Tag Archives: West Africa

International news

Ebola fighters get too much credit

I’m not prone to critiquing Time magazine’s annual Person of the Year selection.

The choices don’t usually get me too worked up — either positively or negatively. This year’s choice is a bit different.

Time chose to honor the Ebola fighters, the medical professionals who went to West Africa to battle the killer disease.

Of all the choices Time could have made, the editors could have chosen someone with more, um, immediate and palpable impact.

As my pal Tom Taschinger wrote in the Beaumont Enterprise, “Granted, these men and women are doing noble deeds. But Ebola has faded from the epidemic that will end Life As We Know It to an overhyped cable-TV story.”

Indeed, this story was overplayed from the beginning, particularly the “outbreak” in the United States that never occurred.

Here’s one of the posts I published on my blog about the coverage:

https://highplainsblogger.com/2014/10/16/shep-gets-it-exactly-right-on-ebola/

One man flew to Dallas from Liberia; he was carrying the virus with him. He got sick, checked into a first-rate hospital in the Dallas area, but then died. Another man died in Nebraska. A nurse got infected in Dallas, went to Atlanta, and was declared Ebola free.

That’s it.

The disease has receded from the headlines and from CNN, MSNBC and Fox news coverage.

As Taschinger noted in his excellent column, occasionally Time picks a notorious figure as its Person of the Year — such as Ayatollah Khomeini or Timothy McVeigh. It has leaned more in recent years to feel-good selections. I agree that they’re important, too. But let’s get real here. Is Ebola really a worldwide threat?

http://www.beaumontenterprise.com/opinions/columns/article/THOMAS-TASCHINGER-The-Person-of-the-Year-is-a-5969800.php

The magazine can do better next year.

 

International news, medical news, national news

Listen carefully to Dr. Frist

It’s always heartening to read about politicians who are actual experts on critical issues of the day speak those issues with calm, with reason and with intelligence.

Bill Frist once served as a U.S. senator from Tennessee. The Republican also served as Senate majority leader for a time before he decided he’d had enough of politics. He then went back to his first calling, as a cardiovascular surgeon who’s also treated patients with infectious diseases.

Indeed, while he served in the Senate, Dr. Frist usually spent part of his time on “recess” going to remote locations in Africa and Asia to treat patients infected with HIV/AIDS.

He is an honorable man.

So we ought to heed this fellow’s assessment of the Ebola situation that’s killed thousands of people in West Africa and precisely one person in the United States of America.

http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/2014/10/former-sen-william-frist-ebola-crisis-in-west-africa-could-last-into-next-spring.html/

Ebola is going to be a “crisis” in West Africa at least until next spring, Frist says.

Frist was in Dallas, site of the lone Ebola-related death, to take part in a family-planning conference. As Dallas Morning News blogger Jim Mitchell reported, he put the Ebola “scare” into its proper perspective: “Frist estimates that 23,000 people will die of the flu this year, and in America less than ’10 will die of Ebola, hopefully just one.’ And while every death is tragic, the reality is that protocols have to be strictly established and followed. ‘This is not contagious virus like flu,’ he said.”

Frist is one more reasonable voice that needs to be heard as the world searches for a way to stop this virus from spreading beyond its source in West Africa.

According to Mitchell: “While the Ebola crisis in West Africa has lasted longer than he anticipated, (Frist) wants people to know that he is confident it will not spin out of control in the United States even though it might seem that public uncertainty is trumping established science.”

I should add that media hysteria isn’t helping, either.

Pay attention to this man. He knows of what he speaks.

International news, national news

No travel ban from W. Africa

Wait for it.

President Obama’s critics on the right are going to hit the ceiling — if they haven’t already — with news that the president has declined to impose a travel ban from West Africa into the United States.

The Ebola “outbreak” has many Americans scared. Well, the disease certainly has overwhelmed medical professionals in West Africa, but hardly here.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/white-house-rejects-calls-for-ebola-travel-ban/ar-BB9nv04

Why not impose a ban?

Obama believes the advice of the top medical minds in the world that a ban won’t do any better than what’s being employed now and it could be counterproductive by forcing people to hide from authorities in West Africa, thus, allowing the disease to go untreated.

Airport screeners at Atlanta, Washington, Newark and New York are taking temperatures of passengers coming off planes arriving from Ebola-stricken places. It’s a no-touch technology that enables screeners to use laser lights to record people’s temps.

Those who have greater-than-normal temperatures are then separated and examined more carefully.

Once again, the call here is to avoid panic and undue anxiety.

Two health-care professionals in Dallas have been exposed to the virus. They are being treated by the best medical teams anywhere on Earth. Still, many in the media — as well as some in Congress — have been proclaiming some sort of imagined “epidemic” of the disease in this country.

It doesn’t exist. It well may never exist.

How about letting the medical pros do their job?

International news, medical news, State news

Ebola case testing my composure

Allow me this admission: News that a man got off a plane and is in Dallas, Texas, suffering from the Ebola virus is testing my resistance to panic.

Why? I have family immediate family members in the Dallas area.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/04/health/ebola-us/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

I keep hearing stories of how people are getting exposed to this deadly virus. I know that exposure relies on contact with “bodily fluids” and all that. Still, people are getting infected in other ways, or so it seems.

I will continue to keep the faith my family members will stay far away from wherever this individual is being quarantined. They’ll go about their day as they usually do. They’ll work, study, perform household duties, tend to their children, do the things they do normally.

However, the deadly news out of West Africa has found its way to the United States — and to the very part of the country where our loved ones are living.

I won’t panic. I won’t worry myself sick over this news. I’ll continue to put a measure of faith in the medical professionals’ knowledge of how to deal with this disease and how to keep it contained to the individual who flew here from Liberia as he was infected with the often-fatal virus.

But damn! If I spend too much time thinking about Ebola, it’s hard to keep my composure.