I don’t know whether Americans are more angry and frightened by the Ebola threat or by the ineptitude, mistakes and lies of so-called health officials and politicians.
As for me, it’s even. Our health and safety have been compromised – perhaps mortally – and yet we’re urged not to panic and to rely on what “experts” recommend.
In Africa, and now in this country and Spain (maybe more by the time you read this), Ebola is spreading sickness and death.
We’re told you can only contract Ebola by actual contact with the body of a sick person and/or with any of their bodily fluids.
Sounds logical but which body fluids?
Blood, sweat, vomit, diarrhea, yes, those. But what about tears, saliva, aerosolized droplets from coughing or sneezing? What about contact with things the sick person or their bodily fluids have with such as chairs, linens, utensils, in fact anything that touches them when they are supposedly contagious?
The first person to die of Ebola in the United States brought the disease with him when he arrived by commercial jet. Thomas Eric Duncan apparently knew he was infected but when he left Liberia, he lied on the screening health questionnaire. Several plane changes later, he arrived in Dallas.
After a couple of days, he went to the emergency room feeling unwell. He was in an open room until he was finally seen by some health official who sent him home with antibiotics.
Duncan had told the emergency room nurse he’d just come from Liberia, but it didn’t faze her.
Two days later, this time very sick, he was back at the hospital and was diagnosed, quarantined, and then he died.
And this is where the ineptitude and, in my opinion, outright lying to the public, became clear.
We were told the hospital employees who’d had contact with Duncan were being monitored – yet one nurse became sick at home and was diagnosed with Ebola. As I write, her condition has worsened.
Another nurse was allowed to take commercial flights from Texas to Ohio and back – and she too is now hospitalized, under quarantine with Ebola.
What happened to all the contagion protocol that was touted to us? Supposedly we’re dealing with high-level, so-called health experts – and yet, even the basic concepts of quarantine were ignored.
Politics raised its ugly head as the man who is president made a big deal that he met with nurses and hugged them. What was that about? Was Barack Obama minimizing the danger of contamination?
This is the same man who refuses to order that flights to and from the three host Ebola countries to the U.S. be stopped until the threat is ended. Other countries have done it, but not the U.S. It’s as though we’re so expert on everything that we’re above taking basic health precautions.
We’re told it would harm African economies – really?
We’re told it would prevent anyone from sending medical help to those countries – nonsense! Special provisions can be made for such flights; everyone else, stay home!
A Carnival Magic cruise ship was refused port in Belize and also in Mexico because one passenger, a lab worker, was thought to have been exposed to Ebola while handling specimens from Thomas Duncan at the Dallas hospital.
The ship finally returned to home port in Galveston. The person is in voluntary quarantine and is supposedly being monitored while passengers are concerned about what it means for them.
The hundreds of plane passengers and others exposed to the two Ebola nurses are being sought and warned about their situation – how they’ll be monitored remains to be seen.
The mistakes, contradictions and clear violations of good health practices we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks shouldn’t surprise us.
The truth is, Americans and American medical practitioners have become blasé.
We control communicable diseases and wiped out epidemics because of good health practices, sanitation and the development of effective vaccines.
The so-called childhood diseases like measles, mumps, chicken pox, scarlet fever, whooping cough and others – which in my grandparents’ and parents’ day were real killers – are so rare today that most doctors can’t recognize measles.
Walk through an old cemetery and see how many graves there are of little children. Those killer diseases did their work efficiently and terribly.
We believe the lack of these diseases is “normal” – and that’s dangerous. Those illnesses haven’t gone away; they’re just being held at bay. If we ignore proper prevention, epidemics will return.
Think polio, typhoid fever, smallpox and all the others.
Now we face Ebola, a disease of Africa. It’s a terrible hemorrhagic disease – one of many – that ravages victims and can kill up to 90 percent of those infected.
The best defense is to avoid it. In the host countries, the lifestyle, poverty and medical standards make it almost impossible to control.
Even the Doctors Without Borders, which operates worldwide, has fallen victim to Ebola. The latest from them is that 16 of their medical people have contracted Ebola, and nine have died.
There’s no vaccine, no preventative, no treatment; there’s just avoidance. Have no contact with the person or their bodily fluids.
But people can get on a plane and fly within hours from small African villages to First-World cities, taking with them microbes and viruses that can easily spread.
That’s what’s happening with Ebola and it’s no surprise, but what is a surprise – and in my opinion, a scandal – is that our medical and political establishments downplay the seriousness. The results of their carelessness increase the pandemic potential.
We’re told you can transmit it in public, but you can’t catch it in public. Huh?
Do they think we’re stupid? ‘Fraid so.
We were told the Texas hospital workers were quarantined and monitored, but they weren’t.
This is irresponsible and calls for people to be fired.
I’m not holding my breath.
Now, the government has committed more than 3,000 troops to Africa to “fight” Ebola, developing treatment centers and, Barack Obama just issued an executive order to send the National Guard to Africa.
How will the feds protect? How will they handle quarantine on their return, to prevent exposing their families and others to contagion?
I think the president, and those supporting these decisions, must be held responsible for the consequences.
But what does “be held responsible” mean?
The truth is, it’s meaningless.
Nothing will happen to them.
If any of our military are harmed as a result of these political decisions, and Ebola spreads as a consequence, it will be a catastrophe the likes of which none of us has ever seen. I’m afraid were on the brink of that.
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