Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

Then we have serious mis-steps going on here in Dallas, and -- if you wanted an epidemic to get started here, that would be a good way to do it. Don't train the first-responders so they have no idea what they're dealing with, allow people who have been possibly contaminated to travel at will, only get on top of the situation after the thing is nearly out of control and so on. By now, I don't blame anybody for going full-metal Katsung on this ebola scare. It looks like our health professionals are at the very least incompetent, if not criminally culpable.

It's terrible for those people Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. They have a real crises. The bigger story in the US is how the disease is being exploited by the media and politicians.

Quote from: mjmsprt40 on 2014-10-19, 19:47:02

Then we have serious mis-steps going on here in Dallas, and -- if you wanted an epidemic to get started here, that would be a good way to do it. Don't train the first-responders so they have no idea what they're dealing with, allow people who have been possibly contaminated to travel at will, only get on top of the situation after the thing is nearly out of control and so on. By now, I don't blame anybody for going full-metal Katsung on this ebola scare. It looks like our health professionals are at the very least incompetent, if not criminally culpable.

When Ebola becomes epidemic in the US, call me out. It's about as likely as an ISIS candidate being elected president in '16. And that's as likely as Romney being elected.

Has anyone yet  suggested that those are not the ears of an Earthling?

Somehow, in America at least, we seem to be taking Ebola both too seriously and not seriously enough. Rightwing xenophobes rage about closing the borders and impeaching #OBOLA (heads up, white Americans: if anyone has a track record of deliberately introducing devastating diseases to the North American continent in order to wipe out the population, it’s not half-Kenyan lawyers), while the rest of us titter proprietarily over the gory doom that we know will almost certainly never touch us; meanwhile, we’ve skimped on funding infectious disease research ever since the 90s Ebola scare lost its lurid lustre, and healthcare workers are paying the price. As Wired reported on Monday: “If there were more infection-prevention research, the nurse in Dallas (and probably the one in Spain, who may have contaminated herself doffing her gear) might not have become infected.” Not only that, but Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, says that, if it wasn’t for funding cuts, we would probably have an Ebola vaccine by now.

Sooo … do we learn from that? Are we going to invest in medical equipment that protects doctors and nurses from contamination? Procedures that minimise human error? Education campaigns about the dangers of antibiotic-resistant bacteria? Or even, um, a functioning healthcare system? Anything constructive? Nah, said John McCain on Sunday. Instead, he suggested, Obama should appoint an Ebola tsar to assuage Americans’ superficial, borderline recreational anxieties about a disease that mainly affects people in west Africa living in extreme poverty without access to clean water and modern medical facilities, along with the underfunded, understaffed medical personnel desperately battling the epidemic. Not to mention the fact that the Obama administration almost certainly has not just appointed officials but entire agencies to contain Ebola in the US (if I learned anything from Outbreak, Rene Russo is also on the case), and that McCain’s party hates tsars, government oversight in general and probably Rene Russo, too.

Perhaps John McCain and his cohort ought to invest in a Get a Grip tsar.