Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Glad to see john eastman going through some things.

Republicans in disarray!

It could be worse. Vance could have said “post-menopausal sows.” Waiting for that audiotape to surface.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

Bark louder, little dog.

T R E 4 5 O N

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

American History and Black History can not be separated.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you don’t.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Republicans would impeach Biden if he bit into a whole Kit Kat rather than breaking the sections apart.

You cannot shame the shameless.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Saturday Night Horrorshow Long Read: “Hell in the Hot Zone”

Saturday Night Horrorshow Long Read: “Hell in the Hot Zone”

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I’ve been collecting links on the Ebola outbreak, because I’m morbid like that. This story is scary long enough to deserve its own post. Jeffrey E. Stern, in Vanity Fair:

… Ebola is one of the deadliest viruses known to medical science, with no specific cure and mortality rates of up to 90 percent. The Ebola epidemic now raging in West Africa is the worst one in history. It has decimated Meliandou and moved far beyond. But the mystery today is not how the epidemic began—it is why a concerted effort by an army of international experts was unable to stop it. Part of the answer is the chameleon-like character the virus displays in this part of the world. An even larger part lies in the international response itself. It was rapid and comprehensive—exactly what you would hope. But there was an unexpected reaction that undermined everything the experts sought to achieve—and at the same time fooled many of them into thinking they had succeeded in their aims. Eventually they understood the truth. By then it was too late…

When Ebola strikes, it kills quickly, but it can take up to three weeks to incubate, and usually around 10 days. The period is long enough that contact with a possible source may have been forgotten, and long enough for infected people to travel without symptoms. And even if you tested for Ebola—which nobody in Guinea had the capacity to do—you wouldn’t find it during the incubation period: Ebola can’t be detected in the blood until symptoms show. An epidemic can start slowly and go unnoticed for weeks. This has never been much of an issue before, because Ebola tends not to find its way into large population centers, or places where people are very mobile. This time would be different.

On January 24, more than a month after the first infection, Jean Claude Kpoghomou, a doctor in the town of Tekolo, called a superior to report on something strange happening in a village under his jurisdiction. Three patients had died in the span of two days, he said. All of them came from the same village, a place called Meliandou. The symptoms looked like cholera: diarrhea, vomiting, extreme dehydration. Cholera outbreaks were not uncommon in Guinea. An especially devastating outbreak had occurred just two years earlier, and Meliandou had even been one of the villages targeted for a public-health education campaign. A big pictographic billboard was installed at the entrance to the village, with explicit instructions for the mostly illiterate villagers about how to avoid contaminating the water supply…

Meanwhile, the virus had slipped out of the village. When the grandmother of the infant victim fell sick, she decided that the way the villagers were approaching the illness—summoning a shaman to brandish his fetishes and work his spells—was not satisfactory. The grandmother had a friend in Guéckédou who was a nurse, and when the grandmother’s symptoms began to worsen, she went to see what real medicine could do for her. The nurse tried to help, but he had no idea what he was dealing with. The grandmother went back to Meliandou, where she died.

In early February, the nurse himself developed a fever. Now the virus was in Guéckédou, a bustling trading hub where people converge from Liberia and Sierra Leone. When the nurse’s condition deteriorated, he sought help from a friend who was a doctor in Macenta, in the next prefecture over. The nurse stayed just one night in Macenta—sleeping in the doctor’s own house, sharing a room with the doctor’s own son—and died the next day, February 10, in the waiting room of the local hospital’s lab. The doctor in Macenta was shocked. He didn’t know what he had just witnessed, but it was unlike anything he had seen before, and he immediately sent an alert to the regional director of health in Nzérékoré. Then the doctor developed a fever. He set off for the capital, where he hoped someone might have answers. But along the road—a jolting, treacherous passage lined by burned-out cars and always a few freshly rolled tractor-trailers spilling timber—the doctor died. His body was sent to Kissidougou, a city of more than 100,000, where a funeral was held. Before long, Kissidougou was experiencing an outbreak of whatever it was that had killed the doctor…

When the international community responded to the Ebola outbreak, it did so with astonishing speed. One reason for this was the effective coordination by groups such as M.S.F. But there was another reason behind the rapid response: the sheer horror of Ebola has given it a certain cachet. Epidemiologists who study and follow the virus—people such as Michel Van Herp, of M.S.F., and Pierre Rollin, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—constitute something of an exclusive group whose members stand ready to fly anywhere at a moment’s notice whenever Ebola turns up. Because Ebola outbreaks can kill so quickly, there’s an urgency to get on the ground and begin the work of containment immediately. And because they are also rare and usually very remote, they evoke an eagerness, not unlike that of astronomy enthusiasts rushing to witness some rare astral event…

By mid-April, Dr. Abdourahammane Batchyli, then working for the Guinean Ministry of Health’s national Ebola-oversight division, was spending his days in his Conakry office fielding calls from the 115 hotline and listening to excited citizens offering fantastical explanations for what was happening around them. A member of the Fula ethnic group, a rival of the sitting president’s Malinke group, explained to Batchyli that “this outbreak isn’t real—how could we be having Ebola here? President Condé made it up because he’s trying to delay elections.” Another said the president had introduced the virus to exterminate the Kissi tribe. A man claiming to be a spiritual guide called to say the epidemic was a plague visited upon the people of Guinea when a certain white snake was killed; it could all be cured by sacrificing seven cows.

At first the theories didn’t bother Batchyli very much. There were those who didn’t believe the outbreak was real. But most did, and took it seriously, which was the important thing; their musings about its origins were secondary. It didn’t matter if people weren’t thinking rationally. Who was? It wasn’t just illiterate villagers who acted out of fear. Educated people were scared. He was scared. So were foreigners: On April 1, Saudi Arabia had stopped issuing hajj and umrah visas to Guineans and Liberians, which meant that people in predominantly Muslim Guinea could not go on the pilgrimage to Mecca. On April 4, passengers on the Air France flight from Conakry were quarantined when the plane landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport, in Paris, and not allowed to leave until each was checked for fever, all because someone had gotten sick in the lavatory. Emirates airline had stopped flying to Guinea. Mining companies had pulled out their foreign staff. In the capital, radio stations were broadcasting ads for the best brands of chlorine, to protect yourself from Ebola, and Batchyli saw an article about “rebels dressed in yellow who attacked Guinea and then disappeared”—the interpretation of a local journalist trying to make sense of all the people in big yellow protective suits who had suddenly descended on the country.

But what soon became troubling to Batchyli were the phone calls from people who saw the hand of foreigners behind the epidemic. The logic followed a pattern: the virus had never been anywhere near Guinea before. Then the white people came, and only at that point did talk of “Ebola” start. The foreigners had come so fast that they had actually out-run their own messaging: there were trucks full of foreigners in yellow space suits motoring into villages to take people into isolation before people understood why isolation was necessary…

The process of finding and isolating infected patients was on one level effective and on another deeply disorienting. Batchyli didn’t fully grasp the implications at the time. Nobody did. But people in Guinea were as frightened by the response to Ebola as they were by Ebola itself. As the international community started to make significant progress against the epidemic, people in the Forest Region and in the capital were starting to shut health workers out. Fear was proving to be a contagion: You want to hide from the disease. You want to deny that you have it. You want to retreat to your village behind a phalanx of family members, and when the men in space suits come looking for you, you want to crawl under the bed. And you do—and your family members throw stones at the people in space suits, and so they leave…

Before anyone bristles at the stereotype of “primitive, illiterate villagers”, remember we’ve got U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert whining on every media platform he can command about how ISIL is no doubt using Central American “illegals” to carry Ebola across our sacred borders. And Gohmert’s got a lot of vocal supporters, many of whom don’t have the excuse of having grown up without access to literacy and modern medical science. When you read any U.S. newspaper story about Ebola (and I tend to stick to center-left to moderate outlets, like the Washington Post and the NYTimes), there’s an unpleasant number of reader comments suggesting “solutions” along a continuum from blockading the entire continent to a few ‘carefully targeted’ nukes.

Reader Interactions

52Comments

  1. 1.

    Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)

    So you guys leave the blog unattended for about six hours on a Saturday evening and then offer a late night horrorshow? Lovely.

  3. 3.

    Big R

    I love the concept of a “carefully targeted” nuke. It’s only carefully targeted if you’re watching the whole planet from Jupiter. Otherwise, we can probably manage a more surgical approach of some sort.

  4. 4.

    max

    @Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name): So you guys leave the blog unattended for about six hours on a Saturday evening and then offer a late night horrorshow? Lovely.

    Here you go, guy:

    Better late than never, in a way. More than 20 years after the Replacements initially broke up, leaving behind a fervent cult following but disappointing album sales, the reconstituted band had a stadium singing along on Friday night. Yes, Forest Hills Stadium is a fairly small stadium. But the crowd’s voices were loud through both verses and choruses, song after song. […]
    Mr. Westerberg, 54, still has the slender build, flashy wardrobe and insouciant intensity of a rocker. Mr. Stinson, who has also been touring in Guns N’ Roses, was his comic relief, regaling the audience with a tale of falling on his face the morning of the concert. The band kicked up a solid ruckus, just reckless enough as it worked from punk rock back through echoes of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, while Mr. Westerberg delivered more than two dozen Replacements songs with the same ragged conviction they held in the 1980s.[…]
    But it was the Replacements who played to a suddenly full stadium, with their songs tumbling out: the bratty sarcasm of “Color Me Impressed,” the shyness of “Swingin’ Party,” the underdog persistence and Merseybeat swing of “I Will Dare,” the yearning of “Can’t Hardly Wait” and the pop-fan solidarity of “Alex Chilton,” about the Memphis songwriter who was a cult hero to the Replacements; it imagines that “Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton.” The encore was “Unsatisfied,” which insists the singer is exactly that. Still, seeing that so many people have taken the Replacements’ non-hit oldies to heart, after all these years, must have been just a little satisfying.

    max
    [‘Hope that helps.’]

  7. 7.

    The Dangerman

    Oh, Clemson, you tease (MSU almost pissing away the game would have been the worse loss by far, but Clemson, you had the game won and fumbled it away).

  10. 10.

    Anoniminous

    This is the first time ebola has made it to major population areas. Previously it was confined to isolated rural areas where it either burned through a community or could be easily quarantined.

    Going to be interesting … in the Chinese definition.

  12. 12.

    The Dangerman

    @BillinGlendaleCA:

    Fighting Fashion Nightmares and Cougs are tied…

    Yeah, but I’m not buying what WSU is selling; I’m calling Oregon by at least 2 TD’s still.

    ETA: Then again, a WSU win will lead to a massive celebration that would lead to Pullman burning down (if Pullman HAD anything to burn down).

  13. 13.

    NCSteve

    What is it that makes you think that Louie Gohmert grew up with access to literacy and access to modern medical science? Because I see no evidence of that and my understanding was that he grew up in Texas.

  15. 15.

    Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)

    @tsquared2001: In the end, I just decided to listen to the Replacements and Violent Femmes and wallow in my aging, Upper Midwest, hipster/preppy shit. Sometimes one has to do it.

  21. 21.

    Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)

    @tsquared2001: The ‘Mats, the Femmes, and the Clash are fairly central to my youthful canon. OTOH, my frat’s party tapes were things like this and this. Angst is one thing; a party is another.

  22. 22.

    tsquared2001

    Mariotta is one fast mofo but having to jump up to make that 15 yard throw raises some red flags for the next level.

    EDIT: this is the first time I have seen him play live

  23. 23.

    El Caganer

    Louie is the Lone Star State’s National Treasure. Yes, they’ve got Goodhair and Joe Barton and Ted Cruz, but there’s only one Louie.

  27. 27.

    tsquared2001

    @Violet: The last play I saw was For Colored Girls. My high school teacher took me.

    What production was on tonight’s outing?

  28. 28.

    Hal

    Speaking of horror shows.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/19/uw-milwaukee-fraternity-date-rape_n_5851060.html

    The Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is being investigated by the school, its national organization and campus police after accusations that female guests who attended a Sept. 12 party were marked with color-coded Xs on their hands and given date rape drugs.

    At least three women and a man were found that night vomiting and unable to walk at Sandburg Hall, a university residence, reports WISN, a local ABC affiliate. All four needed to be hospitalized. One of the women told police she experienced a “weird feeling” before blacking out, according to the Associated Press.

    The three women were each marked with a red X on their hand from the TKE party, according to a search warrant affidavit cited by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. The man had a black X on his hand, but told police he drank from the same cup as a woman with a red X.

    Female partygoers were allowed to buy an index card for $8 that provided “all access to the house” and drinks, the paper reported. One of the women told police “you have to be hot” to purchase one of the cards, according to the Journal-Sentinel.

  31. 31.

    tsquared2001

    @Hal: Sick motherfuckers. That mindset, I do not get.

    When I was in college, the administration just kept the suicides on the down low but maybe I wasn’t hip to all this raping shit.

  33. 33.

    Suffern ACE

    @tsquared2001: I don’t know how they thought they would get away with it, but then I’m not much of a sexual predator and I’ve never been a member of a frat, lodge, or cult. I mean, let’s say this plan worked. The party is over and there are three drugged girls and a guy passed out in the house. Not one of the frat boys would have had enough moral strength to notice that he was an accomplice to rape? I think it’s time to close that chapter down.

  34. 34.

    Yatsuno

    @The Dangerman:

    if Pullman HAD anything to burn down

    Pullman has sushi stands now. I know. I don’t even know the place anymore.

    But Oregon got the ball back. I’m shocked my Cougs did as well as they have. I had zero hope tonight.

  35. 35.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @Yatsuno: Pullman’s a tough place to play as a visitor(either football or basketball).

    My Bruins have gone up there and laid and egg in both sports.

  38. 38.

    JGabriel

    Vanity Fair via Anne Laurie @ Top:

    A member of the Fula ethnic group, a rival of the sitting president’s Malinke group, explained to Batchyli that “this outbreak isn’t real—how could we be having Ebola here? President Condé made it up because he’s trying to delay elections.” Another said the president had introduced the virus to exterminate the Kissi tribe. A man claiming to be a spiritual guide called to say the epidemic was a plague visited upon the people of Guinea when a certain white snake was killed; it could all be cured by sacrificing seven cows.

    Just like American Conservatives denying global warming.

  39. 39.

    mai naem

    @Arclite: Its because of the rituals done during funeral ceremonies. Apparently there’s a lot of touching the dead person pretty “intimately.” Don’t ask me what ‘intimately” means. It’s a term I’ve heard in NPR and BBC coverage.
    I was listening to NPR and the were talking about the exponential growth of ebola and it’s absolutely scary. Ebola doubles about every 3 weeks which means unless something drastic happens the currently affected geographic area will have 60,000 cases before Christmas. Half a million by February. And, oh yeah, ebola cases are under reported because of the awful nature of the disease. I’ve been following this ebola story and it’s a whole lot more important than ISIS. It’s a pity we can’t somehow get ISIS to follow us into the Liberia/Guinea//SIerra Leone area.

  40. 40.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Florida State escapes a scare in OT, and frankly, the Fighting Fashion Nightmares had a scare of their own against the Cougs. Oklahoma had some problems with Cole’s Mountaineers.

    Then there’s Tommy, who is in deep mourning atm, I’m sure, at LSU’s woes.

  41. 41.

    Betty Cracker

    @Villago Delenda Est: Helluva football day. I’d like to note I predicted the LSU upset this morning. I also foresaw my Gators’ ignominious defeat, but that didn’t require much prescience.

  44. 44.

    chopper

    @Arclite:

    It helps when people dying of the disease are bleeding from every orifice and bazooka barfing bloody black-tinged sick all over the place.

    Still, it’s a matter of close contact. Like with SARS you’ll notice the disease is decimating medical staff, as they are in contact with patients day after day. Of course SARS was far more motile.

    A lot of people are afraid that this is a new, more mobile strain. However, remember that this outbreak is in a new place which is both more populated and was completely unprepared, whereas places like Congo that deal regularly with the virus are much better at dealing with it early on.

    There’s also the Liberian effect which only makes things worse there. Decades of corruption and genocidal practices have left people so distrustful of their government that they refuse to believe it isn’t some sort of plot.

  46. 46.

    Cermet

    The big concern is that as the virus spreads, and more and more people get ill, the virus will mutate and become airborne – the ultimate deadly killer virus. Never before has this virus had so many victims to host it and each time, its DNA (or RNA) mixes with that of other viruses in a given host then this virus could take on new characteristics. Of course, this can also cause the virus to become less deadly (this one might be doing that to some extent or possibly it is just that some people there are more immune) but the risk of this deadly virus becoming transmittable by an airborne vector is really of concern – if luck holds, it will burn out or be contain but the longer that takes, the more likely it could change into the most dangerous type of virus – one that infects victims by air through a simple cough … . Oh, by the way, good morning and enjoy your coffee.

  47. 47.

    GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)

    @Arclite:

    I thought Ebola spread via bodily fluids. How is it spreading so easily among people?

    Saliva and sweat are body fluids.

  48. 48.

    Jasmine Bleach

    @GHayduke (formerly lojasmo):

    Yeah, part of the disease is bleeding from just about everywhere, and a lot of vomit and diarrhea. Let’s say a family member comes down with it, and does some of that before you get them to a medical facility (if you can even get them to a medical facility over in Guinea, Liberia, etc.)–someone has to clean up the mess in the house, right?! You can’t just leave it sitting there and still live in the house.

    There’s your source of contamination and spread. What I find interesting (and horrifying) is that all the doctors and nurses who got the disease were taking the right safety steps when they contracted it.

  50. 50.

    Liberty60

    Maybe we can airdrop Jenny McCarthy and Pat Robertson there are they can handle the epidemic by explaining that it can be prevented by vitamins, and praying to Gawd, respectively. And maybe sacrificing a few homosexuals, just to be sure.

  51. 51.

    Julia Grey

    Bodily fluids are also contained in aeorosol form in coughs. If you inhale ENOUGH airborne droplets, which is more likely in a contaminated environment like a hospital ward caring for Ebola patients, or being the close caretaker of even a single patient, you could be sufficiently exposed to airborne fluids to catch the disease yourself.

    HIV needs direct bloodstream-to-bloodstream transfer, sexually or via injection. Ebola is more “catching” and can be transmitted from contact with the virus in ANY bodily fluid, not just blood and semen.

    But the key to Ebola that I have gathered from the coverage so far seems to be that it requires close, sustained or repeated contact, although it probably could also be caught from a high-load dose directly into the mucus membranes of a person with a compromised immune system. It is unlikely to be caught by a healthy person from being on one plane ride with an Ebola patient, for example, because the dose of the virus being received by any given passenger in the minimal amount of the patient’s cough product in the air would very likely be insufficient.

  52. 52.

    keestadoll

    And what would be wrong about blockading the continent? If we have boots on the ground (I think that’s NUTS as-is), why NOT halt any travel to and from these regions at least? I’m following a blogger on Gran Canaria and the risk of Ebola hop, skipping, and jumping to (at least) the EU is very real.

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