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Real science acknowledges that people can make mistakes, making such a dangerous virus a zero-risk to a nation or a state means taking precautions that absolutely prevent human error

Slouching toward Ebola



Slouching toward Ebola
In 1968 Joan Didion published a collection of non-fiction essays titled Slouching Towards Bethlehem in which she took a look at the chaos of the counterculture in the mid-1960s. The title of the book comes from a line in a poem by William Butler Yeats titled The Second Coming:
"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
In the preface to her book, Didion explained: “...the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder." Fast-forward to 2014 as we endure a new chaos called the Obama administration. Not content just to operate within their Constitutional authority, the ideologues in the Executive branch, and their compliant judges, seem to prefer policies that create disorder, endangering our nation rather than protecting us from threats to our national well-being. As the governments of Australia, and then Canada on Friday, halted the issuance of visas to people from countries dealing with an Ebola epidemic, in Maine, a judge on Friday struck down Maine’s Ebola quarantine policy, as he decided it was up to him to micromanage the state’s efforts to interpret the CDC guidelines for monitoring those who have been in some kind of contact with Ebola-infected people.

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Judge Cearles C. LaVerdiere ruled that: “The State has not met its burden at this time to prove by clear and convincing evidence that limiting Respondent's movements to the degree requested is "necessary to protect other individuals from the dangers of infection.” The following, from an affidavit filed by Shiela Pinette, D. O., Director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention (MeCDC) is what proved insufficient for the judge:
“The surest way to minimize the public health threat is direct active monitoring and additional restrictions on movement and exposure to other persons or the public until a potentially exposed person has passed the incubation period.” “Direct active monitoring means the MeCDC provides direct observation at least once per day to review symptoms and monitor temperature with a second follow-up daily by phone. The purpose of direct active monitoring is to ensure that if individuals with epidemiologic risk factors become ill, they are identified as soon as possible after symptoms onset so they can be rapidly isolated and evaluated. Once a person is symptomatic they become contagious to others, and their infectiousness increases very quickly.”
Rather than taking precautions to make Ebola a zero-risk threat, politics prevails over the science of disease prevention as a pro-Obama judge rules that an individual’s opinion can trump the efforts of a state to make sure that no one can intentionally or accidentally allow the spread of Ebola. The science of it is that even individuals who have the medical training to monitor the disease cannot know the absolute moment they have the symptoms. Diagnosis comes after the fact. Real science acknowledges that people can make mistakes, and making such a dangerous virus a zero-risk to a nation or a state means taking precautions that absolutely prevent human error.


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Rolf Yungclas -- Bio and Archives

Rolf Yungclas is a recently retired newspaper editor from southwest Kansas who has been speaking out on the issues of the day in newspapers and online for over 15 years


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