What We’re Afraid to Say About Ebola

[Brian4Liberty]

What We’re Afraid to Say About Ebola

What We’re Afraid to Say About Ebola

By MICHAEL T. OSTERHOLM - SEPT. 11, 2014

Michael T. Osterholm is the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

MINNEAPOLIS — THE Ebola epidemic in West Africa has the potential to alter history as much as any plague has ever done.

There have been more than 4,300 cases and 2,300 deaths over the past six months. Last week, the World Health Organization warned that, by early October, there may be thousands of new cases per week in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria. What is not getting said publicly, despite briefings and discussions in the inner circles of the world’s public health agencies, is that we are in totally uncharted waters and that Mother Nature is the only force in charge of the crisis at this time.

There are two possible future chapters to this story that should keep us up at night.

The first possibility is that the Ebola virus spreads from West Africa to megacities in other regions of the developing world. This outbreak is very different from the 19 that have occurred in Africa over the past 40 years. It is much easier to control Ebola infections in isolated villages. But there has been a 300 percent increase in Africa’s population over the last four decades, much of it in large city slums. What happens when an infected person yet to become ill travels by plane to Lagos, Nairobi, Kinshasa or Mogadishu — or even Karachi, Jakarta, Mexico City or Dhaka?

The second possibility is one that virologists are loath to discuss openly but are definitely considering in private: that an Ebola virus could mutate to become transmissible through the air. You can now get Ebola only through direct contact with bodily fluids. But viruses like Ebola are notoriously sloppy in replicating, meaning the virus entering one person may be genetically different from the virus entering the next. The current Ebola virus’s hyper-evolution is unprecedented; there has been more human-to-human transmission in the past four months than most likely occurred in the last 500 to 1,000 years. Each new infection represents trillions of throws of the genetic dice.

If certain mutations occurred, it would mean that just breathing would put one at risk of contracting Ebola. Infections could spread quickly to every part of the globe, as the H1N1 influenza virus did in 2009, after its birth in Mexico.

Why are public officials afraid to discuss this? They don’t want to be accused of screaming “Fire!” in a crowded theater — as I’m sure some will accuse me of doing. But the risk is real, and until we consider it, the world will not be prepared to do what is necessary to end the epidemic.

In 2012, a team of Canadian researchers proved that Ebola Zaire, the same virus that is causing the West Africa outbreak, could be transmitted by the respiratory route from pigs to monkeys, both of whose lungs are very similar to those of humans. Richard Preston’s 1994 best seller “The Hot Zone” chronicled a 1989 outbreak of a different strain, Ebola Reston virus, among monkeys at a quarantine station near Washington. The virus was transmitted through breathing, and the outbreak ended only when all the monkeys were euthanized. We must consider that such transmissions could happen between humans, if the virus mutates.
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More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/opinion/what-were-afraid-to-say-about-ebola.html

 

[Ronin Truth]

What We’re Afraid to Say About Ebola

That we and/or someone(s) else are weaponizing it?

 

[THX 1138]

I would say that we should consider a moratorium on immigration from these regions. But I'd probably just sound like some crazy person talking.

 

[jmdrake]

That we and/or someone(s) else are weaponizing it?

It does seem odd that for however many thousands of years man has been living in that region, Ebola didn't become a problem until our lifetime.

 

[Ronin Truth]

It does seem odd that for however many thousands of years man has been living in that region, Ebola didn't become a problem until our lifetime.

HIV/AIDS too when you stop and think about it. The NWO is working towards a 90+% reduction of the entire world human population, in order to be able to control the survivors easier. Look out "useless eaters". What are those four horsemen again?

 

[osan]

It does seem odd that for however many thousands of years man has been living in that region, Ebola didn't become a problem until our lifetime.

Odd? Perhaps, perhaps not. I suspect humans know precious little of the larger scheme of existence, all our observations and theorizing and LHCs notwithstanding. Who can say what the nature may be of mechanisms for preserving life on a planetary basis? This may be the first time, at least in our written history, that the summary actions of men have posed an existential threat to the life of the planet itself. In such a case, is it really so difficult to imagine that the greater scheme would seek to preserve itself from the dangers of the lesser?

This does not mean to imply that I do not believe in the possibility, perhaps even likelihood, that some small cadre of like-minded humans have decided to take matters into their own hands and engineer either an organism or a delivery system intended to induce pandemic plague with the goal of knocking down the human population. Hell, the UN Agenda 21 document goes on endlessly about the need to do this, but notably fails to present any detailed solutions for achieving the reductions. That makes population reduction an element of "official" policy, and not the product of so-called "conspiracy theorists". What is open to speculation is not the general policy, but the means of carrying it out to its vaguely stated goal. But if one applies some small analytic logic, he finds that the most logically obvious conclusions tend to point to an artificially induced cull.

If you consider human psychological makeup for a brief moment, it becomes clear that pandemic culling of the population presents the best of a small set of otherwise miserable options pursuant to the goal of mass reductions. Why? Because people by their very nature tend to want to be able to tell themselves that what they are doing is justifiable; that it is for a "greater good"; that it is not evil. There are the exceptions like Stalin and Mao, who in my estimation were rare examples of pure and unmasked evil - but I base that solely on appearances and could even be wrong about them. Hitler, OTOH, I am convinced wanted to believe in the goodness of what he and his circle were up to and that it was all justifiable for that greater good we keep hearing about even to this very day from the lips of such scurrilous "men" as Obama.

An induced plague, the forced induction remaining covert, presents to the world causes that obfuscate the truth. This allows those responsible to retain their sense of personal goodness and their standing in the community, such as it may be for them. It cannot be ignored that such obfuscation also helps shield them from being held accountable in the unlikely event that those who survived were to take that distinctly grim view of what had been done in the name of God-only-knows-what. People would attribute all manner of falsehoods to the plague, accept it as having been somehow unavoidable (or perhaps avoidable under the guidance of Theire expert hands), and go on. That is a very different result for the perpetrators from that where the real truth became known and the villagers grabbed their torches and pitchforks for the witch-hunt. We all saw how neatly life ended up for the likes of Mussolini and Ceausescu.

A plague would be greatly preferable to war, given the latter wreaks such material destruction, that often being not predictably containable. Disease, OTOH, when chosen and prepared for correctly, can be selectively applied with greater reliability than artillery and bombs, all else equal.

I would also point out to those who ask, "why not just use weaponized anthrax?", that such organisms are well identified as weapons and their use is more likely to lead to the real truth and the Mussolini consequence. Perhaps the "discovery" of ebola was a godsend for Themme. Having been previously unknown to the world at large and therefore not being associated in people's minds as a weapon, either its deliberate setting upon the population or simply allowing an otherwise natural outbreak to take its course sans outside interference, those surviving are not likely to make the association with Theire deeper intentions. It happened, people died, we survived, and now we go on... once again, probably with Themme shaking their fingers at the rest of us and saying something to the effect of "I told you so" and demanding ever greater authority to dictate what the Individual may or may not do.

 

[RonPaulIsGreat]

So, what happens if you have a rotting corpse in some slum tent oozing into the open sewer, that people then walk in. I know ebola survives after the host dies, that's why they burn the corpse, but for how long, and how long could it survive in water?

Just looked up the water question. They say ebola would die in minutes in normal water, so spreading via open sewers would be minimal, but it says corpses can stay infectious for days or weeks depending upon conditions.

 

[tangent4ronpaul]

So, what happens if you have a rotting corpse in some slum tent oozing into the open sewer, that people then walk in. I know ebola survives after the host dies, that's why they burn the corpse, but for how long, and how long could it survive in water?

Just looked up the water question. They say ebola would die in minutes in normal water, so spreading via open sewers would be minimal, but it says corpses can stay infectious for days or weeks depending upon conditions.

I seriously doubt the info on survival time in water is accurate. We used very strong disinfectants/surgical scrubs whenever dealing with anyone in isolation. They are using a 10% chlorine solution in the ebola clinics. How long does it survive in blood? What about fecal matter. The slums lack sanitation systems and the locals just go wherever.

The best answer I can come up with is to drain the swamp. Taking West Point as an example as it's the worst, evacuate the area. There is extreme poverty here with 2 cents being a claimed daily wage, so hire all 75,000 of them. then train and put them to work. get them to fix the roads, make protective masks, retrofit the entire slum with sanitation, go building to building spraying everything down. In so doing find the sick and quarantine them. It's quite controllable in small villages so split them up into a bunch of small refuge camps with only the healthy.

Main problem is that only 5% of the roads in the country are paved and it's monsoon season through the end of October, the the other 95% of the roads are impassable. Monovia does however does connect with 2 rail lines, though and there is a port. Go down the coast and there is another port connected to a third rail line. As to the first port, you can do bare ship charters for cargo vessels and the US Gvmt has 4 aircraft carriers that are decommissioned and on the donation list.

oh -- and quarantine the survivors as regulat blood donors for their antibodies. Its the best treatment right now.

anyway, I'm collecting names and e-mail addresses of infectious disease specialists, particularly the ones working on this to forward that idea to with some additional detail. If you know of any, please post um.

-t