EBOLA

Sorry to have been away but I've been sick with the seasonal crud.

I suppose there is no point writing about anything but Ebola this week.  So, here it is. 

Ebola is a threat to us in general, particularly because it is bound up with other threats that we are not supposed to speak about.  Chief among these are race and immigration.  Ebola is an African disease.  It originates in Africa among Africans.  We are told it stems from the consumption of “Bush Meat,” in this case from fruit bats.  AIDS, which also came to us out of Africa, seems to have a similar origin except that the animal vector is from monkeys on the menu.  The Canal in my backyard now harbors West Nile Virus.  No extra points for guessing where that came from. 

It is not surprising that a lot of disease comes to us from the Dark Continent.  We evolved there.  Which means that every virus, bacterium and fungus that damages us has had millions of years to perfect its act among our kind. As we lost our tails and took to our heals they got better and better at eating us alive.  Most people alive today are the descendants of populations that had the good sense to leave Africa.  Some of us stayed behind as a kind of human petri dish for diseases to hone their skills.  I know a lot of people who visited or worked in Africa.  Without exception, every one of them became seriously ill.

There are obvious dangers of unlimited travel in and out of Africa.  Despite this our government refuses to control Africans access to our shores.  Our government still insists on allowing Africans to travel here despite all indications that it is not safe. 

This is beyond invincible ignorance.  It is multicultural orthodoxy carried to dangerous extreme. The Ebola patient who brought the disease here had a number of red flag issues that should have prevented hiom for being granted a visa.  He had relatives here.  He was unemployed.  He did not reside in the country of his citizenship.  Why our immigration service granted him a visa against their own protocols is a sinister mystery.  But it is of a piece with the Obama administration’s policy of lax border enforcement.  It’s worth noting that the Bush Administration was no better. 

We are at the mercy of an elite that simply doesn’t value our sovereignty or our safety.  They believe in the free flow of people in the service of cheap labor.  The cab drivers in Princeton are Africans.  There are African guards at our suburban corporate offices.  Washington DC is full of Africans, legal and illegal.  Our government encourages non-profits to settle whole populations of Africans in places like Maine and Minnesota.  And by the way, there are plenty of Liberians in the greater Trenton area. 

To notice such things is not bigotry, but sanity.

Africans are not the only threat to our health.  More than a few of the Central American so called “children” that Obama disbursed among us were found to have TB and a host of parasites and maladies.  We are seeing afflictions reassert themselves among us after long absences.  Bedbugs, Chagas, Malaria, TB etc. were rare or non-existent when I was a boy. I don’t think Dutch tourists brought them here.

A deeper dilemma than our self-destructive immigration policy is our simple unseriousness in carrying out basic functions.  Our Ebola outbreak is one of lackadaisical “what me worry” performance by all concerned.  From the official who let Mr. Ebola in, to the Dallas hospital staff, to the dissembling chief ninny at the CDC, to Dr. Nancy Snyderman, to the President, all are operating on third world levels of incompetence.  No one wants in inconvenience anyone or look bad.  So we have people under quarantine getting soup in Hopewell, and flying around the Midwest on commercial airlines.  And they are both medical professionals.

Indeed what strikes me is that we are coming to resemble the very people we need to keep at a distance.  We lack social discipline.  By that I mean that we increasingly fail to hold others or ourselves to standards of responsibility and self-discipline.  

It’s not surprising that some guy from Liberia would hop a plane in hopes of better health care here.  He couldn't think of anyone but himself.  That he was carrying a plague to the whole western hemisphere didn't concern him.  But we in the Western World once prided ourselves on doing the responsible thing in hopes that others would do the same.  It was called acting for common good.  Now we know that our government lies to us, and we lie to each other.  One wonders what would happen if we all had to pull together again?  Many of us would, but our leaders would not. 

We are afraid to demand that our government protect us from obvious dangers for fear of being called racists.

Some good news and some bad

CSPAN covered a conclave of medical experts at Johns Hopkins Tuesday.  While drugs to fight Ebola are not close at hand, several very promising vaccines are in trial stages and may save us from our follies this time.  Next time, who knows?

The bad news is that according to the experts at Hopkins, fever may not be the reliable screening measure it was thought to be.  According to one expert, there have been cases in Africa where people have died without any fever at all. They are atypical but they have been recorded. It also seems that Africans have learned that taking some Tylenol can beat down the fever long enough to get past security.  This last, according to African MD’s interviewed on NPR.  

The same African MD said that she had to retrain her assistants to get beyond the routine dishonesty of incoming patients.