Spain and Ebola: Discuss

[d0ug]

I know some people would not know the truth if it was right in their face. Would they believe the department of defense.

https://www.scribd.com/doc/239001204...Nanotechnology

they would rather believe the Rockefeller FDA
Rockefeller’s FDA was established to protect the chemical industry! | AntiCorruption Society

[crazyoldboatguy]

Originally Posted by d0ug

I know some people would not know the truth if it was right in their face. Would they believe the department of defense.

https://www.scribd.com/doc/239001204...Nanotechnology

they would rather believe the Rockefeller FDA
Rockefeller’s FDA was established to protect the chemical industry! | AntiCorruption Society

Research is fine - results not yet proven. I wouldn't rub nano silver on my body and then clean up an Ebola victim. By all means, have at it.

Ignore the FDA, eat your almond pits when you are diagnosed with cancer. Die like Steve McQueen did. Your belief in the repeatedly debunked Burzyinski is evidence that you are not wedded to the scientific method - he certainly wasn't.

[s/v Beth]

Originally Posted by sneuman

If you're not convinced by the science, just use your common sense: No one cooped up in the same apartment as Duncan for days contracted Ebola. No one on the plane with Amber Vinson got Ebola. And, no one on the subway in NYC will get it from Dr. Spencer, either Ergo a) all these "trace contacts" are incredibly lucky or b) it is not transmitted through the air.

The CDC protocols are designed to protect health care workers, who are handling bodily fluids.

We have protocols for handling bodily fluids. They do not look like what you see around Ebola. As for the people who have not gotten Ebola- I too am encouraged. I think the disease is not easily spread in the early stages. The end game however is probably much more infectious, and I would not be surprised to see people infected in Liberia without ever touching a victim.

BTW Yersia Pestis, the bacteria that caused the plague, did not mutate. The form of transmission changed (from bubo to pnemo) when the main vector became human to human rather than rat to human. There are still rodents with endemic yersia, one population exists right outside my medical school in New Mexico. We would see 1-2 cases of plague a year. Nasty stuff.

[Ocean Girl]

Cool survivor story. Note how family handle the situation once ebola was suspected.
“I share my story to inspire that Ebola is not a death sentenceâ€�Â*- Médecins Sans Frontières Australia (Doctors Without Borders) - International Medical Humanitarian Aid

[crazyoldboatguy]

I am recalling now the difference between airborne infectious and perhaps getting it thru the lungs. It is a matter of the host and what they are giving off. If the droplets from vomit and/or diarrhea in the air get into your lungs, you may well get ill. For the disease to be truly airborne, however, the host must have the disease present in the lung/secretions which would become airborne when the host coughs. I do not believe Ebola can be spread in that way currently.

BTW, some folks believe some other illness other than yersia (sic) pestis actually caused the black death - there is plenty of debate about just how it went from bubonic to pneumonic. I don't pretend to know the specifics beyond general information.

[s/v Beth]

That just sounds like good genes OC. What we really want is a truckload of those antibodies. What is really encouraging to me is the two nurses that got it in Texas are going to be home soon! Well!
COBG- it is splitting hairs really. Anything that is coughed out and spread you could make a case that it is airborne. As for transmission of the plague, I just know what they taught me at school. Our hospital treated it in real life, so they may have some insight that those historians did not...
But I don't really care. I am still not going to let it be coughed on me.

[Astrid]

One of the interesting aspects of Yersinia pestis is the 6th century strain commonly known as Justinian Plague, because it hit the Roman empire during the reign of Justinian, appears to have died out or otherwise been an evolutionary dead end. Mapping the bacteria's genome from victims of that plague from Aschheim, Germany, it has been concluded that this particular strain died out and left no descendents. The Great Plague that devastated Europe was also a member of the family and the modern version is directly descended from it. However, while still a health concern to be sure, study of the genome seems to indicate that it has undergone very little change since the 14th century. That it has not broken out into a major epidemic and instead remained endemic, even though it is essentially as deadly as ever, is people have changed to become less susceptible to it through natural selection.

[s/v Beth]

This may be more up your alley Astrid, (thanks for the correct spelling btw, I was just too lazy to look it up) We had ground hogs that carried fleas that had the bacterium. The domestic dogs would chase the ground hogs and the ones that were too sick got caught. Then the dogs would give it to their owners and we got involved.
I always thought it was easily treatable by antibiotics and that is why it did not spread. That would not explain why we were not tortured by it before the advent of antibiotics. A genetic explanation is much more eloquent, and makes sense.

[crazyoldboatguy]

It's not much different than smallpox. Europeans became less susceptible to it over the generations due to natural selection. It could still kill large amounts of folks or disfigure many but enough survived to carry on the human race. Not so when Europeans "discovered" the Americas. The indigenous population had not encountered the disease and had no natural defense against it and so died by the thousands after coming into contact with the hosts.

Just to be clear - it does not appear that Ebola is carried in the lung secretions. Any airborne infection comes from droplets in the air from diarrhea and or vomit. Still not easy to catch as we saw with the unfortunate man in Texas whose family was in close proximity with him for days AFTER he became infectious and was having severe symptoms.

It is a sad thing that the folks most likely to contract the disease are those who care for them during the worst phases of the illness. Kudos to the medical personnel who went to Africa to assist - their rate of fatality is pretty high, I understand.

[Astrid]

As a matter of fact, another study done of people from a village in Derbyshire, England that had been particularly hard hit by the Plague, indicates that descendents of those who survived the Plague had a specific gene which increased their resistance to it. The Plague or Black Death hit the west in three waves over the course of two or three generations with each succeeding occurrence having less apparent lethality than it's predecessor. The first wave had a lethality of about 90%, the second about 70%, and the last about 50%. The genetic study from those who survived the plague and those who did not confirms that natural selection was at work and succeeding generations were more resistant because those who had the necessary allele or gene variant lived to pass it on to their descendents, while those who lacked it did not survive.

When I did undergraduate work in Arizona, there was a yearly resurgence in plague among prairie dogs and ground squirrels and generally one or two cases in humans per year.

[SaltyMonkey]

My research online uncovered that 10% of Europeans are immune to it.

[hellosailor]

On the quality of ER's and ER personnel?

First, there are often 12-hour shifts in hospitals today. And for the past hundred years or so, every study of shift work and labor hours has said the same thing. Long shifts mean fatigue which means higher error rates. Last time I heard, going from an 8 hour shift to a 12 hour shift DOUBLED the error and accident rates. Why the medical industry feels it is acceptable to have double the accident rate that shorter shifts would have, I don't know. I don't think any answer is acceptable for that one.

But last time I was in an ER, I overhead a number of conversations from the bay next to me. The guy's name was something very close to Tenzing Sherpa, same as Edmund Hillary's guide on Everest. No big surprise, I knew there was a large Nepalese/Tibetan community in the area. And the ER nurse keeps asking the guy "Habla espanol?" because his English wasn't very clear. So she brings in another nurse and they're trying habla whatever and I'm saying to myself, hello, do I really have to tell them that SHERPA ISN'T HISPANIC? (Someone finally figured it out.)

ERs, even at Category I trauma centers, aren't always full of the brightest least fatigued people around. Hospital errors kill something like 200,000 people a year in the US alone, so why wouldn't they miss a case of something they've never seen?

[Coops]

That seems a lot. 4000 deaths a week by hospital error, nearly 600 per day. That is an epidemic in itself.

Coops.

[crazyoldboatguy]

Those stats are quite disturbing. I looked around a bit and found that the higher number (200-400,000) comes from a study conducted by a patient safety advocate whose son died from what appears to have been lapse in care at a hospital where his son was being treated. I don't know enough about the subject to opine but I could suggest that the gentleman is very close to the subject at hand.

The American Hospital Association puts the amount at about 100,000. Still very high and unacceptable. Of course, we can cast aspersions on their self interest in the matter as well.

Having been a consumer of American medicine, along with close members of my family, I can see problems exist. Ultimately, no matter where you are or who is treating you, the patient/advocate is responsible for much of the care they receive. Time and again I had to bring all the disparate members of a treatment team together to ensure I was getting what I was supposed to get. Surgeons will mark which limbs or parts of the body are to be operated on so that the correct procedure is done on the correct body part. So much of care is compartmentalized what with specialties involved that it really comes down to the consumer or their advocate to keep tabs on what is going on.

[Coops]

If the hospitals are truly killing that many patients a day then there is no need to fear ebola or even terrorists. They are as scary as garden gnomes on that basis. I have to say that I do doubt those statistics. A wee bit of padding out of the figures to make a case for whichever side is trying to make it.

Coops.