I applaud Kaci Hickox for defying the reactionary political hacks and demanding release from a mandatory quarantine but I also fear for her safety. The pols and the media have managed to create yet more hysteria and hype which of course has brought out the craziest of the crazies.
The comments concerning Kaci have run from take her nursing license, send her back to Africa to charge her with murder if anyone becomes infected and dies of ebola in Maine.
Kaci does have the support of much of the actual medical community. HERE is a article from the New England Journal of Medicine which reads in part: "We have very strong reason to believe that transmission occurs when the viral load in bodily fluids is high, on the order of millions of virions per microliter. This recognition has led to the dictum that an asymptomatic person is not contagious; field experience in West Africa has shown that conclusion to be valid. Therefore, an asymptomatic health care worker returning from treating patients with Ebola, even if he or she were infected, would not be contagious. Furthermore, we now know that fever precedes the contagious stage, allowing workers who are unknowingly infected to identify themselves before they become a threat to their community."
The ANA (American Nurses Association) has also made a statement HERE in regards to mandatory quarantine. This reads in part: “The American Nurses Association (ANA) opposes the mandatory quarantine of health care professionals who return to the United States from West African nations where Ebola is widespread. ANA supports registered nurse Kaci Hickox, who recently returned to the United States after treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, in her challenge of a 21-day quarantine imposed by state officials in Maine, her home state."
There have been a total of 9 cases of ebola on American soil. Thomas Duncan is the only one who unknowingly brought it with him from West Africa and subsequently died of the illness. Of all the people he was in contact with, including family members who shared living quarters, only two people were actually infected with ebola from Mr Duncan and that was the two nurses who either broke protocol or were inadequately prepared by their hospital administration. Of all the people they came in to contact with, NONE have come down with ebola. The other six ebola cases were all Americans working in West Africa who were knowingly returned to the US for treatment in Atlanta, Nebraska and Oklahoma. No health care workers have become infected from treating these patients and they have all recovered.
Now that the flu season is upon us, let's take a look at that. Every year hundreds of thousands of Americans come down with the flu. Of those 20,000-40,000 die from complications of the flu. Every year people go to work and interact with others while knowingly or unknowingly being infected with the flu. Unlike ebola where you have to symptomatic to be infectious, with the flu you have a 1-4 day incubation period and you can be infectious at least one day BEFORE symptoms appear!
Can you imagine applying the same hair-brained logic to the flu as to ebola? Mandatory quarantine if you come in to contact with someone who has the flu. If you go to work with the flu and your co-worker's 90 year old Aunt Louise dies two weeks later from complications of the flu, you should be charged with murder. And if you won't stay home and you have an Asian strain of flu then we should just pack you up and send you and your flu to Asia!
People need to get a grip and community leaders need to grow a brain - caving to public hysteria and pandering to the fear mongers because it is an election year is some of the WORST reasons to make unreasonable demands on decent, caring people who go above and beyond to do the work they love.
We DO NOT have an ebola epidemic in the United States and there has NOT been a state of emergency declared anywhere in the United States due to ebola so therefore any mandatory quarantine is a criminal offense called unlawful restraint or kidnapping.
This is the same kind of ignorance and irrational fear that led to witch burnings and the Grand Inquisition.
Good sense here, rockync, but we'll never read anything as rational as this on the "all ebola all the time and we're all gonna die" right wing loonie sites.
ReplyDeleteIt's a good bet that most of their hysterics is political and a way of scaring people as they go to the polls.
I'm cross-posting this at P.E.
Thanks Shaw for spreading the word. I hope people will take a step back and actually consider all the implications of what they are demanding of others. Probably not but we must try.
DeleteAbsolutely, Kaci Hickox is well within her rights to challenge – not a legitimate legal authority in this instance – but an authoritarian mindset that trades on fear mongering, demagoguery and ignorance. Absolutely, the belligerent Governor “La Plague” is depriving her of her human rights. Unless there is a court order to the contrary, Ms. Hickox has every right to attend to her own business without state interference … as is the right of every citizen.
ReplyDeleteShame on the governors of New Jersey (Governor Bridge Bully), New York (Governor Pro Domo), and Louisiana (Governor Jingo) for abusing their powers - fat egos aspiring to the rank of alpha chimpanzee among human beings!
Here’s an older article worth reading: Why Even Educated Conservatives Deny Science. “Mega amygdala megalomaniacs” I call them!
OCTO - I am waiting for the townspeople to mob with torches and pitchforks. Why let something like science and common sense get in the way of a full scale riot?
DeleteRemember Typhoid Mary? She was quarantined for life.
DeleteMad mobs of angry peasants wouldn't be out of the ordinary. Mob violence in America - or everywhere in fact - isn't new and doesn't require much of an impetus to get started. Hysteria concerning disease is true to form and truly bipartisan, from quarantining Japanese-Americans, to going nuts about Alar in your apples to the gluten in your food, to fear of vaccination, to your TV causing cancer, to aluminum pots causing Alzheimer's. No amount of evidence will dissuade people from irrational fear. There has been much written about people who worry themselves sick about a tenuous connection to an infinitesimal risk while they smoke cigarettes and eat double bacon cheese burgers with cheese fries. There's a name for it.
In these times there's billion dollar industry dedicated to making us mistrust science and medicine and promoting terror of technology and the sale of books and diets and pills and snake oil and duck tape that pulls the poison out of your body through your feet and it's hardly a new thing. We're afraid of our food and water and the mysterious unnamed "toxins" everyone seems to feel we're filled with. We live in terror of science and technology and we're massively ignorant about how it all works. Even my doctor expressed concern about being so sure as to how Ebola is transmitted. Who knows? Nobody wants to stake his life on doubting the possibility of infection just because it's sort of a consensus among researchers.
All this is in addition to the political football this has become in an election year. Hell it wasn't long ago that a Florida Congressional candidate told us the Liberals wer going to quarantine Republicans and put them in camps. He suggested that Democrats be quarantined lest that happened and then deported.
China quarantined 150 people this year after one guy came down with Bubonic Plague. In 2007 an American was quarantined for suspected tuberculosis of a dangerous kind. Canada quarantined 100 people for SARS in 2003. There are too many instances to list and frankly, if I were that woman I would lock myself indoors rather than face the pitchfork and lantern lot.
No so far it isn't quite like the 1919 Flu pandemic that may have killed 50 MILLION people, but people have always reacted in terror to epidemics. At least we're not burning these people as witches.
Yes, ignorance abounds, even among those who should know better. Research shows and ancedotal evidence backs up that ebola is not spread in the air or by casual contact. If there was any evidence we are on the brink of an epidemic and that quarantine could stop the spread I'd be all for it but with ebola this is not the case. People are freaked out by the hemorrhagic aspect of this disease which doesn't appear until the late stages not long before death. This is not the only disease that causes bleeding but we have an exotic disease with an exotic name so it must be tens times worse.
DeleteIt's very true that the flu is more contagious and more deadly in terms of numbers and much more of a risk for all of us, but expecting reason or reasonable risk assessment to predominate over panic when in a theater and you smell smoke is unreasonable in itself. Somebody's bound to get trampled.
DeleteWe don't assess risk in a reasonable fashion and we are helped in that panic reaction by incessant fear mongering in the media. The media in turn profits by our obsession and gives us more. Simply suggesting a risk repeatedly makes it seem more likely and more severe while that little devil sits on your shoulder and asks how much faith we should have in experts under pressure to quell fear, How many horror movies feature the government trying to cover up a terrible risk? We're primed for denial.
Hell, If we're terrified of wheat and tap water, can't we expect panic over a foreign disease from a dark, dangerous place? Isn't it being made scarier by all that political crap about government incompetence and a half African president? I'm surprised things aren't worse!
Fear is far more contagious than Ebola. Fear is sometimes fun because it gives us relief from the unbearable boredom and predictability of civilized life. Why else the explosion of Zombie Apocalypse movies, games and TV series? Why else do we love Halloween?
And need I point out that the traditional American Witch hunt is one of our oldest and most traditional values?
DeleteFOX News and Tea Bag Central, purveyors of hysteria and fear.
ReplyDeleteThat's it in a tea pot.
I am a tea drinker but never admit it. :)
DeleteFunny thing is the Brits drink a lot of tea and it doesn't seem to affect them in the same way it does their American counterparts. ;)
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