Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Texas Representative McCaul on Ebola

Open email to Texas Representative Michael McCaul:

Dear Representative McCaul,
I have been following your newsletter for about six months. Nine times out of 10 you have taken a socialistic approach in resolving any problem. This is wrong. The United States has been a Republic since its founding, and in spite of movement to the contrary, there is no room for communist/radical socialism in this country.
The good news is that you you are right on target in handling the potential epidemic of Ebola virus in the US.
You have made three points, to which I agree wholeheartedly. These are as follows:
1. You have called on the Department of Homeland Security and Department of State to suspend all visas of individuals from Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, until the outbreak of the Ebola virus is under control within these countries.
2.  Any diagnosed patients [in the US] should be treated at one of the four U.S. biocontainment units, so our nurses and healthcare professionals are not placed in a situation in which they have not been properly trained for.
3., The [Obama] Administration should reconsider Ron Klain for the Ebola czarship. [He is not qualified].
Congratulations for finally coming up with something practical and reasonable.

Friday, October 17, 2014

Liberal Ideology with Respect to Ebola

I have previously written suggesting serious quarantine for control of the Ebola disease. In that essay, I touched on a liberal attitude which would be detrimental to actual disease control.
A Political Associate has further commented on my essay, particularly the aspect of liberal ideology and disease control. He said the following, as what he thinks is the Liberal ideology on the subject:
"Quarantine worked well and was accepted widely among the USA and the world, that is until AIDS came along.  Suddenly the deviant behavior crowd was suffering and dying in great numbers.  This couldn't be their fault, it was unfair and it must be the work of ... Republicans or some other evil crowd.  Also if we quarantined this infected group, their deviant lifestyle would be affected.  If we identified this crowd to protect the non-infected, they would be ostracized by society.
So we have developed a modern ethic on dealing with infectious/contagious diseases.  The rules are like this:
Never publicly identify a person with the disease Never ask questions that would lead to an answer that allows the healthy to seperate Celebrate that the disease exist and normalize its constant threat to society Release those with the disease into the general population Pay for the care and treatment of the escalating and never ending population with the disease with government funds Wear colorful ribbons on your lapel to let other know how much you care for those with the disease Identify anyone who speaks truth of the disease and censure them Spurn and humiliate anyone who suggest quarantine as a control
So you see with Ebola, like AIDS, your antiquated quarantine idea just won’t work.  We will only understand the disease by celebrating and embracing it. To understand and develop the right ethic we must all suffer".

I don't mind a little suffering to help my fellow man, but my unnecessary death from a communicable disease is not part of my reasoning.

Quarantine for Ebola

Several hundred years ago society learned how to deal with human infectious disease. It established a system known as quarantine, which simply is that a person having the disease or suspected of having the disease is isolated from other human beings. This automatically eliminates the possibility of disease transmission from person-to-person..
The Ebola disease is typical of a viral disease that can be controlled by quarantine. Unfortunately, a segment of society has also developed an attitude, which we will call a liberal attitude, and which is best represented in the number of people who adhere to an ideology that West Africans, the hotbed of the disease should, not be quarantined. They somehow, in their lack of logic and recognition of experience on how to handle infectious diseases, have come to the conclusion that all West Africans should be allowed to travel, usually by airplane, exposing themselves and their diseases to other people in the process. This is obviously a ridiculous ideology to those persons experienced in medicine and science in general. These opposers to quarantine are usually educated people in disciplines such as psychology and social service,. Simply put, these people know nothing about how to control infectious disease. Left to their own devices, there would be no controls and the disease would subsequently become rampant leading to the deaths of millions of people, such as occurred in the European experience with the plague, before the development of quarantine procedures. Now, anyone opposed to quarantine in any of its forms is judged by me to be an ignoramus and a danger to society in general.
Sen. Cruz of Texas, in his recent newsletter, has proposed a temporary flight ban on non-US passengers traveling from Ebola-afflicted nations.. This is the right direction, but does not go nearly far enough. A better proposal would be to ban all commercial flights to and from countries known to have a large number of Ebola cases. For the liberals, this does not mean the natives of those West African nations cannot be helped by US technology. Private charter flights and military flights would be allowed.
Let's also see what Pres. Obama's newly appointed Czar plans to do with respect to quarantine. If he is anything like the political hack of the CDC which we have recently heard on television, we can expect no practical controls and look forward to millions and perhaps billions of deaths around the world from Ebola.