Very scary. On September 17 CIDRAP – the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota “strongly” urged the CDC to adopt new standards for PPE (personal protective equipment) for healthcare workers treating Ebola patients. They urge the CDC to change the protocol and have healthcare workers use powered air-purifying respirators (PAPR) rather than the masks currently specified.

http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2014/09/commentary-health-workers-need-optimal-respiratory-protection-ebola

katrina, they may be slow in telling us stuff but I’m pretty sure there are no things they are not telling us.

From CDC:
“Tissues from pigs that had died from Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome were sent from the Philippines to the USDA Plum Island laboratory for diagnostic analysis. Several viruses known to infect pigs (e.g. circovirus and arterivirus) were detected in some of the tissues. Using new molecular detection assays, Ebola-Reston virus RNA was detected unexpectedly in some of the samples. Ebola-Reston virus has not been shown to infect or cause disease in swine previously.

Although infection with Ebola-Reston virus can cause a hemorrhagic fever with high fatality in non-human primates, the Reston subtype of Ebola virus has not yet been proven pathogenic to humans with antibody evidence of Ebola-Reston infection; however, infection with other Ebola virus species, such as Ebola-Zaire and Ebola-Sudan, usually causes a severe hemorrhagic fever that is often fatal in humans.

In October 2008, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed that swine from two farms in the Philippines were infected with a filovirus, which was confirmed to be the Reston species of Ebola virus.”

Exactly. Everybody gets NORO, and for the measles, everybody gets that too, plus the people down the hall in another room. Here, “everybody” is everybody in your household, of course.

“Of course, living space, sanitation and nutritional quality were all poorer at the time giving rise to those estimates. ” Right, R0 is context dependent.

“This falls into the trap of caricaturing Others’ actions which we don’t like as being due to their evil, irrational beliefs. ” Yes, always a very bad mistake to make!

G writes: “To characterize the Ebola terrorism risk in terms of “rational actors” is a mistake: rational actors are by definition death-averse and this-world-oriented. Contrast to “irrational actors” who are death-seeking and other-world-oriented, for example motivated by martyrdom ideologies.”

This falls into the trap of caricaturing Others’ actions which we don’t like as being due to their evil, irrational beliefs. Studies of terrorists (by dictionary or American definitions) make it clear that most are motivated primarily by political goals. People are probably more willing to give their lives for a cause if they believe in an afterlife, but this does not mean that the purported cause is not actually meaningful. That pretense allows us to ignore the real injustices that often provoke intergroup violence.

Meanwhile, I strongly disagree either that the behavior of outgroup members is much less rationally motivated than that of good Westerners – all humans have a mixture of rational and irrational motivations – or that to be rational is “by definition” to be “death-averse”. (On the contrary, to be rational, I must recognize that my own short life is of finite value; therefore I should be willing to risk or sacrifice it for something I consider of greater value, such as my child or my people. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, etc.)

But anyway, when I spoke of a rational bioweapon, I didn’t mean “one that a Vulcan would consider it desirable to use”, to continue the Star Trek theme. I meant “one that a typical, emotionally motivated human who had already decided to develop or use a bioweapon would think was a good candidate.” Both U.S. and Russian researchers who had no qualms about working on potential ways of killing off “enemies” with epidemic disease looked at filoviruses and decided that yes, they are very nasty diseases, but no, they do not make “good” bioweapons. This is not to say that no scuzbag will ever set out to infect another person with one on purpose; the U.S. had a small group of [white] scuzbags some years back who contaminated local salad bars with a diarrhea-inducing bug, causing a few illnesses. But if you’re trying to bring about the apocalypse, it’s a really stoopid way to go about it.

If a nurse in full protective garb contracts the disease, then the unfortunate family members caring as best they can for Ebola-struck loved ones prior to diagnosis have only luck and God’s protection. Seriously, do we even know how the Texan nurse contracted it?