Hey Harlem, the LA Times says don't accept the lies, the airborne
Ebola may already be hear.... panic now. Part of the hospital business and the business of staying alive.
In an article entitled
Some Ebola Experts Worry Virus May Spread More Easily Than Assumed, the
Los Angeles Times exposes the fact that several experts have questioned the lies being spread by official agencies on Ebola’s transmission.
Dr. C.J. Peters, who battled a 1989 outbreak of the virus among
research monkeys housed in Reston, Virginia and who later led the CDC’s
most far-reaching study of Ebola’s transmissibility in humans, said he
would not rule out the possibility that it spreads through the air in
tight quarters. “We just don’t have the data to exclude it,” said
Peters, who continues to research viral diseases at the University of
Texas in Galveston.
Dr. Philip K. Russell, a virologist who oversaw Ebola research while
heading the U.S. Army’s Medical Research and Development Command, and
who later led the government’s massive stockpiling of smallpox vaccine
after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, also said much was still to be
learned. “Being dogmatic is, I think, ill-advised, because there are too
many unknowns here.”
The
Los Angeles Times article says that the researchers it
reached in recent days for this article cited grounds to question U.S.
officials’ assumptions in three categories.
One issue is whether airport screenings of prospective travelers to
the U.S. from West Africa can reliably detect those who might have
Ebola. Individuals who have flown recently from one or more of the
affected countries suggested that travelers could easily subvert the
screening procedures and might have incentive to do so: Compared with
the depleted medical resources in the West African countries of Liberia,
Sierra Leone and Guinea, the prospect of hospital care in the U.S. may
offer an Ebola-exposed person the only chance to survive.
A person could pass body temperature checks performed at the airports
by taking ibuprofen or any similar common anti-pyretic analgesic. And
prospective passengers have much to fear from identifying themselves as
sick, said Kim Beer, a resident of Freetown, the capital of Sierra
Leone, who is working to get medical supplies into the country to cope
with Ebola.
“It is highly unlikely that someone would acknowledge having a
fever, or simply feeling unwell,” Beer said via email. “Not only will
they probably not get on the flight -- they may even be taken
to/required to go to a ‘holding facility’ where they would have to stay
for days until it is confirmed that it is not caused by Ebola. That is
just about the last place one would want to go.”
Moreover, said some public health specialists, there is no proof that
a person infected, but who lacks symptoms, could not spread the virus
to others. “It’s really unclear,” said Michael Osterholm, a public
health scientist at the University of Minnesota who recently served on
the U.S. government’s National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity.
“None of us knows.”
Russell, who oversaw the Army’s research on Ebola, said he found the
epidemiological data unconvincing. “The definition of ‘symptomatic’ is a
little difficult to deal with,” he said. “It may be generally true that
patients aren’t excreting very much virus until they become ill, but to
say that we know the course of [the virus’ entry into the bloodstream]
and the course of when a virus appears in the various secretions, I
think, is premature.”
