Monday, August 4, 2014

Oh, Oh.

A traveler from West Africa lands in NY and is hospitalized with high fever and diarrhea...Mount Sinai Hospital says "All is well"; we're testing him for ebola but we don't think he has it because he still lives.  Ahm... the 2 confirmed Ebola infected patients are still alive after being evacuated from Liberia. While it kills almost uniformly in poor African villages, one cannot say that it will remain as individually lethal in the USA. Instead of 90% lethality it may be only 50% or less. That is not necessarily a good thing as it may lead to greater number of infections and consequently more dead. Also the reassurance about Ebola only being spread by such fluids as blood and urine is misleading; I doubt the volunteers in Liberia that became infected were being peed on by the locals infected with Ebola and I also doubt they were sharing needles with them. I am certain that it is more easily transmitted than HIV, and what has kept this bug at bay was the fact that a small village would get infected and wiped out, and that was the end of a local outbreak. This particular strain doesn't kill as fast and hence greater spread.  If it establishes a local reservoir in the good old USA, then oh, oh.... and the we'll stop caring about Obama's criminal activities and those illegals might start moving back to South America. By then, it will be a pandemic.

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