We interrupt this normally mediocre comic for a tasteless, mediocre comic. But this is the first thing that popped into my head when this headline dropped today.
Why yes, we do live 8 miles from that hospital. But that’s not scary. What’s scary to me is that this fucker apparently walked around for two days with symptoms before he was quarantined.
So yeh. Making god damn sure our survival stores are up to snuff.
Ebola is not considered contagious before the onset of symptoms, at least.
The problem is, he went to emergency room on Friday and they released him with antibiotics. He was brought by ambulance on Sunday. Hopefully not to many people were in contact with him when he symptomatic. And, those people chose to take proper precautions.
I admit I was calm when they first announced the case yesterday. But, as details have come out, I’m a little worried (I live in the Dallas area). For the next month or so, I think I will be giving anyone I see who looks ill a very wide berth.
Ebola’s fun. It has been my favorite disease since I read Richard Preston’s “Hot Zone” while attending the Biological Integrated Detection System course at Ft. Leonard Wood a few years ago.
It will turn into Super-Ebola now. ‘Cause everything’s bigger in Texas.
I’m just happy to be ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PLANET thanks. You can keep your nasty diseases right there….
We were on the other side of the planet until some numbnuts brought that crap here by plane.
3091 deaths in Liberia
Population of about 4.2M
0.0735%
Flu deaths in America: CDC estimates that from the 1976-1977 season to the 2006-2007 flu season, flu-associated deaths ranged from a low of about 3,000 to a high of about 49,000 people.
Average that to 26k out of 300M population.
0.0086%
So approximately 9x the death rate. And that’s in a country where they live 12 people to a room in their own shit.
Sure, Ebola is crappy, but I’m not worried about it as much as the news is trying to tell us to be. It is spread through direct contact. We are a cleaner country than Liberia. Fewer people will die from it than the flu.
The percentage of the population isn’t where concern lies, it is the percentage of those who contract the disease that die that should worry you.
Unless it mutates, as viruses are sometimes wont to do.
If it crosses with another virus which is pneumonically transmitted, then it’s what up sucka.
This might unsettle you a little more. Supposedly he went to the ER on the 24th, and given antibiotics and sent home.
http://www.redstate.com/2014/09/30/the-ebola-patient-and-a-call-to-my-show/
Q. How many days was he sick (and therefore contagious) before he went to the ER the first time?
A. We will know in 21 days.
Antibiotics. For a virus.
It’s common for health providers to do this. They usually don’t really know what is making someone ill. So, they just give people anti-biotics in the hope that it is bacterial or that the antibiotics will stop in opportunistic infections (like pneumonia). Though, I really wish they had seen he was from Liberia and took a closer look.
It’s stupid for health providers to do this. Even if it is bacterial, you need to know what bacteria you’re treating before you can prescribe the correct antibiotics, and giving out antibiotics like candy is the leading reason for antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Doctors do it because the KNOW most things are viral and will go away on their own, but patients demand that the doctor DO SOMETHING, and the doctors are afraid of losing a client.
This. So very much this.
They really ought to write prescriptions for 0.8% w/w theobromine instead. Eating foods rich in theobromine offers a number of benefits beyond the alkaloid’s mild stimulant and moderate diuretic properties, according to the “National Geographic Desk Reference to Nature’s Medicine.” Theobromine helps to energize your nervous system while at the same time exerting a calming effect on your brain. The alkaloid’s ability to relax smooth muscles offers benefits in the bronchial passages by making breathing easier. The same mechanism relaxes the walls of your blood vessels, which slightly lowers blood pressure, and relaxes muscles in the digestive tract, which helps to minimize gastrointestinal problems.
is private ownership of flamethrowers allowed? I’m thinking killing it with fire is always a good answer.
Actually, yes, U can haz flamethrower..
I always had a feeling it wouldn’t be terrorism or zombies, but a plague… Think I’m gonna need to start reading up on medieval survival tactics.
Step one of medieval survival. Be royalty.
End of steps…
Who’s the idiot who failed to quarantine or stop commercial flights to the U.S. from Africa when the crisis there got serious?
….Oh, oh yeah.
At least he didn’t do anything stupid to just make the situation worse, like , …oh, sent a few thousand infantry troops over to bring the infection back to every state…
….Oh?, oh no….
Well that’s just not good.
That’s just not good AT ALL.
I think some someones in a few places need to take a clue from George Romero,
do the right thing, dial the number on the side of the drum, and take one for the team..
You have got to be trolling. Let me get this straight: It’s Barrack Hussein Obummer’s fault because he didn’t halt all air traffic from Africa??? Furthermore, it’s a bad thing that we sent aid to try to curtail this epidemic?
Do you realize just how large Africa is? How many countries you’re talking about?
Two items:
1) It isn’t entirely unheard of to at least halt air traffic from (or at a minimum passengers originating from) places with horrible outbreaks of nasty diseases. Africa may be huge, but maybe narrow it down to flights from countries that are epidemic hotzones?
2) This was a guy who was transporting people with Ebola. We can put Senate aides on watchlists and no-fly lists, but we can’t see to it that someone who was in direct contact with folks sick with a nasty, often lethal virus isn’t allowed to come here?
Not to mention that apparently he flew to NY from Brussels, not Africa.
Yes, I’m sure they track all points of transit, as well as country of origin on passport. But still, it’s not like the flight came in from Monrovia.
They do LOOK at the passport don’t they? A stamp from an african nation within the last 2 days might be worth noticing.
Point of order: As per 9/11, we have a precedent for LITERALLY GROUNDING EVERY FLIGHT INTO AND OUT OF THE COUNTRY based on a threat. They stayed grounded for… three? Four days? I can’t quite remember, I’m sure google knows, but it’s sorta pedantic. And realistically since the planes themselves aren’t the vector, but the passengers, we wouldn’t even have to stop cargo and freight flights, just double-check them for stowaways.
YES! Best. Strip. Ever.
Oh good- I’m flying in to Texas in two days.
Lubbock is nice, you should stay there. It’s quite a ways from Dallas. And, whatever you do, don’t go to Austin.
I’m going to Austin. It’s cool though – I’m down with the weird.
Eh, Ebola doesn’t scare me. I’m occupationally exposed to MUCH worse day in and day out.
One day a month or so ago I had a patient with viral meningitis, a patient with active MDRTB (who spent most of the day coughing in my face), and I regularly treat patients with HBV and HCV. Did you know that HBV can survive in a spot of dried blood for up to 6 weeks and still retain full infectivity? Ebola dies after a few minutes outside the body.
Thank you. I hate watching people freak out over non-issues…..This is easily contained if you don’t have sick people taking care of sicker people and families dying together in filth.
Eh, as long as you don’t go swim in his puke and shit you’ll be fine.
May get hated for saying this but….
In Africa – “Ebola has infected 6,553 people and has killed 3,083 in the three countries hit hardest by the epidemic”
Here in the US – “Three Americans have survived Ebola after getting intensive care in specialized biocontainment units in the USA.”
Maybe an Ebola scare here in the US is what we need to take this seriously?
When it is single-digits of sick, it is easy to treat and cure. When it becomes wider-spread the resources to deal with it get spread thin and you start getting lots of deaths.
Those three American survivors used up the entire stock of that experimental drug.
Beeeeecause we’re a capitalist nation that doesn’t keep stores of cure for diseases we aren’t suffering. Tell me, how many days of meals do you have coked and plated in advance? Or I guess more pertinently, how much bedbug spray do you keep around, having never had or been near bedbugs in your life?
And for the record, bedbugs are way more infectious than this. It’s scary in Africa because there is zero infrastructure over there. Here, you get a fever and diarrhea in Dallas, go to the hospital, and 3 out of 3 times you will be fine, according to current statistics, about to be 4 out of 4.
Unless you are planning on swapping bodily fluids with the guy, there isn’t anything to worry about en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_disease#Transmission
I still can’t believe they were landing the first victims near me in Georgia and it still broke out near you in Texas.
I don’t guess 100 sets of masks and gloves were going to get me far anyway.
That song was about as funny as a rubber crutch
https://scontent-a-iad.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpa1/v/t1.0-9/10646967_937842679570077_8201324849863297056_n.jpg?oh=e8972d7203ded6e8347a6486929effa2&oe=54CCFE61
captain trips, paging captain trips to the white courtesy phone for an urgent message……………….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stand#.22Captain_Trips.22
Don’t panic! You can use your trusty towel to help prevent yourself catching ebola by wrapping it in front of your mouth.
Or what the hell, PANIC!!!! Cash out your bank accounts and max out your credit cards to buy as much guns, ammo, food, water, first aid supplies, duct tape and plastic sheeting. Most importantly, buy all the bricks of .22 LR you can because anything bigger than that is too much to kill the ebola virus.
So…”Don’t forget to bring a towel!” is what you’re saying?
At least it’s not smallpox.
If it was smallpox, that would mean it got out of a lab somewhere (and was most likely intentional). But, I’m lucky enough to be old enough to have been vaccinated against smallpox. My wife on the other hand…
Not all smallpox is in a lab. While I was in the Navy, there was a threat that Iran may have a sample of smallpox and we were deploying to the area, so we had to get vaccinated against smallpox, too. It was highly controlled, though. Also the most annoying and scary vaccine I’ve ever received.
That, or it escaped a cardboard box in a warehouse.
Smallpox still exists in nature. Just because it is astonishingly rare doesn’t mean it is actually gone forever. It came from somewhere in the first place, after all.
And the fact that people still manage to fall for the “Don’t vaccinate” bullshit means that herd immunity suffers.
The Ebola is scary as hell, but on an equally scary front, our U.S. Government wants companies to stop using encryption because, think of the children. Seriously, you cannot make this up, U.S. attorney general claimed that encryption makes it difficult for the government to protect children.
Encryption makes it harder for identity thieves and terrorists to use our data against us. Yip, I invoked terrorism to prove we need privacy and security.
Without worldwide instantaneous media, ‘terrorism’ dies.
No audience= no event.
Don’t worry, despite Perry’s best efforts even Texas has a better public health infrastructure than Liberia, and even Texans aren’t ignorant enough to kiss dead Ebola victims. If you’re panicking over Ebola and you aren’t panicking over climate change, you’re doing it wrong.