella have a lot more coherent protocols and practices, but that's a systemic problem due to the way US does things.
Just like different police departments deal completely differently with the same circumstances even if the laws are the same - it's part of decentralization.


One of the big misconceptions is that the problems with ebola are medical, but they aren't. They have been political from day one - the populations in the countries with problems don't trust their governments, so they think it's a big conspiracy and shouldn't do what they are being told to do. The governments are too weak to force people to do things they do not want to do voluntarily. Then there is the lack of administrative capacity to coordinate the response. Plenty of separate entities some big some small each doing their own thing and wanting to either be in charge or be left alone and not told how to do things.
The medical facts have not changed from the beginning and as far as I can tell the US federal government has been fairly restrained in taking political gestures without meaningful effect.
I personally don't care who is in charge of overseeing everything, as long as they can do the job of overseeing and coordinating which is administrative, not medical. A party hack with good administrative skills would probably be far better than the world's foremost expert on ebola who is no doubt a great researcher and has no meaningful experience in running a bureaucracy.

To me the acceptable reason to quarantine a person is to prevent them from infecting others; doing it to pander to somebody's ignorance is not. There is not yet a case of person without severe symptoms infecting others, so why would you quarantine them? Just to be on the safe side? There are a plenty of things that can be done 'just to be on the safe side' such as those explicitly prohibited in the Bill of Rights.

Nigeria had two clusters of outbreak and even though they have strong enough government not especially known for it's concern with human rights who could force their will they still managed to go through a dozen or so infections and half a dozen deaths without blank quarantines of asymptomatic people.
But in US where people have unalienable rights, and the government is largely viewed as a necessary evil that should not intrude on people, in this same USA we need quarantine for every person coming from a hot-zone regardless of whether they are contagious or not, just to be on the safe side.

Originally Posted by gssixgun

LOL pretty much exactly what we said here in this thread

Only three Ebola-infected travellers per month are likely to fly from west Africa | World news | The Guardian

Actually it says the exact opposite of what you have been saying:

The UK and US have set up entry screening at airports for passengers arriving from west Africa, but the paper in the Lancet medical journal says this will have little chance of detecting somebody infected with the virus and that it will cost money that could be better spent.

The authors say that restricting air travel from Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, where the epidemic is raging, is damaging to the countries’ economies and may potentially handicap efforts to end the Ebola outbreak, which is the best way to safeguard the rest of the world.

It is saying that people in US and UK should stop preoccupying themselves that the sky is falling in their country and instead concentrate on the actual problem on the ground in Africa.

It helps when one reads the entire article and not just the parts that back what you want to hear,, In fact there was a good study about just that phenomena as it related to smoking done some years back..


the last paragraph

“What this research fails to consider,” said Dr Adam Kamradt-Scott, senior lecturer in international security studies, at the University of Sydney, “is that in public health crises like Ebola the political pressure on leaders to be seen to be doing everything they can to protect their citizens is immense. We can have the best available evidence, but it won’t amount to a hill of beans if we don’t also understand the politics behind these events.”


Pretty much explains exactly why AU just stopped Visas from West Africa

Originally Posted by thebigspendur

There is no requirement to stamp the passport of a returning U.S Citizen. It's only if they request it. There is also no universal requirement to stamp a passport entering each country. Most do it but some don't.

Have you ever seen the passport of a real world traveler? There are so many stamps on every page you really can't decipher all of them. Many stamps are poorly stamped, blurred, partly missing and totally unreadable.

Though I can claim only 34 countries with entrance and exit stamps some might consider me a real world traveler. Mine seems to be ok and legible. I have had to turn mine in a couple of time because it was full though.

Here are a couple of old pictures I had from a memory stick. I start at page 19 and work backwards.