Vocal Voices

A man who flew in from Sierra Leone whose brother had died from Ebola was horrified that no one bothered to check him out health wise or question him ....but just waved him through customs and arrivals,
He wrote a serious letter of complaint. " It made no difference however."
People who are arriving here from the areas smitten with this deadly disease are just waved through with that typical gesture of "have a nice stay"

Difficult if not impossible to detect until the first symptoms show which can be a couple of weeks or so. Blood test could show it but that would take a while and mean quarantine for the result. Hardly practical.

If that is what it would take to prevent an epidemic occurring in this country so be it. Primary symptoms, a nasty headache for around two weeks. I believe that you like myself have lived in countries where cholera and other diseases take hold , the scourge of TB my youngest caught that in Philippines nthat is now on the the increase here following the gates being opened by Blair.
"Unknowingly" I nursed my late husband through cholera. During "The first outbreak in Singapore in 22 years. "

It is a tough call - what are countries to do?

Ebola is a contact virus, it is not air borne like flu. Simply having been in Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia or Nigeria is not sufficient reason to quarantine or even test everyone. An individual would have to have been in an infected area, and then have been in physical contact with infected people/animals/food, and then to have somehow ingested the virus through poor hygiene, kissing, sexual activity or via a cut. The risk of an epidemic is, statistically, quite low.

I also hope that anyone who suspects that they are infected would seek medical help given that Ebola is deadly in about 90% of cases.

Not entirely sure what this man was expecting - after all he took the decision to travel here, knowing that he could potentially be ill! If he was truly concerned, would it not have been more sensible to postpone his trip until he was sure he was healthy?

I'm not sure of the motivation behind him coming here, then complaining about being let in! Publicity perhaps? Money for his story.........?

A bigger worry than Ebola is the reaction of the media and how that might affect our attitudes in future. One day we really will need to take urgent precautions, but all these "Wolf!" cries could make us slow to react.

We had SARS, and that was going to kill us all off......

Then swine flu was going to do us in.....

MERS ( Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) is in the wings waiting to wipe us out.....

Now Ebola.....

The interesting thing about this is reactions and hysteria. Ebloa is not airborne. Whilst someone sneezing next to you will infect you, someone breathing next to you will not.

Smallpox, flu and a whole host of other diseases are airborne, smallpox especially is more dangerous than Ebola. We survived them and we'll survive Ebola.

WM you stated that death rates are as high as 90%, but that little statistic is misleading. The Ebola virus usually survives around 7 - 9 iterations (the number of times it jumped host before infecting another one). However adults infected by the index patient directly suffer 100% mortality. The only survivors of index patient infection are children.

All adult survivors come in the latter stages of the disease, where the infection has spread through many hosts 5+ and has mutated.

The main thing about Ebola is that it works too quickly and kills too thoroughly to become a true pandemic. Also it requires direct contact with infected material. Therefore it spreads more slowly. The worst case is someone is infected with Ebola, doesn't know and then spends the next two weeks flying round the world in the largest jets.

A little more information and a lot less hysteria and we'd all be a lot happier about it. However they would sell less papers and reap less advertising revenue.....

Life goes on.