First US case of Ebola


I'll have to get back to you specifically about your question but in the meantime here is some info, there were flights that left Ft. Campbell on Thursday and Saturday with destination of Liberia.

If you are hearing that some troops are returning right now it's most likely those that were deployed some weeks ago, but I can't imagine that number being very large.

US Ebola fighters head to Africa, but will the military and civilian effort be enough?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...eba6a8-5b99-11e4-8264-deed989ae9a2_story.html

Hundreds of Americans have flown to Liberia in the past few days. Thousands more are on the way.

This Ebola corps is a collection of doctors, nurses, scientists, soldiers, aviators, technicians, mechanics and engineers. Many are volunteers with nonprofit organizations or the government, including uniformed doctors and nurses from the little-known U.S. Public Health Service. Most are military personnel, snapping a salute when are assigned to their mission — “Operation United Assistance.” It does not qualify for combat pay, only hardship-duty incentive pay, which is about $5 a day — before taxes.

“We’re going over there to take the fight to the enemy,” said Sgt. Maj. John Kolodgy of the 2nd battalion of the 501st Aviation Regiment, stationed in Fort Bliss, which is sending 85 soldiers this weekend to Liberia to provide airlift capability. “In this situation the enemy is Ebola and the spread of Ebola in Africa.”

The “Iron Knights” from Fort Bliss, in El Paso, will join hundreds of soldiers from the 101st Airborne who departed for Liberia in flights from Kentucky’s Fort Campbell on Thursday and Saturday. The U.S. military presence in West Africa is expected to grow to more than 900 troops by Sunday, a number that will climb to 3,900 in coming weeks.

Global health officials have a plan to bring Ebola victims out of their homes, where they can easily spread the virus, and treat them in health facilities. The 101st Airborne officially took command Saturday of the effort to build 17 Ebola treatment units (ETUs) in Liberia with 100 beds each.

For the military, this is an unusual mission. Past humanitarian efforts have involved events that have already occurred, such as hurricanes, typhoons and earthquakes, but this crisis is still developing, generated by a pathogen that is dynamic and unpredictable.

The U.S. military is deploying primarily to Liberia, though the U.S. civilian operations include Guinea, Sierra Leone and other nations in West Africa. President Obama announced Sept. 16 that the military would provide support to the civilian-run effort that had failed to keep the epidemic from growing exponentially. The question now is whether this more muscular response is too little too late.

The outbreak on Saturday officially topped 10,000 cases — 10,141 confirmed or suspected cases and 4,922 deaths, according to the World Health Organization. Those are only the official numbers; the affected region includes rural areas and forested regions where disease surveillance has been minimal. The virus has now spread to Mali, where an infected 2-year-old girl who traveled from Guinea with her grandmother died Friday. (A small, unrelated outbreak of Ebola is underway in Congo, which has more experience fighting the disease.)

The WHO said this past week that there is no evidence the infection rate is dropping. A report in the Lancet medical journal said, based on a mathematical model of the outbreak in Liberia, that the U.S. military’s plans to create 1,700 new beds for Ebola patients is inadequate and that there is a “rapidly closing window of opportunity for controlling the outbreak and averting a catastrophic toll.”
‘I’m not afraid of it’

U.S. military personnel will construct ETUs and fly cargo across Liberia but will not directly treat Ebola patients or come into contact with them. That is a point stressed by the Pentagon in trying to assuage the concerns of military families.

Instead, volunteer health-care workers will staff the 17 ETUs, which will not all be completed until December, a Pentagon spokeswoman said. The U.S. Agency for International Development, which is coordinating the overall effort, said late this week that 3,700 people from around the world had volunteered online to serve in West Africa. But it is unclear how many will make it through the vetting process, which USAID said is being handled by organizations such as the International Medical Corps, Save the Children, the International Organization for Migration and the International Rescue Committee.

A potential complication in recruiting health-care workers to fight Ebola arose Friday when the states of New York, New Jersey and Illinois announced they will quarantine for 21 days travelers from West Africa who have directly dealt with Ebola patients.

...


Tennessee GOP seeks clarity about Ebola mission
http://www.tennessean.com/story/new...p-seeks-clarity-about-ebola-mission/17980831/

101st Airborne to control 'Ebola corps,' thousands of U.S. soldiers, personnel deployed to Africa
http://www.legitgov.org/101st-Airbo...s-thousands-American-soldiers-deployed-Africa
101st Airborne to control 'Ebola corps,' thousands of U.S. soldiers, personnel deployed to Africa --U.S. military presence in West Africa expected to grow to 3,900 in coming weeks 26 Oct 2014 Hundreds of Americans have flown to Liberia in the past few days. Thousands more are on the way. Most are military personnel, snapping a salute when are assigned to their mission -- "Operation United Assistance." The "Iron Knights" from Fort Bliss, in El Paso, will join hundreds of soldiers from the 101st Airborne who departed for Liberia in flights from Kentucky's Fort Campbell on Thursday and Saturday.
 
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Okay looks like the confusion is because there was an airman group deployed on Sept 26th that are returning now, but that is a small outfit compared to the hundreds and thousands that have been deployed in the last week and are about to be deployed in the coming weeks.



 
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Meanwhile...

Kayes, Mali

imrs.php



http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...rry-isnt-ebola-in-new-york-its-ebola-in-mali/






Ebola patient who died in Mali had contact with at least 300 others


http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ebola-...ad-contact-with-at-least-300-others-1.2812975





This kid and her grandma went on a public transportation trip across Mali Equivilent from NYC to Miami days before her death.


35_Mali2_kayes.jpg

https://www.google.com/search?q=kay...Fwww.traversees.org%2Farticle160.html;250;288


mali_djenne_bus_roof.jpg



These green buses are apparently the typical public transport in Mali:


mali1016.jpg


green-bus-small.jpg


dsc_0084.jpg


Excellent.

I dunno, seems fairly contained to me. Contained, to Africa, that is.
 
Not sure how to change my settings, right now I have it set so I see 50+ posts per page, so this thread is up to page 32.

How the hell did you get 50 posts per page?

I'm limited to thirty.

I think orenbus meant 40 posts per page. That's what mine is set at, and for me this thread is up to page 33 right now.

The posts-per-page setting can be changed by going to the "Settings" page (from the "Settings" link at the top of this page or any other).

Then, on the left side of the "Settings" page, under the "My Settings" heading and the "My Account" sub-heading, click the "General Settings" link.

Then, on the "General Settings" page, under the "Thread Display Options" heading, you can change the "Number of Posts to Show Per Page" setting.

There are options for 5, 10, 20, 30 and "Use Forum Default."

"Use Forum Default" will show 40 posts per page.
 
Bellevue staffers call in ‘sick’ after Ebola arrives



An extraordinary number of Bellevue Hospital staffers called in sick on Friday rather than treat the city’s first Ebola patient — and those who showed up were terrified to enter his isolation chamber, sources told The Post.

“The nurses on the floor are miserable with a ‘why me?’ attitude, scared to death and overworked because all their co-workers called out sick,” one source said.

“One nurse even went as far as to pretend she was having a stroke to get out of working there, but once they cleared her in the ER they sent her back up,” the source added.
http://nypost.com/2014/10/25/many-bellevue-staffers-take-sick-day-in-ebola-panic/






previously:


[h=3]Madrid hospital staff quit over Ebola fears - The Guardian[/h]www.theguardian.com › WorldEbolaThe Guardian


Oct 10, 2014 - While no official numbers were available, Elvira González of the SAE nurses' union said fear of Ebola had caused some staff to refuse to treat ...

[h=3]Health care workers protest conditions faced in treating Ebola[/h]www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/.../ebol-o14.ht...World Socialist Web Site


Oct 14, 2014 - Health care workers who have come into contact with Ebola patients are at ... in sick or quitting out of exhaustion and fear of contracting Ebola.

[h=3]For Ebola caregivers, enormous fear, risk and bravery ...[/h]www.cnn.com/2014/10/12/health/ebola-health-care-workers/CNN


Oct 12, 2014 - WHO: At least 416 health care workers have contracted Ebola
 
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Why oh why isn't a 21 day, offshore quarantine in effect for travelers from west Africa? Prevention > reaction with this deadly disease.

You couldn't plan on bringing Ebola here any better...

The governors of NY, IL, and NJ freaked out with the recent quarantine and now are back peddling because the FED said it was too draconian and the media is all out attacking them. Since when is this control all Administration defending the people? Something smells to high heavens on this one. States like NY and IL only do things like this when they are really nervous especially when its their "party" in the WH.

Now the media is making it seem like it was all political. There is real fear which is the only thing that makes politicos act swiftly and they do not trust the Administration to handle this because they know it cant or wont.

Australia just stopped all immigration from west Africa and no longer is issuing any visas. There were some comments that maybe they should stop visas from US as well because after all we are technically a country with current Ebola cases.
 
Okay looks like the confusion is because there was an airman group deployed on Sept 26th that are returning now, but that is a small outfit compared to the hundreds and thousands that have been deployed in the last week and are about to be deployed in the coming weeks.

Thanks for the reply. Will be interesting to watch and see if there's any further media coverage of troops going to Africa or if it goes down the memory hole with the reports of them already returning.
 
UGH! This post was in a thread that got moved to hot topics while I was posting it, so I'll post it here...

It's worth noting that the first Ebola outbreak occurred about when we started clear cutting a lot of jungle in Africa.

DNA Sequence Analysis Shows Ebola Outbreak Naturally Ocurring, Not Engineered Virus
https://www.emptywheel.net/2014/10/...reak-naturally-ocurring-not-engineered-virus/

I had really hoped I wasn’t going to have to write this post. Yesterday, Marcy emailed me a link to a Washington’sBlog post that breathlessly asks us “Was Ebola Accidentally Released from a Bioweapons Lab In West Africa?” Sadly, that post relies on an interview with Francis Boyle, whom I admire greatly for his work as a legal scholar on bioweapons. My copy of his book is very well-thumbed. But Boyle and WashingtonsBlog are just wrong here, and it takes only seconds to prove them wrong.

Shortly after getting the email and reading the blog post, I sent out tweets to this summary and this original scientific report which describe work on DNA analysis of Ebola isolated from multiple patients during the current outbreak. That work conclusively shows that the virus in the current outbreak is intimately related to isolates from previous outbreaks with changes only on the order of the naturally occurring mutation rate known for the virus. Further, these random mutations are spread evenly throughout the short run of the virus’s genes and there are clearly no new bits spliced in by a laboratory. Since I wasn’t seeing a lot of traction from the Washington’sBlog post, I was going to let it just sit there.

I should have alerted last night when I heard my wife chuckling over the line “It is difficult to describe working with a horse infected with Ebola”, but I merely laughed along with her and didn’t ask where she read it.

This morning, while perusing the Washington Post, I saw that Joby Warrick has returned to his beat as the new Judy Miller. Along with the line about the Ebola-infected horse, Warrick’s return to beating the drums over bioweapons fear boasts a headline that could have been penned by WashingtonsBlog: “Ebola crisis rekindles concerns about secret research in Russian military labs“.

Warrick opens with a re-telling of a tragic accident in 1996 in a Soviet lab where a technician accidentally infected herself with Ebola. He uses that to fan flames around Soviet work in that era:

The fatal lab accident and a similar one in 2004 offer a rare glimpse into a 35-year history of Soviet and Russian interest in the Ebola virus. The research began amid intense secrecy with an ambitious effort to assess Ebola’s potential as a biological weapon, and it later included attempts to manipulate the virus’s genetic coding, U.S. officials and researchers say. Those efforts ultimately failed as Soviet scientists stumbled against natural barriers that make Ebola poorly suited for bio*warfare.
The bioweapons program officially ended in 1991, but Ebola research continued in Defense Ministry laboratories, where it remains largely invisible despite years of appeals by U.S. officials to allow greater transparency. Now, at a time when the world is grappling with an unprecedented Ebola crisis, the wall of secrecy surrounding the labs looms still larger, arms-control experts say, feeding conspiracy theories and raising suspicions.
/snip/
Enhancing the threat is the facilities’ collection of deadly germs, which presumably includes the strains Soviet scientists tried to manipulate to make them hardier, deadlier and more difficult to detect, said Smithson, now a senior fellow with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a research institute based in Monterey, Calif.
“We have ample accounts from defectors that these are not just strains from nature, but strains that have been deliberately enhanced,” she said.
Only when we get three paragraphs from the end of the article do we get the most important bit of information to be gleaned from the Soviet work on Ebola:

Ultimately, the effort to concoct a more dangerous form of Ebola appears to have failed. Mutated strains died quickly, and Soviet researchers eventually reached a conclusion shared by many U.S. bio*defense experts today: Ebola is a poor candidate for either biological warfare or terrorism, compared with viruses such as smallpox, which is highly infectious, or the hardy, easily dispersible bacteria that causes anthrax.
Note also that, in order to make Ebola more scary, Warrick completely fails to mention the escape of weaponized anthrax from a Soviet facility in 1979, infecting 94 and killing 64, dwarfing the toll from the two Ebola accidents.

And lest we calm down about Ebola and the other bioweapons the Soviets worked on, Warrick leaves us this charming tidbit to end the article:

“One must assume that whatever genetically engineered bacterial and viral forms were created . . . remain stored in the culture collections of the Russian Federation Ministry of Defense.”
Okay, so after we finish peeing our pants over the warnings from WashingtonsBlogPost, here are the clear scientific data showing that the virus actually circulating in West Africa fits perfectly within the genetics one would expect from a natural outbreak. From the summary article, we have this:

For their study, published in the August 28 online issue of Science, Gire’s group sequenced viral DNA of samples collected from 78 confirmed Ebola patients in Sierra Leone between late May and mid-June. For 13 of these patients, they collected samples at multiple time points, resulting in a total of 99 viral genome sequences. They compared these Ebola genomes to each other, as well as to three published genomes from Guinea, and 20 sequences generated from previous Ebola outbreaks.
The genomic analysis revealed that the current version of the virus in West Africa most likely spread from Middle Africa within the past 10 years. They also found that the viruses causing this outbreak and the two previous ones diverged from a common ancestor around 2004. This means that these outbreaks arose from different “jumps” from the animal reservoir to the human population. The similarity between samples from the current outbreak confirm that it originated from a single jump, and since that time the disease has spread exclusively from human to human. This is different from previous outbreaks, which had spread via multiple zoonotic events.
If we go to the paper in Science, here are the details of what was found in the DNA sequencing:

We combined the 78 Sierra Leonean sequences with three published Guinean samples (3) [correcting 21 likely sequencing errors in the latter (6)] to obtain a data set of 81 sequences. They reveal 341 fixed substitutions (35 nonsynonymous, 173 synonymous, and 133 noncoding) between the 2014 EBOV and all previously published EBOV sequences, with an additional 55 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs; 15 nonsynonymous, 25 synonymous, and 15 noncoding), fixed within individual patients, within the West African outbreak. Notably, the Sierra Leonean genomes differ from PCR probes for four separate assays used for EBOV and pan-filovirus diagnostics (table S3).
Deep-sequence coverage allowed identification of 263 iSNVs (73 nonsynonymous, 108 synonymous, 70 noncoding, and 12 frameshift) in the Sierra Leone patients (6). For all patients with multiple time points, consensus sequences were identical and iSNV frequencies remained stable (fig. S4). One notable intrahost variation is the RNA editing site of the glycoprotein (GP) gene (fig. S5A) (10–12), which we characterized in patients (6).
So they found a few hundred single changes in the coding sequence of the virus, spread throughout the genome of the virus. The most important bit of the work is the next paragraph:

Phylogenetic comparison to all 20 genomes from earlier outbreaks suggests that the 2014 West African virus likely spread from central Africa within the past decade. Rooting the phylogeny using divergence from other ebolavirus genomes is problematic (Fig. 2A and fig. S6) (6, 13). However, rooting the tree on the oldest outbreak reveals a strong correlation between sample date and root-to-tip distance, with a substitution rate of 8 × 10−4 per site per year (Fig. 2B and fig. S7) (13). This suggests that the lineages of the three most recent outbreaks all diverged from a common ancestor at roughly the same time, around 2004 (Fig. 2C and Fig. 3A), which supports the hypothesis that each outbreak represents an independent zoonotic event from the same genetically diverse viral population in its natural reservoir.
Translating from the technical language here, what the scientists are saying is that if they compare the DNA sequence data from this outbreak to data from previous outbreaks, it is clear that all of the isolates seen are quite similar. The computer programs for graphically representing these relationships are thrown off slightly by the facts that there is diversity in the pool of viruses circulating in the wild and that the virus also tends to mutate over time. By making the logical assumption of “rooting” the relationships among isolates by putting the oldest one at the bottom of the “tree”, the relationships then all fit perfectly and allow a calculation of the mutation rate over time. Simply put, if the virus circulating now were a product of laboratory manipulation to change the virus, it is very likely that the number of changes that would have been introduced would have blown up the phyologenetic analysis of the current outbreak virus when compared to previous outbreaks. The only way an engineered virus could be involved in this current outbreak would be if somehow a scientist understood how just a very small number of single nucleotide changes could make this virus suddenly more virulent.

While there is a hint that perhaps this virus may be more virulent in the evidence that this outbreak may trace to only one jump from a host species instead of several (although I’ve seen analyses suggesting that this outbreak was just unlucky in getting to highly populated areas quickly, accounting for its spread) the authors of the study demonstrate that our knowledge of Ebola is not yet at a level where one could put just those few changes into the genome to achieve higher virulence. In fact, one of the driving reasons for carrying out this study was to identify just those changes that can affect virulence so that the information can possibly be put to use in developing vaccines or other treatments, as seen in the final two paragraphs of the publication:

As in every EVD outbreak, the 2014 EBOV variant carries a number of genetic changes distinct to this lineage; our data do not address whether these differences are related to the severity of the outbreak. However, the catalog of 395 mutations, including 50 fixed nonsynonymous changes with 8 at positions with high levels of conservation across ebolaviruses, provides a starting point for such studies (table S4).
To aid in relief efforts and facilitate rapid global research, we have immediately released all sequence data as it is generated. Ongoing epidemiological and genomic surveillance is imperative to identify viral determinants of transmission dynamics, monitor viral changes and adaptation, ensure accurate diagnosis, guide research on therapeutic targets, and refine public health strategies. It is our hope that this work will aid the multidisciplinary international efforts to understand and contain this expanding epidemic.
As a sad postscript, the paper is dedicated to five health care workers among the paper’s authors who died of Ebola during the time the manuscript was in preparation:

Tragically, five co-authors, who contributed greatly to public health and research efforts in Sierra Leone, contracted EVD and lost their battle with the disease before this manuscript could be published: Mohamed Fullah, Mbalu Fonnie, Alex Moigboi, Alice Kovoma, and S. Humarr Khan. We wish to honor their memory.

-t
 
The governors of NY, IL, and NJ freaked out with the recent quarantine and now are back peddling because the FED said it was too draconian and the media is all out attacking them. Since when is this control all Administration defending the people? Something smells to high heavens on this one. States like NY and IL only do things like this when they are really nervous especially when its their "party" in the WH.

Now the media is making it seem like it was all political. There is real fear which is the only thing that makes politicos act swiftly and they do not trust the Administration to handle this because they know it cant or wont.

If the Feds were the ones pushing "draconian" policies and the states were the ones taking a more "laid back" approach, the situation would be the same.

The Feds have no toleration for significant dissent from its policies, and will not countenance decentralized (e.g., state-level) responses to Ebola that do not comport with their own (whatever they might be - "draconian," "laid back" or anything in between).

IOW: The Feds can't stand it when any eggs are not in their basket.
Whenever that happens, they will "cry 'havoc!' and let slip the lapdogs of propaganda" ...
 
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/21-days/381901/

Good article.

21 Days
An expert in biological warfare warns against complacency in public measures against Ebola.

Interesting that not all have fever symptoms when contagious with Ebola.

For 4.1 percent of patients, based on mathematical modeling, the period between exposure and onset of the first symptoms is longer than 21 days. Around 13 percent of infected people in the current outbreak did not have a documented fever, according to a New England Journal of Medicine report last month. As Hatfill noted in his manuscript, researchers studying an outbreak in Uganda in late 2000 reported that "the commonest symptom … was fever, but this occurred in only 85 percent of the cases.” Another study of that outbreak found fever in only 88 percent. A study of the 1995 outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo found fever in 93 percent of the 84 people who died.
 
I hope this was the policy all along, and it includes those AF guys just now returning.

And damn them for sending the troops into this.

No gunny, you know that "the troops" are just cannon fodder. "The policy" is whatever they say it is on that day. It will change depending on the mission...

I was talking to a friend of mine who was a marine in Viet Nam about this and he told me about his "experiences" with the VA. I mentioned that they really have less "problem" with the boys who died over there and only the ones who came back became a liability. He says he's going to make as much noise as he can so they don't forget about him and his medical needs...
 
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