Ebola

I'm not sure how to say this except to start with, this is not directed at the American public (a few of which I consider friends and definitely don't consider them stupid) more your government is arrogant and they deny and bury their heads in the sand until they can't.

aaeerroo often has her rant of the day so here's mine;

This Ebola outbreak started around 4 months ago. Here in Australia we had travel warnings for places like Sierra Leone and other West African nations. Around 3 months ago our government stopped issuing visa's to those places except for health workers and those coming from there were denied entry visa's and our citizens returning home had to do a 14 day quarantine.

America only started reporting about this when a doctor, an American citizen, a member of either the WHO (world health org) or MSF (medicins sans frontiers which translates to doctors without borders) contracted this strain of Ebola and was taken back to America under quarantine to the CDC in Atlanta. It was from him that the world realised this was a totally new strain and past vaccines and serums may have little or no effect. I think that was now around 5 weeks ago and since then there have been several Americans brought back to the states that have worked in the health field that have contracted this strain.

I saw a text fight between 2 Americans after they had read an article about this from another country quite a few weeks back, #1 view was since this didn't originate in the US (the article not the virus) they're idiots because if this was true our CDC would have told us, #2 then said, I bet you have a subscription for the National Enquirer and believe everything you read in that too. (have to admit I looked it up and didn't even read an article, 20 seconds and a few headlines told me what type of magazine it was and I got the gist of what #2 meant)

Part of the basis of that argument was what the CDC had said in general about Ebola, not just about this new variant, which they hadn't really admitted to even knowing about at that stage. But about what denotes a virus becoming airborne, rather than direct contact (swap of bodily fluids etc). The CDC basically said it would be hard to catch on an airplane unless the person next to you had it and you swapped bodily fluids with them. That was true but only a partial truth.

How it was explained here was almost word for word from I think the SARS outbreak a few years back. Actually by that I mean the best way to avoid catching it and those silly masks like doctors wear were a good idea if you did have it, so if you sneezed or coughed you didn't infect your friends but were pretty useless to stop you catching it...

An example we got was... a person is standing a metre (2 1/2 feet?) in front of you and is infected and sneezes, you would probably feel it on your hands and lower arms, if you washed right away, which would be most peoples reaction, even just plain old water the chances of catching it would be slim, if you had some scabs from healing cuts or abrasions where the sneeze hit, still a fairly slim chance of catching anything, a fresh cut or abrasion still bleeding or weeping then you probably should wash in something a bit stronger than water. When people sneeze it is usually directed downwards so same applies to bare legs and feet.

Coughing is usually more in your face so to speak, you get it in the eye and there isn't much you can do except rinse with water and apparently the eye is one of the quickest places that will absorb things and again normal reaction would be to close your eyes but then open them and blink or wipe them with your hands, both of which is a good way to really make sure you get something in there.

The other thing I haven't yet seen in any article coming from the US is WHY this variant of Ebola is so different. Apparently all previous versions of human infection can be traced back to primates, African tribes that ate monkeys in there diet or kept them as pets and got scratched or bitten. This version allegedly comes from a large fruit bat and possible scenario is that someone with a cut on their bare foot walked through some guano and got infected or again a pet bit them or scratched them, I have heard that it comes from a bat has been confirmed but the how it got into humans still seems to have a lot of speculation...