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We could fire bomb the western part of the African continent.

I'm sure that option has been discussed at very high levels.

The fact that the nations involved have implemented a cordon sanitaire around the epicenter of the outbreak without any planning for getting food, water, and medical supplies/care into that zone suggests to me that if they had nuclear weapons they would consider using them.

Something more selective.

Sub-Saharan Africa could be such a great hunting preserve; absent the flies, mosquitoes, germs, and people.

Let's just make sure we fire bomb the zone into one big ash pile though and not nuke it. We wouldn't want to irradiate those viruses and start a mutation chain that ends the world.

It suggests to me no such thing, it suggests far more to me that they lack the preexisting funding/infrastructure to implement humanitarian measures themselves, and would necessarily expect/hope international humanitarian aid to pick up that particular slack.

Except possibly for some rudimentary health services and vaccination programs I would guess there were NO pre-existing government-funded social welfare/community health programs operating in these countries. For the general population over there, entitlements do not exist.

Heck, I'll be surprised if they even have the collective wherewithal to mount an effective quarantine of the affected areas.

All this relates to my earlier comment about Judgment Day and surprises: Over here you can be an honest and virtuous man and still make a living, ergo it is relatively easy to be a practicing Christian.

Over there the pressures towards corruption are enormous; you can be honest on principle and in many cases accept the resultant poverty, but if your kids are going hungry, they just starve or get sick whatever, there are NO safety nets for you to fall back on.

I did meet honest and upright people over there, where adhering to their Faith resulted in real hardships for themselves and family.

Furthermore...

Even if WE had a localized outbreak over here I'm pretty sure we would announce martial law and quarantine in that area first, and only then quickly attend to food and water issues. The difference being we ourselves would be in a position to do so without waiting for outside help.

Birdwatcher

They have been working on the virus for decades to develop a genetically selective and durable aerosol version, and it's been a stubborn little bugger... this last field test is looking more promising.

Wouldn't surprise me a bit.

Run with it, loon..

Miles, Doc, and others, thanks for the insight, and the information. What y'all are saying does mesh well with what I read at the CDC site, and other places.
There is room for concern, and I realize that both the health care community and the general population share that concern.

Sam, I think I speak for the others:

There's a lot of room for concern, we'd just like to see that concern properly focused. It's like with guns. Worry about the right things.

I'll throw in on thankin' ya'll for the updates and straight dope on this " Fear Mongering " prone situation.

I've referred several friends to this thread just as a source of clean, no nonsense and straightforward text.

Muchismas Gracias' Hombres !

GTC

Why would "they" have to invent the wheel all over again?

Ain't you been reading the thread?

Turns out there's whole sacks of smallpox virus gone missing (when did we stop vaccinating for that anyhow? I recall meeting people with that little vaccination scar but its been decades)....


....and "they" apparently have engineered flu viruses that could take out half the planet.

Birdwatcher

There really isn't a specific finite date to say this is when we stopped. For specific populations it probably stopped in the late fifties/early sixties. More generally, the practice stopped in the 70s. The last of it outside of specific labs and Russian military units was some time in the early/mid 80s, but the Russians have never been real forthcoming about the things they did with Smallpox. Which by the way should be said that it's not sacks of virus gone missing there, but tanker truck loads of it that were never accounted for. Smallpox that we know was bio engineered for use as a weapon.

Think of the end date for Smallpox vaccination like this. We have stopped routine vaccination for Polio in the US and many western countries long ago. But for specific groups in the US we pursue Polio vaccination aggressively. There is currently a program in place and funded with the goal of eliminating Polio like we did Smallpox. For years we made steady progress. Largely due to ignorance and fear, that effort is now losing ground and may well fail if we cannot break down some of that fear and ignorance.

Hundreds of bioterror lab mishaps cloaked in secrecy

The issue of lab safety and security has come under increased scrutiny by Congress in recent weeks after a series of high-profile lab blunders at prestigious government labs involving anthrax, bird flu and smallpox virus. On Friday, a CDC investigation revealed how a rushed laboratory scientist had been using sloppy practices when a specimen of a mild bird flu virus was unwittingly contaminated with a deadly strain before being shipped to other labs.

Earlier this summer, other researchers at CDC potentially exposed dozens of agency staff to live anthrax because of mistakes; nobody was sickened. Meanwhile, at the National Institutes of Health, long-forgotten vials of deadly smallpox virus were discovered in a cold-storage room where they weren't supposed to be.

The new lab incident data indicate mishaps occur regularly at the more than 1,000 labs operated by 324 government, university and private organizations across the country that are registered with the Federal Select Agent Program. The program is jointly run by the USDA and the CDC, which are required by law to annually submit short reports with incident data to Congress.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...at-bioterror-select-agent-labs/14140483/

Miles... thanks for the update.

Browing around, I'm happy to read that polio is in full retreat most places. There was few things sadder than seeing a little kid on crutches, knowing the paralyzed leg would not grow and the sort of future faced by that kid.

Birdwatcher

FlaRick,

Thank you for this post!

For the rest of the people following this thread, I will try to use the info in the link Rick posted and the info previously posted in this thread to tie this all together for you.

Somewhere in the beginning I advised someone to read The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. I advised to pay particular attention to observe that in the narratives of the various scientists that they just didn't get religion about protective measures and containment protocols until they personally or one of their colleagues was exposed. That is really the critical take away from that work! The single biggest threat to the general populace in the US is not the organisms these people work(ed) on.

It is the potential for the loss of these people. They are incredible resources that we have huge resources expended into their training and experience. Some of them of and by themselves are an intellectual force and repository of experience that is irreplaceable. Some of them are capable of putting together and directing a large number of very intelligent, very independent individuals with extremely specialized training and managing them to handle the task at hand. I have spent enough time in positions where I needed to work with this kind of scientist, and I will say point blank that They are uniformly poorly managed, very characteristically isolated from their organizations and uniformly so underutilized that they happily make time to answer questions and provide direction to people like me with questions.

The organisms in the link are not particularly worrisome. The can be found in our environment without looking too far or too hard. For instance, Anthrax. It is found in cattle. It sporulates and can remain viable in soil for decades. It is difficult to infect humans with wild Anthrax. You either need to be french kissing infected cows or drinking from the waterer that an infected cow is using. Even if a person is infected with wild Anthrax we have antibiotics that can readily handle it.
I have seen wild Anthrax under a microscope and handled samples. It scares me less than a trip to say Jack In The Box.

Read Poisoned, by Jeff Benedict. It is a chronicle of the 0157/H7 E. Coli. While there certainly should be some morbid fascination with the bacteria and what it does to a body, like The Hot Zone, the take away is not obvious. It's take away is how the beef industry creates a situation in which this organism can prosper, can enter our food supply under government supervision, be delivered to your mouth and kill you. It quite simply amounts to dollars and cents and insurance to cover the inevitable risk to you. I know of no big game hunters ever infected by E. Coli 0157/H7 from eating wild meat. Were it ever to happen, it would with 99.99% certainty result from something like deer associating with cattle very recently moved into a pasture from a feed lot. Further, The antibiotics in animal feed will with 99.99% certainty at some point produce E. Coli 0157/H7 with fairly broad resistance. Whether that achievement by the bacteria comes at the expense of it's virulence I do not know. I would be quite surprised if it hasn't already happened and the isn't already some level of resistance.

If you want to understand how this works and how we'll eventually do ourselves harm well beyond society is capable of grasping today, read first The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett. It's a dense, highly foot noted work that requires you to chase down those foot notes. It'll take a while to get through and fully comprehend. After that, read Betrayal of Trust by Garrett. It's an even more dense chronicle of how we have dismantled so much of our public health systems.

You'll come away with a realistic grasp of what to be afraid of and probably a lot more worried than you ever could be about something as trivial as Ebola which just doesn't kill many people.

Edited to add... In all probability people working things like Tularemia, Brucellosis, Anthrax etc probably didn't worry about the release or reporting so much in that those organisms are not uncommon in our environment. Not that they were not "required to report. Not that they didn't understand their obligation to report. The fact that no reported epidemics resulted confirms that this wasn't such a big deal to us. But like I said above, those kind of mistakes put them (our best resources) at risk.

I am old enough that I saw a lot of people with missing parts due to amputation to control infection. Polio hit my family in the fifties outbreak, but not me. I knew people with the scars of small pox. I had friends that were thalidomide babies. I have know people subjected to barbarism like lobotomy and electro-convulsive therapy. I had friends that we as a society just referred to as DPs. I had friends with numbers on their arms. I had family that were killed and maimed at work. I had friends whose fathers were killed at work. That's a lot of stuff that used to be common and now is quite rare

From that perspective, looking at people in near panic about minor stuff and blindly ignoring real threats without a clue about how we got to where we are often affects the way I respond.

The Ebola virus sweeping through West Africa has mutated repeatedly during the current outbreak, a fact that could hinder diagnosis and treatment of the devastating disease, according to scientists who have genetically sequenced the virus in scores of victims.

The findings, published Thursday in the journal Science, also offer new insights into the origins of the largest and most deadly Ebola outbreak in history, which has killed more than 1,500 people in four countries and shows few signs of slowing.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...a-2ecb-11e4-bb9b-997ae96fad33_story.html

So long as no one brings one of the victims into the US we should be OK ... oh wait.

CDC Director: Ebola Outbreak �Is Spiraling Out Of Control�
September 2, 2014 10:59 AM

http://atlanta.cbslocal.com/2014/09/02/cdc-director-ebola-outbreak-is-spiraling-out-of-control/

Still not worried?