Who Knew? (I mean, besides Everyone...)

Duncan and government incompetence rack up second Ebola victim.

(CNN) -- A healthcare worker at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital has tested positive for Ebola after a preliminary test, the state's health agency said.

Confirmatory testing will be conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The employee helped care for Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person ever diagnosed with Ebola in the United States. Duncan died on Wednesday.

It's okay though. This is "highly unlikely", health care here is "well-prepared" to deal with Ebola, and "We've got this!".
So everything's cool.

CDC and government screeners begin total bullshit "security" theatre at JFK; flight from infected countries continue unabated.

Federal health officials said the entry screenings, which will expand to four additional U.S. airports in the next week, add another layer of protection to halt the spread of a disease that has killed more than 4,000 people.

"Already there are 100 percent of the travelers leaving the three infected countries are being screened on exit. Sometimes multiple times temperatures are checked along that process," Dr. Martin Cetron, director of the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine for the federal Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, said at a briefing at Kennedy.Cetron added, "No matter how many procedures are put into place, we can't get the risk to zero."

President Barack Obama has said the new screening measures are "really just belt and suspenders" to support protections already in place. Border Patrol agents already look for people who are obviously ill, as do flight crews.

Health officials expect false alarms from travelers who have fever from other illnesses. Ebola isn't contagious until symptoms begin, and it spreads through direct contact with the bodily fluids of patients.

Cetron said more than 36,000 travelers leaving West Africa have been screened for Ebola in the last two months and none was infected with Ebola.

Especially when you're only doing something so ineffective it failed to catch Duncan coming in three weeks ago, and who wasn't "obviously ill". We haven't had a president this gobsmackingly stupid since Jimmy Carter went traipsing through Three Mile Island in rubber booties.
But if you want to work for the CDC, skip medical school; instead get a diploma from a box of Cracker Jacks, or just print one up at Kinko's. No one at the White House or CDC will notice, and you've just saved $250K and long wasted years.


Health experts say the new airport screening measures are more likely to calm the public than to prevent Ebola from entering the US.

Liberian Army is the new frontline resource.

Many Liberians have a love-hate relationship with the military: they love the American military; they hate their own.

Today, there are only 2,000 enlisted men and women in the Liberian armed forces. 

Two months ago, with no warning, the Liberian government sent the army and the police to impose a 21-day quarantine on West Point, a crowded slum where tens of thousands of people live, many in two-room shanties.

Clashes broke out as angry residents tried to get out. Shots were fired into the crowd, killing a 15-year-old boy.

“All those soldiers them were shooting,” Nancy Jellehs, 76, a still-angry West Point resident, said recently.

Residents say that during the 10-day quarantine they routinely bribed soldiers to let them through the barricades.

General Ziankahn, the Liberian military’s chief of staff, has suspended all other training and exercises so that he can throw his entire army into the war against Ebola. He is dispatching troops to each of the treatment centers under construction, and Liberian soldiers have deployed to the borders to enforce screening measures.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. 2000 soldiers, who routinely accept bribes to let people out of quarantine, are what stands between keeping this outbreak contained, and letting it out to points beyond Liberia's borders.