An Unfolding Scenerio

One of the first lessons I learned as an Environmental Health Technician while in the U.S. Air Force was to stop the spread of life-threatening disease by containing it at or nearest its source. That means all contaminates, including people, had to be held away from the public in the area in which the disease was first noted.

But somehow this isn’t being followed by current medical staff either abroad or in the U.S.

From the L.A. Times: “An American physician who fell ill with the deadly Ebola virus while treating others afflicted in West Africa arrived back on U.S. soil Saturday and was to be whisked via a specially outfitted ambulance to Emory University Hospital for treatment in an isolated ward.”

This despite a November 2012 report by the BBC that reads, “Canadian scientists have shown that the deadliest form of the Ebola virus could be transmitted by air between species.”

Meanwhile, the Center for Disease Control, which is overseeing the infected doctor’s treatment, says ‘don’t worry.’

CDC director Dr. Thomas Frieden told NBC News: “It is not a potential of Ebola spreading widely in the U.S. That is not in the cards.”

However this is the same government agency that Newsweek, in a July article, stated: “In June, the CDC revealed what it represented to be an accidental anthrax mishap. But in the investigation that followed, shocking conditions at federal laboratories were revealed. Long-forgotten smallpox samples had been discovered in a storage room at the National Institutes of Health’s Food Administration campus in Bethesda, Maryland, and cross-contamination of harmless samples with a potentially deadly flu virus had occurred in the CDC’s infectious disease lab.”

We should worry, because it is a horrible way to die.

From the World Health Organization’s website: “EVD is a severe acute viral illness often characterized by the sudden onset of fever, intense weakness, muscle pain, headache and sore throat. This is followed by vomiting, diarrhea, rash, impaired kidney and liver function, and in some cases, both internal and external bleeding.”

But the table may already be set for such a thing to happen, as Department of Religious Studies Professor James Tabor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, explained in the PBS ‘Frontline’ series, ‘Apocalypse!”

“If you open the Book of Revelation and simply begin reading it as an unfolding scenario, it goes something like this. There will be wars and famines and disease epidemics and heavenly signs that will alert the world to some sort of crisis.”

With all this said, I’ve decided to take a hold of Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman’s personal mantra: “What? Me worry?,” as I drop to my knees and pray in earnest.