Ebola viruses emerging from infected
cell Photocredit: NIAD creative
commons
Alan Blider of the
The New York Times tell us that
Two U.S. Ebola Patients Are Released by Atlanta Hospital. How unusual to have a feel good story with Ebola in the title? And what a difference a day makes. Last night I was ranting in my post
Violence erupts in Liberia as police fire on crowds trying to escape from quarantined Ebola zones, feeling as if I were bringing the community down and even laying on a bit to a guilt trip by implying Americans are not really interested in mass catastrophy in Africa where 80 plus new deaths are being reported every three days, and expected to grow exponentially with no end in sight, but which is barely noticed in mainstream media.
So in a happier note, the first two Americans ever to be treated for the Ebola virus in a hospital in the United States have recovered and have been released after receiving world class medical treatment and receiving new experimental drugs that appear to be very helpful.
Emory University Hospital, which admitted Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol to a specialized isolation ward earlier this month, said both were discharged after at least two weeks of treatment. Dr. Brantly was released on Thursday, the hospital said, after Ms. Writebol was quietly discharged on Tuesday.
“I am forever thankful to God for sparing my life, and I’m glad for any attention my sickness has attracted to the plight of West Africa in the midst of this epidemic,” Dr. Brantly, who arrived at Emory on Aug. 2 after being evacuated from Liberia, said at a news conference here on Thursday morning, his wife at his side.
Ms. Writebol, who is from North Carolina, did not appear before reporters on the Emory campus, which is near the headquarters of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ... “Nancy is free of the virus, but the lingering effects of the battle have left her in a significantly weakened condition,” her husband, David Writebol, said in a written statement. “Thus, we decided it would be best to leave the hospital privately to be able to give her the rest and recuperation she needs at this time.”
Flying infected patients back to the United States was controversial, leading many to fear we could spread the virus here. Our health facilities are so vastly superior to any anything available in Africa, doctors and public health officials insisted the public was never in any danger. These patients were kept in world class isolation units, where even air pressures are controlled to prevent inadvertent spread of contagion.
For example, in Bio-Security level 4 labs the specialized Personal Protective Equipment, aka "moon-suits." We have the real ones which cost $1,500 each and maintain their own air supply with a positive pressure relative to the outside. Not these make shift Playtex gloves, butcher aprons, and sky goggles we see in photos from western Africa. Isolation rooms are kept with a negative pressure. So even if any of the "non-airborne" spread viral particles hitch a ride on micro-droplets of moisture from a sneeze, or evaporated sweat they can't "swim upstream.
1:05 PM PT: Dang, rather than end now, on an upbeat note with a short tightly focused report, I can not help but wonder if former yet-to-be-indicted war criminals President George Bush and V.P. Dick Cheney has chosen to protect and advance U.S. national security by investing $1 trillion into a global war on poverty, and inadequate health systems in the African and Islamic worlds instead of falsifying intelligence information to illegally attack Iraq and kill, wound and and maim over 100,000 Iraqis over 10 year and also destabilize the region and directly causing a vastly greater threat from violent extremists now spreading throughout the whole middle east and world?
If one imagined a different world which would have been entirely possible and required nothing but wisdom, if we had instead just even sent every Muslim, or African in the world $1,000 and said please spend this in a way that you believe will create the best possible improvement in your quality of life and foster the best possible future relationship with your American brothers and sisters, how much better off would we and the world be, in terms of national security and even just pure U.S. economics.
I'm just making a point and realize that with so many Americans without sufficient food and jobs here we shouldnt' be spending trillions of dollars around the world - but we did!
Much of that spending could have been spent and in this fantasy scenario would have been spent on American products and services and or economy would have had to have been cranking on all six cylinders for this whole decade just to keep up. BTW I I read a few weeks ago that the total per capita annual health cares of Liberia and Sierra Leone were $8 and either $14 or $16 dollars.
Having enacted this incredibly stupid war on Islam instead, at the prodding of our neocon and Likud "allies," instead of spending equivalent time and money on improving African and Islamic health care infrastructures, how many more Muslims will we have to kill on this original plan, to catch up? Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not given up his 10 year personal crusade to drive America into war against Iran, one of the major targets of the original PNAC plan to "re-engineer the Middle East."
Sorry if this appears to be "hijacking" my own diary, however, the vital point I am trying to make is if we ask ourselves right here and right now what should be the basic themes for American foreign policy to make the biggest contribution to helping West Africans, the Middle East, and the world, and our own American national security for the next decade which sounds like a better idea?
Continuing to follow the neocon military centric policies of George Bush, Dick Cheney and Prime Minisiter Netanyahu, which has and is devastating U.S. national security and perceived legitimacy, or switching to a wisdom based positive and constructive maximum return on investment strategy where we could one again be admired as respectable and helpful leaders and productive and members of the world community.
An effort to help Western African improve their health infrastructure, sending in a division of marines in bio-warfare suits, (for practice) and have them construct 500 solar powered health-logistic treatment centers (fancy tents) with U.S. DOD standard command, control, communication and intelligence capabilities to assess needs, escort and protect health workers into rural areas and improve health care infrastructure by 10 fold in 1 year for a fraction of the cost we are spending now on shipping weapons to tyrants to suppress local populations.
The total deaths from Ebola so far are just over a 1,000, but millions of Africans die every year from tropical diseases, some as simple to avoid as cholera and diarrhea from the lack of potable drinking water and chlorine tablets that cost less than a penny each, imagine how much more "secure," healthy, and better we could make the world, at less cost than we are spending now on drones to track and kill enemies who could just as easily be our best friends and allies.
Just saying ...
2:23 PM PT: Thanks to Leevank for correction to previous title. Only Brantly is a doctor, Writebol is a health care worker.
Fri Aug 22, 2014 at 6:05 PM PT: Thanks to alx9090 for sending me an article early this morning calling this to my attention. In the hustle bustle of the day I "detached" from the memory that he/she sent it.
Thanks again.