It’s FOX NEWS, eschewing fear-mongering and partisan politics to speak plain common sense about Ebola. Pay attention, this is rational and informative:
I just checked outside, it’s not raining blood, and a quartet of horsemen aren’t galloping by, so I think we’re safe. Smith is actually saying very sensible and accurate things about the disease — relax.
If I were cynical, though, I’d point out that one reason Fox is being reasonable is mentioned in there — that the panic is affecting the stock market. Can’t have that, Republicans!
Also, let’s not forget that while Ebola may not be a serious concern in the United States right now, it is a terrible, awful disease that is killing people horribly in Africa. They matter, too. Support research and medical care for everyone.
I don’t understand… doesn’t he normally have a goatee?
Heh, he called it a “fact-dissemination exercise,” like that wasn’t his fucking job all day, every day.
Don’t read the YouTube comments. :(
I assume the signal-to-N-word ratio is extremely low.
(long-time reader, first-time commenter)
There’s a strange pattern with truth-telling and reality checks on FoxNews. If someone is being reasonable on FoxNews and people talk about it online, 99.9% of the time it’s Shep Smith, to the point where on another site a few years ago people joked about rescuing Shep Smith from FoxNews in the way someone would talk about rescuing a puppy or a kitten from an animal shelter. It’s like he got hired accidentally and they keep forgetting to fire him.
(The remaining 0.1% is Megyn Kelly complaining because someone has been sexist in a way that affected her directly, once in a blue moon.)
Jafafa Hots @ 3
Gag, anti-vaxxers. Fucking opportunistic slime.
The idea that the monied lords of Fox are trying to repair the temporary damage to the stock market is a good one, but not complete. See, the rich don’t mind a wildly-fluctuating stock market… particularly if they are in control of the fluctuation!
No, I think we’re seeing a bit of conscience slipping out. If I had a sky daddy, I’d be praying hard that they kick Shep out on his ass… to release him to tell the truth about Fox on ALL the other stations. But that’s probably too much to ask for.
Sooner or later, though, someone’s gonna leave Fox and spill the beans.
Who is this man and what is he doing on television news, let alone Fox?
Ebola must be the fault of African countries’ notoriously efficient vaccination programs.
@7 davidnagle
Don’t they have this newfangled thing … what was it called? Oh, I remember: nondisclosure agreements!
I agree wholeheartedly that the news media has ran away with ebola in the US. It’s being over sensationalized. We are far more likely to die in a car accident or being shot than ebola… Far more of us will die from the flu. That said, I think what the media should be focusing is on is proper hygiene and getting your vaccines. Ebola is deadly but there are other diseases in the US that could spread more rapidly. It’s those we should be conscious of.
250,000 people around the world will die this year from the regular old flu and nobody will bat an eye.
I can’t believe I’m gonna say this, but I’m gonna have my kids watch this when they get home from school.
Living in the Dallas area, it seems, ebola is on everyones mind. My 11 yo even came home yesterday talking about the “Ebolapocalypse”.
I admit to some surprise at the seeming incompetency of the TX hospitals, leading to the revelation of widespread fears among nurses and other healthcare providers that their training is inadequate to deal with Ebola.
NPR’s morning edition had a rundown of the various ways politicians are using Ebola. There are three main categories:
1. Democrats slamming Republicans for cutting funding to the CDC
2. Republicans slamming the administration as too incompetent to run Obamacare, and that Obamacare doesn’t work
3. Republicans calling for more closed and militarized borders
Charming.
I suspect the fact that the focus is on Texas helps. They might not be so reasonable if it were California.
@SallyStrange #14
What, do they intend to shoot down commercial passenger planes?
Naked Bunny, #16: Not yet but they seem to be going that direction. Stopping all flights from West Africa or maybe even Africa generally? Yes.
The only bit of US Ebola news that disturbs me is the nurse who was supposed to be under observation who flew after treating Duncan from Dallas to Cleveland, stayed in Cleveland for several days and flew back to Dallas the night before she started showing symptoms.
The number of protocols and safety requirements that violates boggles me.
BBC Link
When I’m watching the part where he’s assuring us that no one else has the virus, and that we don’t have an outbreak, etc etc I just keep seeing the start to every zombie movie ever, where the lying newsman is denying things and it’s intercut with random zombies attacking people.
I’m now terrified of ebolazombies eating me, thanks FauxNews!
As long as the problem was “over there” noone (hyperbolically speaking) gave a shit. Now that it is “over here” everyone is going nuts. Seems like there are two main responses coming out. We could try to fix it over there (send support, fund vaccine research, etc) thereby stopping it from coming over here and helping a whole lot of people to boot. Or, we can try to just keep it over there by shutting our borders (very popular among the Republicans).
I’m not a medical professional, but I’ve seen enough zombie movies to know which one is most likely to work.
Andy Borowitz writes Some Fear Ebola Outbreak Could Make Nation Turn to Science
@7 davidnagle:
Everything at Fox News is tightly scripted. It’s really hard to believe that Roger Ailes would tolerate anyone deviating from the established talking points.
My take on Shep is a tad tinfoil hat, but I honestly think that he’s their designated loose cannon. As in, “Alright, today Smith is going to contradict everyone else on-air who is losing their shit over (manufactured scare story here).”
That way, Ailes and company can point to Smith and go “Look! See? Fair and balanced! Not everyone is parroting the same line!”
It’s admittedly a little crackpot, but let’s be honest: Fox News didn’t get where it it by tolerating anything other than a conservative world view.
The problem I have with Shepherd and CDC officials is that they do not discuss how easily our medical system could be overwhelmed.
It is very difficult to care for an Ebola patient without becoming infected yourself. Isolation units, supplies, training, and staff are very limited, and the current ones cannot be expanded very much in the next few moths or years. I have no idea of the current capacity, but how many patients is it? 1000? If we exceeded that number, it would be difficult to care for patients without spreading the infection further among health workers and others. All it would take is a few groups who oppose government organized medical care (anti-vaxers, libertarians, religious groups) to get infected and try to care for their own to develop a substantial outbreak that could exceed our capacity.
I like Obama a lot, but I think he should have declared this a civil defense emergency, and should publicly develop plans to deal with a substantial outbreak. He should use the term “the moral equivalent of war”. We should be experimenting with our civil defense plans in Africa, to see if we can make them work. We should be ramping up production of supplies needed to care for Ebola patients as if we were on a war footing.
High capacity isolation units need to be developed, and we should have plans to staff them in part with Ebola survivors for basic care tasks that do not require medical knowledge such as cleaning, decontamination, patient needs (feeding, moving, washing, changing linens, etc.) Every patient should have electronic communication through phones, skype, whatever, even when not conscious, so that family members can observe that care is taking place and follow the condition of their loved one. Otherwise, they will be tempted to care for the patients themselves.
Individual responses to epidemics are counterproductive, the same way individual responses to war are counterproductive. That’s why this needs to be a civil defense issue.
It is possible that this could be a tempest in a teapot. But the expense would not have to be wasted: the same preparation and supplies could be used for other public health emergencies that occur worldwide. Development of valid strategies to bring this epidemic in Africa under control would be a great success all by itself.
Hmm…What is the problem with this attitude and plan, and where have I seen it before?
Could we not joke about zombies, please? These are real people suffering and dying, not interchangeable undead NPCs for our entertainment.
I am generally convinced that even with the inevitable mistakes we’ll make, ebola is not likely to become a significant outbreak here. But this statement from the nurses in Dallas is troubling. I don’t think it means we’ve completely blown it and oh no here comes the epidemic, but our health system needs to learn from what are apparently early mistakes and anyone who may be involved in caring for patients with ebola should ensure that their particular systems and personnel are better prepared.
I’m also a little bit perplexed that the stories I’m hearing about ebola and the nurses and patients in Dallas aren’t mentioning this statement. I understand wanting to allay fears, but if the nurses’ allegations are accurate, it’s at the least something our health care providers need to learn from and prevent happening again.
Lets’ hope Stross’ rather gloomy prediction doesn’t come about… http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/10/metacommentary.html#comment-1960245
I gotta say the almost criminal response to the first infection AND the nurse traveling to Cleveland is pretty darn concerning.
Ebola isn’t influenza…but the doubling time in Africa is now about 30 days. It’s nowhere near under control there. Just simple math tells you that if that rate continues, in 2 years more than 1 billion people will be infected. Can’t wait until it jumps over to rural India…that’ll be a lot of fun.
Yes, influenza will kill more people this year. And maybe next. But if health authorities, from WHO on down to your local city health department, don’t get their collective shit together, we are going to be in a world of hurt.
I don’t think anyone should minimize the danger here.
I’m scheduled to go to Texas to a medical conference at the end of the month, and I just got an inbound e-mail from the conference organizers with specific information about Ebola. They’re taking it seriously. So should everyone else.
My personal risk of getting Ebola rose from zero to some non-zero number in the space of 2 days. I have relatives in Cleveland. That airport is very, very busy. There is now an increased risk of someone in Cleveland being infected and incubating Ebola right now. There’s an increased risk of someone who merely traveled through Cleveland and who is now anywhere in the world being infected and incubating Ebola right now. And since we’re at the start of the influenza season (along with the enterovirus that I personally know two people have right now), coupled with the all-too-human propensity to diminish or ignore or “fight through” their own symptoms and … well, I think people should be a little more wary.
Here’s a little scenario. Cleveland airport worker, feeling a little feverish, maybe has some bloodshot eyes…”It’s OK, honey, it’s just the flu. You take the kids Trick or Treating and I’ll stay here and pass out candy.”
Do I think that’s likely? No. Is it probable? No. Is it possible? Sadly, yes.
That said, I do think that it is immensely frustrating that Ebola is being seen as some sort of political “gotcha” card on both sides. How many infections will it take before people start working together on this? 100? 1000? 1 million? It’s sad and sickening.
99% of my worry is for the African people facing more than 99% of the problem, frankly. The odds of an epidemic of this disease taking place in North America are small enough to be negligible, and the MSM fearmongering is reprehensible.
SallyStrange @#14
#1 seems sufficient to explain Fox delivering a calming message to its horde about Ebola. Democrats are hammering Republicans for cutting the CDC budget. I was just listening to an election report on NPR with a sound bite of some Demo candidate doing just that. They are also hammering Republicans for stonewalling on approving Obama’s nominee for Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, whom the Washington Post describes as an “Affordable Care Act advocate and physician.”
Obviously, we can’t have that, and we can’t have Democrats fomenting the electorate right before an election, particularly over health care issues and Republican intransigence. In any case, fomenting is Fox’s business.
I did note that Shep delivers a reassuring “believe me” about the risk of contracting Ebola. No, I don’t believe him about anything. He’s a hack and will say whatever they tell him to say…fact, truth, or lie. I understand the evidence indicates that I’m at very low risk, but my confidence in that does not depend on believing a Fox news talking head.
@Kevin Kehres:
This is why less simple math exists. Because doing simple math gets you to the wrong answer. You can’t just extrapolate outward on the spread of a disease like this. It’s also important to note that even if Africa, ebola is relatively constrained geographically. Africa’s a big continent, and the disease is only in a few pockets on that continent. The size of this outbreak is troubling, but previous outbreaks have been contained. I am unconcerned that it will jump to rural India. It would certainly be a problem if it did, but I’m not sure it’s at all likely.
Not trying to belittle the horrible, awful epidemic going on there, but at least a lot of us USians could stand to be reminded that Africa is a fucking big place. The tourism industry of African countries thousands of miles away from the current outbreak is taking a big hit because we’re fond of treating an entire continent like a monolith.
Somewhat related, USians from west Africa are finding that the ebola scare is a great excuse for people to be assholes to them.
And the candy all has the worker’s body fluids on it?
Those eyes aren’t bloodshot… they’re bloodshooting.
People are not getting ebola because they were near someone who had it.
They are getting it because they are caring for people with ebola, or dealing with their corpses, and getting body fluids on them in the process.
Just a little bit different.
(and that doesn’t even explain how the airport worker was exposed to and then got infected from the asymptomatic passenger’s body fluids)
In news of utterly unbelievable asshattery, in Cleveland a superintendent closed and cleaned 2 schools because an employee flew on the same plane as the most recent ebola patient a day later. As in, they weren’t even on the same flight. This is an institute of learning displaying/condoning/perpetuating irrational behavior.
[tangentially]
I hear that airlines (urh… airports – eg JFK) have instituted “screening” for Ebola by waving a magic meter at each of them to ensure they do not have Ebola virii in them. I want to ask about the “false positive” rate of these devices.
EG: if disease rate is 1:100 and detection rate is accurate with a rate of 1:10 failure rate and it flags one positive for the disease; what is the probability one actually has the disease? [without doin the maths…] This is one of those situations where being tested #positive# actually means you very probably do NOT have the disease. In summary, the testing device has to have an accuracy about 10x better than the rate of occurrence, or “false positives” will outnumber “correct positives”.
/tangent
I just wonder about the accuracy of those handheld detectors. Could they be deceiving us of our actual risk?
I’m getting 1980s nostalgia.
I wonder if they even have any idea how to actually clean and disinfect a building the size of a school well enough to remove any risk of ebola. Mopping the floors wouldn’t actually cut it, if there was actually the slightest chance that there was any virus there in the first place, which of course there wasn’t.
They claimed to follow CDC guidelines off their website, but instead I’m guessing that they poured hand sanitizer on everything and then bombed the place with Lysol. Then threw all the rags in trash cans for their janitors to take out.
A Fox News reporter telling his viewers that they should NOT feel fearful and/or angry about a news item? Alright, when did Roger Ailes get kidnapped, and can I send money to the kidnapper to NOT release him?
@36, twas brillig (stevem)
I’m more curious how a scanner for a virus works. Does it need a blood sample? Saliva?
Or is that kind of like the “bomb-detector” scam?
They are remote thermal sensors. They are basically trying to take your temperature, to see if you have a fever (one of the early symptoms). Of course, fever is relatively common, so to the extent the gimzos work at all, the false positive rate is quite high. (Besides, what are They planning on doing? Put everyone who has a fever in isolation?)
However, the gizmos, or at least the strategy, is known to not work. They were first deployed in the SARS scare some years ago, and accomplished (wait for it) nothing. Did not detect a single case.
It’s all a form of “security threatre”, like tanks at airports and the goons who make you take off yer shoes. For instance, I seriously doubt any airport has the equipment, facilities, or people with the training to deal with a genuine case (be it “dry” (i.e., just a fever or similar), or the ultra-dangerous “wet” (i.e., vomiting, bleeding, etc.)).
(Fascinating tidbit I learned a few days ago: There are only two aircraft in the world capable of safely transporting a “wet” Ebola patient. As a result, it’s essentially impossible for any of the organisations involved, such as MSF (a.k.a. Doctors Without Borders) to promise they can evacuate any worker who comes down the disease. Therefore, they are having a HUGE problem trying to get volunteers.)
twas brillig (stevem) #36
That “magic meter” is simply a remote sensing thermometer. They are looking for people with fevers. If a person has a fever, I don’t want to share a plane with them, Ebola or no Ebola. Frankly, I’d like the airline industry to figure out a way to do this to every ticket holder, even after the Ebola outbreak stops.
#33 Jafafa Hots:
I see. And people in the US have no urges to care for the sick? We will just let them die without care, and perhaps burn the building with them in it to dispose of the contagious waste?
The problem with Ebola is that it exploits our normal habits of care for the ill. What works for other less contagious or lethal diseases is not sufficient for Ebola, and the level of training, equipment and supplies to care for patients without exacerbating the epidemic is scarce.
Have you ever tried to clean up after diarrhea in beds or clothing? It is difficult even when it is not dangerously infectious. If your child/parent/spouse had diarrhea, would you just let them sit in it? No: you’d try to get them cleaned up. And likely catch Ebola if that was the cause. Because few people have the training or the equipment to do that job.
First worlders such as Americans are not exceptional when it comes to avoiding infection from Ebola. we will catch it the same way the most rural Africans do, in the process of caring for the sick. Until we establish proper civil defense for this epidemic, which may be spreading into the US.
As for rural India (#31), it’s a small problem compared to urban India. The lack of sanitation and healthcare facilities for the crowded impoverished could result in a huge epidemic.
This is a really useful article on our fears with regard to Ebola: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/09/ebola-highly-contagious-virus-myths-outbreak-epidemic
And what war are we building this defense for? I grew up in a city that had the cold-war civil defense center there for many years. They never worried about diseases, that was always a CDC concern. Your terminology needs to be updated to reality.
In a less encouraging Fox News, Bill O’Reilly went on the Daily Show last night and attempted to argue that White Privilege doesn’t exist, despite seemingly admitting it does several times.
Ann Coulter has weighed in. She’s a frequent guest and panel participant on Fox News. She is not as reasonable as Shep Smith. It seems Coulter is against “free medical treatment” for Ebola victims.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/ann-coulter-medical-treatment-ebola-victims
Think Progress posted an article that addresses the fact that a travel ban will not solve the Ebola crisis.
Link for excerpts posted in comment #49:
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014/10/16/3580494/travel-ban-wont-solve-ebola/
consciousness razor @ # 2: … he called it a “fact-dissemination exercise,” like that wasn’t his fucking job all day, every day.
It isn’t. Never forget: he works for Rupert Murdoch.
And … here we have the really rabid response from the religious rightwing to Shepard Smith’s presentation:
Right Wing Watch link.
This “Okay, kids, this bit’s important so you actually need to listen” tone is quite different to how they talk when they’re laying in to climate change, isn’t it? It’s almost like an admission that they don’t expect their audience to take them seriously the rest of the time.
http://www.vox.com/2014/10/13/6964633/travel-ban-airport-screening-ebola-outbreak-virus
Here’s more discussion on why travel bans not only would not work, but would make the situation worse. This is an issue that is slightly more complicated than Fox News can handle. That is, there are multiple aspects of the problem to consider and to understand.
Excerpt from the link above:
If Ebola spreads here by normal means, Shep is right. We can handle it.
It isn’t the normal means that keep me up at night.
How hard can this be for ISIS or Al Qaeda to figure out? All they need to do is find a dozen people willing to die for Allah. Kidnap someone dying of Ebola. Wait until a plane is just about to take off, and inject all their volunteers with the patient’s blood. The twelve monkeys get off the planes they’ve transferred to before they show symptoms. Then they go visit buses and train stations around the world, with a Kleenex in their pocket to spread their own saliva on every railing as they go…
I absolute think that we should cut off all commercial traffic to airports within five hundred miles of anyplace where the disease is rampant. It’s prudent, and frankly, it’s a few weeks overdue. In fact, I can’t fathom why it hasn’t been done already.
Nice rant full of paranoia, but as likely to happen as a meteor landing on Faux News Headquarters. Why are you letting your imagination get ahead of reality?
Oh, I’d say just a teeny bit more likely than that. How about we go with, “as likely as a group of men armed with box cutters being able to destroy the World Trade Center and (almost) the Pentagon,” hmm? It’s not as if we don’t know that some of our enemies are capable of unspeakable malice and evil.
I’m not saying the scenario I described is likely. I’m saying it’s possible. ISIS has the intent(which they have announced) and probably the technical know-how to carry it out (minimal); the only question is whether they have the means and the will, and whether we’d be able to stop them if they tried.
If you were responsible (and knew you’d be blamed if you got it wrong), how much would you be willing to bet that those chances were zero?
How is wanting to destroy the Pentagon evil?
brucegee1962,
It has squat to do with chances being zero of your scenario happening. Risk has a spectrum, and if you’re worried about everything on that spectrum with a risk factor >0, your head will implode.
Space is full of debris. Some of that debris is big enough that should it hit the Earth, adios muchachos. The chances of a meteor hitting the Earth with enough energy to completely bollux humanity is >0. Why aren’t you worried about that, and pushing our governments to build orbital nuclear weapons to protect us?
The fact is that human beings are completely and utterly shite at assessing risk. Whatever is in front of your face gets all of the attention, even if the actual risk is very low. What we should be worried about is the impending food crisis, and global warming, because these are very high risk. Not “danger-sexy” like Ebola though.
What I am willing to bet, is that it would be much cheaper and a lot less in the long run to no let the paranoid fuckwits control the situation. So much of “security” is mere theater.
Now, why are you afraid it will happen and why? Let’s explore your paranoia, or is the scary ebola laden Muslims a way to “close the borders” for other bigoted reasons, like being anti-hispanic….
dude, did you fucking miss the part where Jafafa was responding to a bullshit hypothetical about getting Ebola from candy?! Way to miss the point.
For a day or week of security theater, high-isolation adjuncts for ebola to say a score of hospitals nation-wide could be built to handle say 200 patients total, with the proper air handling, water handling, waste incineration, and stocked with enough disposable PPE which includes full hazmat protection with supplied air hoods for that cost. This isn’t rocket science, just practical non-paranoid thinking.
well, isn’t it just fucking convenient then that the post right above yours already explains why. But let me quote the relevant bit again:
tl;dr: it won’t work and will only make things worse.
Welp, just got an email from my kids school. Apparently, one of the kids flew on the same flight to Cleveland as Amber Vinson. So, they are “bringing in extra equipment and personnel” to clean the school tonight. They also pulled the buses and are “disinfecting” them.
I called it “theater” when the schools in Cleveland did similar. Now it is my school. My kids. Is it still “theater”?
Yes. Yes, it is. Just had a long convo with my kids. Explained why the school is doing it and why they (the kids) should not be scared.
*Sigh* and my chicken biryani is burned now.
-posting to the lounge also cause I think this thread is dead, jim
brucegee1962,
Sure, it would be possible for terrorists to try to intentionally infect others with Ebola. But would they be able to infect enough people to overwhelm our medical system? My understanding is that once Ebola patients start showing symptoms (and are therefore infectious), they also start to feel like crap. How many bus and train stations would they have the energy to visit before someone noticed the sick guy wiping something all over the handrails? Probably more than one, but isn’t Ebola less contagious in the early stages (the stages where the patient is still capable of walking around independently).
It would probably be a better plan for them to team up, and have a healthy person spread the Ebola-laced fluids of someone who is really sick. The healthy one should have about a week or so before they come down with symptoms, right?
When will I learn. Refresh, read, refresh, then post.
YOB
Yikes, so sorry to hear that scary news. I think I would do the same thing if I was responsible for an entire school. Even if it is being ridiculously over cautious, a thorough cleaning and disinfecting couldn’t hurt and will go a long way towards quelling the concerns of panicky parents.
I feel your pain. Literally.
I just spent 45 minutes calming down one of my relatives. They didn’t know enough about Ebola and had managed to talk themselves into a panic. Even though the nearest Ebola patient is 1500 miles away. This isn’t even the first one.
And to the ones with the now popular ISIS terrorists infected with Ebola spreading it around, borrow someone’s brain and use it!!!, Even a dog brain if you can find one.
There is so much wrong with this that it would take pages to explain. But consider the obvious fact. There is more than one microbial pathogen in the world!!!
Such diseases as TB, Malaria, Hepatitis A,B, or C, toxigenic E. coli, typhoid, cholera, bubonic plague, anthrax, and hundreds of others are more or less everywhere. I know there are bubonic plague and Hanta virus infected rodents within a few miles of my house. There is nothing magic about Ebola. In fact it doesn’t spread as easily as many and kills quickly, making it less than ideal for a terror epidemic weapon.
So fill in the blank. ISIS terrorist infected with drug resistant TB, anthrax, bubonic plague, your favorite disease here, and walks around Washington DC infecting hundreds. Ask yourself why this hasn’t happened already. Hint. It’s not as easy to do this as it is to type improbable paranoid fantasies on an internet comment board.
Beside the difficulty of actually creating plague carriers the guys in groups like ISIS are every bit as scared of infectious diseases as the rest of us. Mess with that stuff and you might get infected as well, and the brains in those groups aren’t in any hurry to be “martyred.” That’s for the desperate and dumb attracted to their cause. Bombs and guns are familiar, known to be effective, and any screw-ups will happen far away from the leadership of ISIS. Non-Arab ISIS converts with legally acquired weapons are a far more likely threat to Americans than Rube Goldberg Typhoid Marys.
Ebola isn’t a sign of any sort of Apocalypse.
It’s a sign of what happens when you ignore science, scientists, and keep cutting the budgets of NIH and the CDC. The worst offenders are the science haters of the GOP but it probably isn’t entirely their fault.
I’ve been watching appalled as everyone from Obama, WHO, NIH, CDC, and that incompetent Texas hospital drops one ball after the other. This is basic medicine that we’ve known for a long time. The rate limiting step here is money. They simply haven’t funded enough, the programs that are supposed to stop these emerging disease epidemics.
The one group that hasn’t dropped the ball are the docs on the ground in Africa. They knew there was a problem in March, six months ago. No one listened or cared until the epidemic became too big to ignore.
…and brucegee1962 provides a perfect example of why it’s irresponsible to recommend anyone listen to Fox, even if by some bizarre chance one of their talking heads manages to make a bit of sense now and again. Shame on you, PZ.
brucegee1962
Turn off Fox News and take a deep breath. It’s all right. The ebil scary ISIS Mooslimbs are not hiding under your bed. Furthermore, there are no boogeymen hiding in your closet.
Shep Smith just said all that because he’s a gay liberal!
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/bryan-fischer-says-shepard-smith-debunked-ebola-fears-because-hes-gay-liberal
I guess I shouldn’t be shocked that scary Muslim ISIS ebola terrorists is being posited as a credible concern. Ebola terrorists! It sounds like the plot from a really bad zombie movie.
The scary ISIS terrorists infected with (dreaded disease this week) has been tried before.
1. A cult in Oregon, the Bhagwan Rajneeshes or some such tried to infect a salad bar in a restaurant in The Dalles. A bunch of people got Salmonella poisoning but IIRC, it wasn’t too severe.
2. A cult in Japan, Aum Shinrikyo tried to develop weapons of mass destruction. Their anthrax program failed but they did manage to attack the Tokyo subway with nerve gas.
3. The ones in Boston (Tsarnaev’s) had a better idea. Pressure cookers with modified legal fireworks and a cell phone. The ones during the Boston Marathon.
If anyone wants to stay up tonight, worry about pressure cookers and fireworks from states where they are legal.
brucegee1962
Do you realized that you just described the villain’s plan from “Troma’s War” (except that was the late ’80s, so the terrible virus du jour was AIDS*)
*Yes, I know AIDS isn’t the virus. Don’t tell me, tell Lloyd Kaufman.
Two great videos from the ebola hot zone:
https://news.vice.com/video/the-fight-against-ebola-full-length
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/world/africa/because-of-ebola-ambulance-work-in-liberia-is-a-busy-and-lonely-business.html?_r=0
Given the conditions on the ground, I’m surprised that ebola hasn’t killed all of Liberia by now. I mean they literally have dead ebola victims laying in the middle of the street and dying victims in the gutter of a highly populated slum and we’re freaking out because someone was on the same plane that an infected person used days before?
Yeah, if you get the virus, you are pretty fucked. But if Liberia only has thousands of victims instead of hundreds of thousands given the deplorable conditions they have to exist in, I have my doubts that this will be a civilization crushing plague.
brucegee:
You really ought to read this comment about Ebola in the Lounge.
It should allay your fears.
WTF is Shep Smith doing on FOX news? A person speaking reasonably and intelligently on FOX news, isn’t there some sort of matter-antimatter reaction danger?
A few responses:
I’m a card-carrying liberal (seriously – I think I may have a card somewhere), and I don’t watch Fox. Just because your enemies routinely use fear to control the minds of the masses, does not mean that fear is never a rational response.
I’m not saying we should seal the borders of these countries. That’s obviously impossible, and we need to get in supplies and medical personnel. I specifically said that just commercial air traffic should be halted. If someone has to drive 500 miles to get on an airplane, that gives a lot more time for their plans to go wrong.
Yes, this kind of shutdown in West Africa would be economically devastating, but only a small percentage of the economic devastation from a European outbreak (I suspect Europe would be the main target, simply because of accessibility). I’m not just thinking about people dying or being hospitalized – I’m thinking about a weeks-long shutdown where schools are closed people are reluctant to leave their houses while hazmat teams go around cleaning up the places where infected people might have been. The panic would do more damage than the disease.
I’m not saying this would be an end-of-civilization type of attack. I’m just saying it could do a lot of damage – particularly to Obama, who really doesn’t need that right now.
Also, a lot would depend on whether the terrorists wanted to go after their “most hated” or “easiest targets.” If they decided to go after places like Mumbai, Jakarta, Rio, and Mexico City, the number of deaths would be a lot more than if they went after obvious targets like New York, London and Paris. Granted, it’s hard to imagine that they’d just want to go about indiscriminately killing – they’d want the maximum symbolic impact.
@68 and 69, yes, that’s somewhat reassuring. But not that much. Anthrax and bubonic plague are fairly hard to come by; I can’t think of the last time I heard about Hep C killing thousands of people in a few weeks.
@69, yes, it’s true that the leaders are probably plenty scared of it. But Mohammed Atta was a pretty smart guy, and look what he accomplished. But yeah, you’d have to be pretty desperate to try something like that – like, maybe if somebody was bombing the shit out of you.
brucegee1962
Yawn. Bored now.
I advise you stop getting talking points from them then. Otherwise someone could get the wrong impression.
No, but it does mean that you shouldn’t go to the professional lying fear-mongers when you make your decision. The first problem is that you believe (for reasons you haven’t gone into) that the insurgent group calling itself the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant is a threat to the United States of America, a nation which has no territorial claims in the Levant, or within a few thousand miles of same, and thus is not really a primary target for a group trying to establish itself as a government in that area. Furthermore, the idea that any non-state actor (or for that matter any state actor) poses a military threat to the U.S. is fundamentally ridiculous. Terrorism, meanwhile, is not actually the goal of ISIL, or at least not in the sense the word is ordinarily used (more generally, by the definition of violence towards political ends, all military action also falls under the rubric of terrorism); they are a non-state army, which is conquering and occupying territory militarily. This is a distinctly different modus operandi than is used by guerrillas, who make lighting strikes against vulnerable military targets while organizing in a cell or band structure, or terrorists, who are similarly organized but make strike against civilian targets.
So, did you just completely ignore the links about why fucking with transportation is a bad idea, or what?
Yeah, they’re just Africans, who gives a shit about them, right? Fucking hell you’re an asshole.
Except you still haven’t explained who’s doing this, or why they wouldn’t devote enough thought to it to realize how stupid a plan it is (for one thing, you think that no one in any of these hypothetical infected airports is going to fly back to whatever country this bizarre plot originated in? That there’s no way the disease (whichever it is; there’s a few hundered that would be better candidates than Ebola) is going to jump that border too? That’s why biological warfare is such an intrinsically stupid fucking idea). And then, having thought of that, if they wanted to randomly kill Europeans or Americans, they’d use one of the dozen better plans I thought of in the last five minutes. Ones that don’t lead to a strong possibility of the person making them dying horribly of haemorragic fever.
Or, you know, a reasonable public health response, which Europe could certainly manage and the U.S. can probably put together sooner or later? One that would contain the infection and prevent its further spread? There’s been an ongoing discussion about the (relatively minor) steps that need to be taken to ensure that.
It’s already starting to, and fearmongering like yours is the reason.
You still haven’t even explained who’s doing it or why.
Why are you so obsessed with Muslim terrorists? There have been far more terrorist incidents perpetrated in the U.S. in the name of Jesus, or white supremacy, or misogyny. They’re just not usually called that in the media, because there’s a shitton of anti-Muslim and anti-brown people bigotry in the States.
You fucking numbskull; do you not realize that Jakarta, like Indonesia generally, is over 85% Muslim? That Mumbai is just across the Arabian Sea from the Arabian Peninsual and the Levant? Are you completely fucking stupid?
Nor has Ebola; indeed, it’s killed just about 4,500 people ever, worldwide. By contrast, Tuberculosis kills about 2.5 million people per year, which works out to just under 7,000 people per day. But not in places with functioning public health systems, like Europe.
Not a whole lot, when you get right down to it. Given the resources he had, he could potentially have done vastly more damage. Fortunately, he didn’t know enough about infrastructure to do so.
I’d be a little more concerned with shooting down the planes that are bombing me, in their shoes, because the last thing that the U.S. is going to cut or let be affected by an epidemic is its continued ability to murder brown people, which they know as well as I do.
brucegee1962
I want to be charitable and assume you didn’t read my response to you @59. So please read it, then consider this question: why are you still fixating on a very low risk danger, when there are high risk dangers all around you?