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UPDATE IX: "Watching the excellent documentary “Ebola in America: Epidemic of Fear” is to relive the confusion and controversies of the summer of 2014: the initial public health mistakes, the divided and unclear responsibilities, the hysterical coverage on cable TV. But it is the political role played by Republicans and conservatives that stands out, and not in a good way."
Read the Washington Post, The Trump train is fueled by conspiracy.
Read also An Example of The Fear, Anger, Hatred Industry.
UPDATE VIII: Read also the Washington Post, Why your bathtub is actually far scarier than Ebola.
UPDATE VII: In the past two years, has ebola caused 6,000 emergency rooms visits, 750 hospitalizations (half required intensive care), and two confirmed deaths?
No, but since their introduction in 2012 through the end of 2013 "colorful, single-load" laundry detergent pods have.
Read The New York Times, Detergent Pods Pose Risk to Children, Study Finds.
UPDATE VI: Your chances of dying from ebola: 1 in 309,629,415 yearly, 1 in 3,934,300 in your lifetime.
Your chances of dying from your pajamas catching fire: 1 in 77,407,353 yearly, 1 in 983,575 in your lifetime.
Read the Washington Post, How likely is it that you will die from . . . ?
UPDATE V: "Ebola has so far killed one person on U.S. soil.
Over 10,000 children a year are killed or wounded by guns on the same soil."
Read the Daily Mail, A math question for the US media: What’s going to kill more American kids this year? Ebola or guns?
UPDATE IV: It’s been 21 days and none of the people in closest contact with Thomas Eric Duncan in the days before he was hospitalized has gotten sick. That includes his fiancée Louise Troh and her children, who were in a small Dallas apartment with an increasingly ill Duncan for days, and forcibly kept inside for days afterward.
No one else has carried Ebola into the country yet, and since Wednesday, no more nurses or other health care workers who took care of Duncan have been infected.
What has been seen is what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other experts predicted would happen — that someone might carry Ebola into the United States, and that they might even infect a few other people. What CDC has always promised is that it would stop there.
Read NBC News, Ebola in America: Has the Fever Broken?
Read also, CNN, Ebola hysteria: An epic, epidemic overreaction, which notes that"[w]hile the threat of Ebola is very real in Africa, the paranoia it's generated in the United States is unreal."
UPDATE III: Ebola "isn’t, as reported by Forbes and the Daily Mail, a low-tech weapon of bioterror for ISIS. It isn’t the final refuge of a lone wolf on a suicide mission, in the words of Fox News. It isn’t a U.S.-built race-targeting bioweapon, as the leader of the Nation of Islam declared. . .
[T]his outbreak isn’t a recipe for a bioweapon. Not unless you want to be the most incompetent bioterrorist in history."
Read Slate, Ebola Is Not a Weapon.
UPDATE II: "So far, none of the 48 Dallas residents who had contact with Duncan while he was symptomatic have shown signs of Ebola, Texas officials said on Tuesday. . .
[H]ealth officials have persistently argued that the United States is not facing an Ebola epidemic. The CDC, for example, continues to stress that most Americans aren’t at risk for Ebola."
Read Forbes, Ebola Came To America Last Week. Since Then: 5,000 False Alarms. Zero New Ebola Cases.
UPDATE: According to the CDC, in 2010 more than 53,000 people died in the United States from this infection.
Name the infection. (Hint, it is not ebola.)
Read PBS, These six diseases should worry you more than Ebola.
"The reproduction number, or "R nought," is a mathematical term that tells you how contagious an infectious disease is. Specifically, it's the number of people who catch the disease from one sick person, on average, in an outbreak.*
Take, for example, measles. The virus is one of the most contagious diseases known to man. It's R0 sits around 18. That means each person with the measles spreads it to 18 people, on average, when nobody is vaccinated. (When everyone is vaccinated, the R0 drops to essentially zero for measles).
At the other end of the spectrum are viruses like HIV and hepatitis C. Their R0s tend to fall somewhere between 2 and 4. They're still big problems, but they spread much more slowly than the measles.
And that brings us back to Ebola. Despite its nasty reputation, the virus's R0 really isn't that impressive. It typically sits around 1.5 to 2.0."
Read NPR, No, Seriously, How Contagious Is Ebola?
Read also USA Today, Even germaphobes don't need to fear Ebola, which notes:
"Unlike the common cold or viruses that cause food poisoning, Ebola does not spread through casual contact.
Ebola spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids, primarily blood. It can only spread after someone develops symptoms, such as a fever. So if you're exposed to Ebola, the odds are that you are going to know it.
So what has allowed Ebola to ravage West Africa?
Extreme poverty, a broken public health system and the trauma of countries newly emerged from years of brutal warfare.
These conditions aren't present in the USA. They aren't even present in much of Nigeria, where the Ebola epidemic appears to be over. Nigeria, which is considerably more developed than many of its neighbors, was prepared for the possibility of Ebola and took quick action to limit its spread."
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