The Ebola virus has arrived in the United States. A man from Liberia, one of the worst places in the current outbreak, arrived in the United States and promptly fell ill with Ebola, despite apparently being screened at the airport in Liberia. The efficacy of airport security in Liberia not withstanding, this is indeed very bad news for the United States and a good argument for quarantine of all airline passengers, flights, and the like coming from the infected areas. However, in spite of the scare, the CDC maintains that the US is capable of weathering an Ebola storm. One doctor does not agree, and as he flew through Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, he wore a full-body Ebola-proof biohazard suit to protest what he calls CDC lies.
The biohazard suit, incluing mask, goggles, gloves, boots, and hooded white jumpsuit, was marked with the phrase “CDC is lying!” on the back in large black letters (amazingly, he made it through airport security). Ebola is currently ravaging vast portions of West Africa, infecting dozens of new people every day and taxing the resources of an already-poor section of the world. Given that there’s currently no vaccine, most of the treatment involves managing symptoms and hoping the patient doesn’t die before he or she gets better. That’s enough to tax any country’s resources, particularly given Ebola’s tendency to be easily spread via body fluid.
“If they’re not lying, they are grossly incompetent,” said Dr. Mobley, a microbiologist and emergency trauma physician from Springfield, Missouri, who flew through Atlanta on his way back from Guatemala. “For them to say last week that the likelihood of importing an Ebola case was extremely small was a real bad call. Once this disease consumes every third world country, as surely it will, because they lack the same basic infrastructure as Sierra Leone and Liberia, at that point, we will be importing clusters of Ebola on a daily basis. That will overwhelm any advanced country’s ability to contain the clusters in isolation and quarantine. That spells bad news.” Added Dr. Mobley, “Yesterday, I came through international customs at the Atlanta airport. The only question they asked arriving passengers is if they had tobacco or alcohol.”
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