On Monday, we got news that the first confirmed case of Ebola transmission in Europe has happened.  A nurse in Spain that had treated a couple of returning Ebola patients has contracted the disease herself…

A nurse’s assistant in Spain is the first person known to have contracted Ebola outside of Africa in the current outbreak.

Spanish Health Minister Ana Mato announced Monday that a test confirmed the assistant has the virus.

The woman helped treat a Spanish missionary and a Spanish priest, both of whom had contracted Ebola in West Africa. Both died after returning to Spain.

Health officials said she developed symptoms on September 30. She was not hospitalized until this week. Her only symptom was a fever.

How many people did she spread the virus to before it was correctly diagnosed?

Meanwhile, Ebola continues to rage out of control in West Africa.  It is being reported that Sierra Leone just added 121 new Ebola deaths to the overall death toll in a single day.  If Ebola continues to spread at an exponential rate, it is inevitable that more people will leave West Africa with the virus and take it to other parts of the globe.

In fact, it was being reported on Monday that researchers have concluded that there is “a 50 percent chance” that Ebola could reach the UK by October 24th…

Experts have analysed the pattern of the spread of the disease, along with airline traffic data, to make the startling prediction Ebola could reach Britain by October 24.

They claim there is a 50 percent chance the virus could hit Britain by that date and a 75 percent chance the it could be imported to France, as the deadliest outbreak in history spreads across the world.

Currently, there is no cure for the disease, which has claimed more than 3,400 lives since March and has a 90 percent fatality rate.

I have written extensively about Ebola, but it is certainly not the only virus making headlines right now.

Down in Uganda, a man has just died from a confirmed case of the Marburg Virus…

A man has died in Uganda’s capital after an outbreak of Marburg, a highly infectious haemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola, authorities said on Sunday, adding that a total of 80 people who came into contact with him had been put under quarantine.

Marburg starts with a severe headache followed by haemorrhaging and leads to death in 80% or more of cases in about nine days. It is from the same family of viruses as Ebola, which has killed thousands in West Africa in recent months.

There is no vaccine or specific treatment for the Marburg virus, which is transmitted through bodily fluids such as saliva and blood or by handling infected wild animals such as monkeys.

The Marburg Virus is an absolutely horrible disease, and many consider it to be even more deadly than Ebola.  But the fact that it kills victims so quickly may keep it from spreading as widely as Ebola.

We shall see.

Meanwhile, a disease that sounds very similar to Ebola and Marburg has popped up in Venezuela and doctors down there do not know what it is…

“We do not know what it is,” admitted Duglas León Natera, president of the Venezuelan Medical Federation.

In its initial stages, the disease presents symptoms of fever and spots on the skin, and then produces large blisters and internal and external bleeding, according to data provided week stop by the College of Physicians of the state of Aragua, where the first cases were reported.

Then, very quickly, patients suffer from respiratory failure, liver failure and kidney failure. Venezuelan doctors have not been able to determine what the disease is, much less how to fight it.

Why aren’t we hearing more about this in the mainstream news?

Here in the United States, enterovirus D-68 has sickened hundreds of children all over the country.  So far cases have been confirmed in 43 different states, several children have been paralyzed by it, and one New Jersey boy has died…

Parents in New Jersey are concerned after a state medical examiner determined a virus causing severe respiratory illness across the country is responsible for the death of a 4-year-old boy.

Hamilton Township health officer Jeff Plunkett said the Mercer County medical examiner’s office found the death of Eli Waller was the result of enterovirus D-68. Waller, the youngest of a set of triplets, died in his sleep at home on Sept. 25.

The virus has sickened more than 500 people in 43 states and Washington, D.C.— almost all of them children. Waller is the first death in New Jersey directly linked to the virus.

The CDC seems to have no idea how to contain the spread of enterovirus D-68.

So why should we be confident that they will be able to contain the spread of Ebola?

Last but not least, the Chikungunya virus is at pandemic levels all over Central and South America.

We aren’t hearing that much about this disease in the U.S., but at this point more than a million people have already been infected…

An excruciating mosquito-borne illness that arrived less than a year ago in the Americas is raging across the region, leaping from the Caribbean to the Central and South American mainland, and infecting more than 1 million people. Some cases already have emerged in the United States.

The good news is that very few people actually die from this disease.

The bad news is that almost everyone that gets it feels like they are dying.

In a previous article, I wrote about the intense suffering that victims go through.  According to Slate, the name of this virus originally “comes from a Makonde word meaning ‘that which bends up,’ referring to the contortions sufferers put themselves through due to intense joint pain.”

Right now, the number of cases of Chikungunya is absolutely exploding.  Just check out the following excerpt from a recent Fox News report…

In El Salvador, health officials report nearly 30,000 suspected cases, up from 2,300 at the beginning of August, and hospitals are filled with people with the telltale signs of the illness, including joint pain so severe it can be hard to walk.

“The pain is unbelievable,” said Catalino Castillo, a 39-year-old seeking treatment at a San Salvador hospital. “It’s been 10 days and it won’t let up.”

Venezuelan officials reported at least 1,700 cases as of Friday, and the number is expected to rise. Neighboring Colombia has around 4,800 cases but the health ministry projects there will be nearly 700,000 by early 2015.

So why is this happening?

Why are so many absolutely horrible diseases emerging all at once?

Please share what you think by posting a comment below…

The post There Will Be Pestilences: Why Are So Many Deadly Diseases Breaking Out All Over The Globe Right Now? appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

All of this talk about “extensive screening” at our airports is just a smokescreen because it does not exist.  As Mike Adams of Natural News has pointed out, Thomas Eric Duncan walked freely through our airports and entered the general population without ever being asked by U.S. security personnel about where he was from or if he had any health conditions…

Ebola “patient zero” Thomas Eric Duncan flew right into the United States and walked through the international airports of both Washington D.C. and Dallas-Fort Worth. He was never asked about his country of origin and was never screened for any health conditions.

Why are people whose flights originate in Liberia and Sierra Leone still allowed to openly travel to large U.S. cities?

And nothing changed even after news broke of a confirmed case of Ebola in Dallas.  Just consider the following excerpt from a CNN news story that I included in a previous article…

CNN Senior Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen said when she and two colleagues recently returned from reporting in Liberia, they got a mixed bag of responses from Customs and Border Protection officers.

“We all said we were journalists who had just been in Liberia covering Ebola,” Cohen said. “One of my colleagues was told, ‘Oh, OK, welcome back home, sir’ — and (was) just let in — that was it.”

Cohen herself got a different response.

“I was told, ‘Wait a minute, I think I got an email about this,’ and the border patrol officer went and consulted with his colleagues,” Cohen said.

That officer later told her she should check her system for 21 days.

“I said, ‘What should I be checking?’ And he wasn’t sure,” Cohen said.

Barack Obama is either lying or he is being grossly negligent when he says that we don’t need to be concerned about air travel from Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone because of how good the screening at our airports is.

When it comes to his primary fundamental duty, he is completely dropping the ball.  The following is from a recent Fox News opinion piece…

The fundamental duty of the nation’s chief executive is to protect its citizens. Under Article II of the Constitution, he is duty-bound to respond to threats and to conduct the country’s foreign affairs. When a crisis presents itself, the president has nearly unfettered power and discretion to act. This includes protecting the health and safety of Americans. Does stopping the deadly spread of Ebola constitute such a crisis?

At this point, a whole host of lawmakers are calling for Obama to restrict air travel from West Africa.

And a petition on Whitehouse.gov to ban all incoming and outgoing flights has more than 10,000 signatures so far.

But the White House is not moving.

In fact, Press Secretary Josh Earnest says that there is “no consideration of a travel ban”…

There’s no consideration of a travel ban at this point.  But I can tell you that there is — well, let me explain.  There are a couple of good reasons for that.  The first is there is in place a very sophisticated, multilayered screening system in place to ensure that the traveling public is safe.

Those screening protocols begins at the point of departure; that in West Africa and these counties, under the supervision of international personnel, there are screening protocols in place to ensure that those individuals who are already exhibiting symptoms of Ebola don’t board aircraft.  This includes everything from a visual examination of passengers as they’re preparing to board aircraft, to giving them questionnaires that they have to fill out.  In other cases, it even involves taking the temperature of passengers before they board aircraft.  So there is screening protocol in place even before individuals enter the transportation system.

As with so many other things, it is hard to tell whether the Obama administration is lying, is being completely incompetent or is pursuing some sort of insidious agenda that we are now aware of yet.

Sadly, the CDC is actually backing Obama up on this.  Just check out what the head of the CDC said about a potential travel ban last week…

Barring all incoming flights from Ebola-hit countries in West Africa might seem like the best way to prevent an outbreak of the virus in the United States, but doing so would actually hurt efforts to curb the outbreak in the long run, Tom Frieden, M.D., MPH, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said today (Oct. 2).

“If we take actions that seem like they may work, they may be the kind of solution to a complex problem that is quick, simple and wrong,” said Frieden in a press conference. “The approach of isolating a country is that it’s going to make it harder to get help into that country.”

Of course medical personnel that are fighting this disease should be allowed to fly in and out of those countries.

But why can’t we ban all non-essential personnel  from flying back and forth?

Meanwhile, the Obama administration also continues to be negligent in guarding our southern border.

We know that people from Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone cross our border with Mexico illegally.  In fact, hundreds of such individuals from those countries were caught by border patrol agents during fiscal year 2013…

Government figures indicate that 112 individuals were interdicted illegally crossing into the United States from Guinea, 231 from Liberia, and another 145 from Sierra Leone, the three Ebola hot spots. The period of these apprehensions was one in which we had a larger Border Patrol presence on the actual border than we do now.

And those are just the ones that we were able to apprehend.

The truth is that most of the people that cross our borders illegally we do not catch.

If Obama and his minions continue to refuse to take even the most basic steps to protect us, it is inevitable that more people with extremely deadly diseases such as Ebola will enter this country and circulate among the general population.

If our health system was ready to handle such diseases, that would be one thing.

Unfortunately, that is not the case.  In fact, one recent survey found that most nurses in the United States do not believe that their hospitals are ready to handle patients with Ebola…

A survey by National Nurses United of some 400 nurses in more than 200 hospitals in 25 states found that more than half (60 percent) said their hospital is not prepared to handle patients with Ebola, and more than 80 percent said their hospital has not communicated to them any policy regarding potential admission of patients infected by Ebola.

Another 30 percent said their hospital has insufficient supplies of eye protection and fluid-resistant gowns.

This Ebola outbreak has the potential to become the greatest health crisis that any of us have ever seen.

But Obama absolutely refuses to take even the most basic steps to keep us safe from this disease.

Why won’t Obama do something?

The post Why Won’t Obama Ban Air Travel From Countries Where Ebola Is Out Of Control? appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

In case you are tempted to think that I am making this up, I want you to read what federal law actually says.  The following is 42 U.S.C. 264(d).  I have added bold for emphasis…

(1) Regulations prescribed under this section may provide for the apprehension and examination of any individual reasonably believed to be infected with a communicable disease in a qualifying stage and (A) to be moving or about to move from a State to another State; or (B) to be a probable source of infection to individuals who, while infected with such disease in a qualifying stage, will be moving from a State to another State. Such regulations may provide that if upon examination any such individual is found to be infected, he may be detained for such time and in such manner as may be reasonably necessary. For purposes of this subsection, the term “State” includes, in addition to the several States, only the District of Columbia.

(2) For purposes of this subsection, the term “qualifying stage”, with respect to a communicable disease, means that such disease—

(A) is in a communicable stage; or

(B) is in a precommunicable stage, if the disease would be likely to cause a public health emergency if transmitted to other individuals.

In addition, as I discussed above, the CDC already has the authority to isolate people that are not sick to see if they do become sick.  The following is what the CDC website says about this…

Quarantine is used to separate and restrict the movement of well persons who may have been exposed to a communicable disease to see if they become ill. These people may have been exposed to a disease and do not know it, or they may have the disease but do not show symptoms. Quarantine can also help limit the spread of communicable disease.

On a very basic level, we are already starting to see this happen in Texas.  Obviously Thomas Eric Duncan has already been “isolated”, and now his family has been placed under mandatory quarantine and ordered not to leave their home for 21 days…

Texas health officials have placed the Dallas family of a Liberian national infected with Ebola under quarantine and ordered them not to leave their home or have any contact with outsiders for 21 days without approval of the local or state health department.

The “control order” also requires the family of Thomas Eric Duncan to be available to provide blood samples and agree to any testing required by public health officials. Officials said Thursday that the four or five family members could face criminal charges for violating the order, which was delivered to them in writing Wednesday evening.

Police have been stationed at the apartment complex to ensure residents’ safety, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings told a news briefing Thursday afternoon.

If we could all just stay in our homes during a national Ebola emergency, that wouldn’t be so bad.

But if thousands (or even millions) of cases start popping up it simply will not be possible for law enforcement authorities to monitor so many homes.

This is a point that Mike Adams of Natural News made exceptionally well…

When just one family is suspected of carrying Ebola, they can be easily monitored in a “volunteer home isolation” scenario. But what happens when it’s 100 families? 500? 1,000? At that point, there aren’t enough state or federal workers to keep an eye on these people, and the quarantine effort will almost certainly shift to forced relocation into quarantine camps.

Those camps will, of course, be called something nice-sounding like “Community Health Centers.” No one in government or media will call them camps, even though they are camps. The word “camp” brings up echoes of “concentration camps” and the government definitely wants to avoid that association.

If one particular town or city is hit especially hard with the virus, there is a likelihood of the entire town being quarantined. No one in, no one out. Everybody will be ordered to “shelter in place” in their own homes for at least 21 days while health workers wearing hazmat suits go door to door, identifying Ebola victims and “relocating” them to the “Community Health Centers.”

If that sounds like “martial law” to you, that is because it would essentially be martial law.

For the moment, public health authorities are pledging that nothing like this will ever happen because they have everything completely under control.

Others are not so sure.

For example, on Thursday a doctor from Missouri named Gil Mobley checked in for a flight at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport dressed in a mask, goggles, gloves, boots and a protective white jumpsuit.  On the back of the jumpsuit, he had written the following words:  “CDC is lying!”

Mobley believes that we are not being told the truth about the spread of Ebola.  And he is convinced that as Ebola continues to spread exponentially, that we will eventually “be importing clusters of Ebola on a daily basis”…

“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,” Mobley predicted. “That will overwhelm any advanced country’s ability to contain the clusters in isolation and quarantine. That spells bad news.”

Mobley, a Medical College of Georgia graduate who had an overnight layover after flying to Atlanta from Guatemala on Wednesday, said that he feels that the CDC is “asleep at the wheel” when it comes to screening passengers arriving in the United States from other countries.

“Yesterday, I came through international customs at the Atlanta airport,” the doctor told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “The only question they asked arriving passengers is if they had tobacco or alcohol.”

Earlier on Thursday, there were reports of people being tested for Ebola in Hawaii, Kentucky and Utah.  None of those tests has produced a confirmed case of Ebola as I write this article.

Many Americans are still treating this Ebola crisis as if it was just one big joke.

But Ebola is no joking matter.  This is a very, very serious disease.

Just consider the experience of one British health worker that witnessed a young brother and sister both die one day apart…

‘The next morning I came in and saw him lying as I had left him, on the bed.

‘He wasn’t breathing. I remember going up to him and looking at his face, his lips were drawn back in a grimace, and his eyes were vacant, lying in a pool of his own diarrhea.

‘I lifted his hand to try, just to confirm things and his whole body turned rigid and cold.

‘I put him in a body bag as his sister looked on.

‘She seemed more baffled than anything, not really understanding what was happening. I carried his corpse outside with the others.

‘The little girl, she deteriorated the next day. Overnight, the following night she had intravenous fluids and the line came out and she bled.

‘I came in the following morning and she was covered in blood. She still had a very puzzled expression on her face and she wasn’t breathing.

‘So I put her in a bag and left her next to her brother. She was a beautiful little girl.’

Hopefully our medical authorities are correct and this virus will not spread easily in this country.

But at this point even some of our top politicians are wondering if we are truly getting accurate information.  For example, check out what U.S. Senator Rand Paul had to say on the Laura Ingraham Show just recently…

“I really think that it is being dominated by political correctness and I think because of political correctness we’re not really making sound, rational, scientific decisions on this.” Paul said referring to statements issued by the CDC last week that assured there was little risk of an outbreak occurring in the US.

“We should not underestimate the transmissibility of this,” said Paul, a doctor himself, adding that medical workers have been contracting the virus even though they are taking precautions and covering themselves with gowns and masks.

“My suspicion is that it’s a lot more transmissible than that if people who are taking every precaution are getting it. There are people getting it who simply helped people get in or out of a taxicab.” Paul said.

Let’s pray that this crisis fizzles out, because if it doesn’t, we could truly be looking at the greatest health crisis that any of us have ever seen.

And along with countless numbers of people getting sick and dying, we would also have to deal with government-imposed medical martial law.

The stakes are extremely high, and so let us hope that this crisis does not escalate any further.

The post During An Ebola Pandemic All Of Your Rights Would Essentially Be Meaningless appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

Right now there is just one confirmed case of Ebola in Texas.  If they isolated him before he infected anyone else, we might be okay for the moment.  But already we are being told that there may be “a possible second Ebola patient” in Dallas…

Health officials are closely monitoring a possible second Ebola patient who had close contact with the first person to be diagnosed in the U.S., the director of Dallas County’s health department said Wednesday.

All who have been in close contact with the man officially diagnosed are being monitored as a precaution, Zachary Thompson, director of Dallas County Health and Human Services, said in a morning interview with WFAA-TV, Dallas-Fort Worth.

“Let me be real frank to the Dallas County residents: The fact that we have one confirmed case, there may be another case that is a close associate with this particular patient,” he said. “So this is real. There should be a concern, but it’s contained to the specific family members and close friends at this moment.”

We have learned the name of the man that is confirmed to have Ebola.  His name is Thomas Eric Duncan and when he went to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital last Friday, he told them that he was feeling quite ill and that he was from Liberia.  You would have thought that should have set off major alarm bells.  But instead, he got sent back home…

The first Ebola patient diagnosed in the U.S. initially went to a Dallas emergency room last week but was sent home, despite telling a nurse that he had been in disease-ravaged West Africa, the hospital acknowledged Wednesday.

The decision by Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital to release him could have put many others at risk of exposure to the disease before he went back to the ER two days later, after his condition worsened.

Thomas Eric Duncan explained to a nurse Friday that he was visiting the U.S. from Liberia, but that information was not widely shared, said Dr. Mark Lester, who works for the hospital’s parent company.

So a fully contagious Duncan had the opportunity to spread the virus around for another 48 hours before he was finally admitted to the hospital for treatment.

And it wasn’t just adults that he potentially exposed to the disease.  It is being reported that he had “close contact” with five students that attend four different Dallas schools.  Local media is reporting that the names of those schools are Tasby Middle School, Hotchkiss Elementary School, Dan D. Rogers Elementary and Conrad High School.

Predictably, many parents are already pulling their kids out of school in the Dallas area.

It shall be very interesting to see how many kids actually show up for school tomorrow morning.

But this is what happens to a society when the fear of Ebola takes hold.  People almost immediately start shutting down their activities and staying home.

Over in West Africa, months of Ebola fear is starting to take a major toll on the economy.  For example, the president of Guinea says that his economy is on the verge of complete collapse…

Guinea has been more successful in containing the Ebola epidemic than its immediate neighbors in West Africa, but the loss of revenue caused by the crisis has left the country in dire financial straits, President Alpha Condé said after concluding a round of meetings at the United Nations General Assembly.

Mr. Condé said Guinea would need about $100 million until December to cover its budget gap, which will grow if Ebola is not tackled by the end of the year.

“The slowing down of our economies due to Ebola requires that most of our countries get some budgetary support … it’s going to be crucial that we get that support so our economies don’t completely collapse,” he said.

And things are even worse in Liberia.  The Washington Post says that Liberia is descending “into economic hell”…

Liberia, the West African nation hardest it by Ebola, has begun a frightening descent into economic hell.

That’s the import of three recent reports from international organizations that seem to bear out the worst-case scenarios of months ago: that people would abandon the fields and factories, that food and fuel would become scarce and unaffordable, and that the government’s already meager capacity to help, along with the nation’s prospects for a better future, would be severely compromised.

If thousands of people start getting Ebola in major cities all over America, the same thing will happen here too.

A major Ebola pandemic in America would mean an almost total economic shutdown and basic essentials would start disappearing from the marketplace almost immediately.  Just check out what is happening in Liberia even as you read this…

The basic necessities of survival in Liberia — food, transportation, work, money, help from the government — are rapidly being depleted, according to recent reports by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Even though economic demand would drop through the floor for most things, prices for food and other essential supplies tend to skyrocket during a major emergency.  The IMF says that the inflation rate will hit approximately 13 percent in Liberia by the end of the year even though economic activity has declined dramatically.  It is going to become extremely challenging for most families over there to feed themselves.

And as economic activity withers, tax revenues also dry up.  Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone are all facing massive revenue shortfalls, and they are asking for international assistance.

But if the same thing happened in the United States, do you think the rest of the world would send us lots of money to help us pay our bills?

I don’t think so.

Needless to say, an Ebola outbreak is not good for financial markets either.  News of the confirmed case of Ebola in Texas helped push down the Dow more than 238 points on Wednesday, and airline stocks in particular declined sharply.

If there are no more confirmed cases of Ebola in Texas, things will probably get back to normal for U.S. markets.

But if Ebola does start spreading and cases start popping up all over the country, that could be just the thing to burst our massive stock market bubble.

Let us hope that this is just a false alarm.

Let us hope that our public health authorities have everything under control.

Nobody should want to see thousands (or potentially millions) of fellow Americans get sick and die.

Unfortunately, scientists tell us that it is only a matter of time before another major pandemic of some sort ravages this nation.

When that happens, will our fragile economy be able to handle the shock?

The post The Economic Implications Of A Potential Ebola Pandemic In The United States appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

At this point, the CDC is admitting that it is not known if others have been infected by this individual.  The CDC also says that it is tracking down everyone that he has been in contact with.  But over four days in a major U.S. city, you can be “in contact” with a whole lot of people.  And what about all of the people that those people were in contact with?

If I was in charge of this crisis, I would admit that we don’t know the full scope of the problem yet but that we are dealing with it the best that we can.

Instead, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is taking an entirely different approach.  Dr. Thomas Frieden insists that we have absolutely nothing to worry about…

“I have no doubt that we will control this case of Ebola, so that it does not spread widely in this country. It is certainly possible that someone who has had contact with this patient could develop Ebola. But there is no doubt in my mind that we will stop it here.”

Frieden better be right about that.

Other “experts” are being even more dogmatic…

“There is no cause for concern,” says Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “The Ebola virus is not easily transmitted from person to person, and we have an outstanding infrastructure in place both to contain the virus and trace contacts. There will not be an Ebola epidemic in the United States.”

I have no idea how they can say these things when the outbreak over in Africa is completely and totally out of control.  Despite extreme precautions, hundreds of health workers have gotten the virus, and so far global health officials have not even been able to slow down the exponential growth of the Ebola pandemic in West Africa.

And our health officials should not be so dogmatic about how this virus spreads either.

In a previous article, I discussed a study that was conducted back in 2012 that demonstrated that Ebola could be transmitted through the air between pigs and monkeys that did not have physical contact with one another…

When news broke that the Ebola virus had resurfaced in Uganda, investigators in Canada were making headlines of their own with research indicating the deadly virus may spread between species, through the air.

The team, comprised of researchers from the National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease, the University of Manitoba, and the Public Health Agency of Canada, observed transmission of Ebola from pigs to monkeys. They first inoculated a number of piglets with the Zaire strain of the Ebola virus. Ebola-Zaire is the deadliest strain, with mortality rates up to 90 percent. The piglets were then placed in a room with four cynomolgus macaques, a species of monkey commonly used in laboratories. The animals were separated by wire cages to prevent direct contact between the species.

Within a few days, the inoculated piglets showed clinical signs of infection indicative of Ebola infection. In pigs, Ebola generally causes respiratory illness and increased temperature. Nine days after infection, all piglets appeared to have recovered from the disease.

Within eight days of exposure, two of the four monkeys showed signs of Ebola infection. Four days later, the remaining two monkeys were sick too. It is possible that the first two monkeys infected the other two, but transmission between non-human primates has never before been observed in a lab setting.

There is much that we don’t understand about this disease.

I can understand the need to keep the public calm, but why don’t these officials just tell us the truth?

At the same time that they are telling us that there is no chance that there will be an Ebola epidemic in the United States, they are also sending out guidelines to funeral homes on how to deal with dead Ebola victims…

CBS46 News has confirmed the Centers for Disease Control has issued guidelines to U.S. funeral homes on how to handle the remains of Ebola patients. If the outbreak of the potentially deadly virus is in West Africa, why are funeral homes in America being given guidelines?

The three-page list of recommendations include instructing funeral workers to wear protective equipment when dealing with the remains since Ebola can be transmitted in postmortem care. It also instructs to avoid autopsies and embalming.

Why are they doing this if there is “no chance” that the disease will spread widely?

Hopefully they isolated this Ebola patient in Dallas in time.

Hopefully he did not infect anyone else.

But we need to be honest about the situation that we are potentially facing.  So far, there have been more than 6,000 cases of Ebola in Africa and more than 3,000 of those have died.  Unfortunately, even WHO officials admit that those official numbers “great underestimate” the scope of this outbreak.  The number of official cases has been doubling approximately every three weeks, and the CDC says that under a “worst case scenario” we could be looking at 1.4 million cases by the end of January 2015.

Right now all of the treatment facilities in Liberia and Sierra Leone are completely full and more than 80 percent of Ebola patients have been turned away and sent home without being treated.  It is an absolute nightmare, and now it has come to America.

And as the virus continues to spread, it is inevitable that more carriers of the disease will get on airplanes headed for America.

Unfortunately for us, according to a recent Defense One article the screening done at airports actually does very little to stop the spread of Ebola…

The bad news is that thermal screenings of the international flying population at airports are not likely to yield much by way of improved safety.

Here’s why: fever can be a sign of a lot of different illnesses, not just Ebola. And thermal scanning proved to be a poor method of catching bird flu carriers in 2009 as well. So presenting with an elevated temperature at an airport checkpoint does not indicate clearly enough that the fevered person is carrying the deadly virus. More importantly, the incubation period for Ebola is two days. As many as 20 days can pass before symptoms show up. That means that an individual could be carrying the virus for two weeks or longer and not even know it, much less have it show up via thermal scan. So what good are these scanners?

When I first started writing about Ebola, a few people accused me of “spreading fear”.

Well, now that Ebola has arrived in the United States, perhaps they will take a second look at some of my recent articles…

-“The Pure Hell At The Heart Of The Ebola Pandemic In Africa Could Soon Be Coming To America”

-“Computer Models Tell Us That This Ebola Pandemic Could Soon Kill Millions”

-“16 Apocalyptic Quotes From Global Health Officials About This Horrific Ebola Epidemic”

-“Ebola Among Health Workers: More Than 240 Sick, More Than 120 Dead”

-“It Is Becoming Clear – We Are NOT Prepared For An Ebola Pandemic”

Let us pray that this is just one isolated case and that there will not be a major outbreak in this nation.

Because if cases do start popping up around the country, fear will spread like wildfire and we could potentially be facing the greatest health crisis that any of us have ever seen.

One of the individuals that successfully survived this disease was Dr. Kent Brantly.  I think that the following quote from him really does a great job of summarizing what we are potentially facing…

“Many have used the analogy of a fire burning out of control to describe this unprecedented Ebola outbreak,” Brantly said. “Indeed it is a fire—it is a fire straight from the pit of hell. We cannot fool ourselves into thinking that the vast moat of the Atlantic Ocean will protect us from the flames of this fire. Instead, we must mobilize the resources … to keep entire nations from being reduced to ashes.”

A virus like this could change everything if it starts circulating widely.

Like I have said so many times before, let us hope for the best, but let us also prepare for the worst.

The post Ebola In America: The Confirmed Case In Dallas, Texas Could Change Everything appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

The mainstream media has told us over and over again that Ebola “does not spread easily” and that we have nothing to be concerned about in the United States and Europe.

But if that is true, then how in the world have hundreds of doctors and nurses gotten sick?  They go to extraordinary lengths to avoid getting the virus.  The following is from an official World Health Organization statement that was released on Monday…

The outbreak of Ebola virus disease in west Africa is unprecedented in many ways, including the high proportion of doctors, nurses, and other health care workers who have been infected.

To date, more than 240 health care workers have developed the disease in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, and more than 120 have died.

During past outbreaks, a few health workers have contracted the virus.  But once the virus was identified and proper safety measures were put into place, “cases among medical staff dropped dramatically”.  Unfortunately, the WHO says that this outbreak is “different” and the virus continues to spread among medical personnel…

In the past, some Ebola outbreaks became visible only after transmission was amplified in a health care setting and doctors and nurses fell ill. However, once the Ebola virus was identified and proper protective measures were put in place, cases among medical staff dropped dramatically.

Moreover, many of the most recent Ebola outbreaks have occurred in remote areas, in a part of Africa that is more familiar with this disease, and with chains of transmission that were easier to track and break.

The current outbreak is different. Capital cities as well as remote rural areas are affected, vastly increasing opportunities for undiagnosed cases to have contact with hospital staff. Neither doctors nor the public are familiar with the disease. Intense fear rules entire villages and cities.

Needless to say, the fact that so many doctors and nurses are getting sick has created a tremendous amount of panic in areas of Africa were Ebola is spreading.  Here is more from the WHO statement…

The fact that so many medical staff have developed the disease increases the level of anxiety: if doctors and nurses are getting infected, what chance does the general public have? In some areas, hospitals are regarded as incubators of infection and are shunned by patients with any kind of ailment, again reducing access to general health care.

The loss of so many doctors and nurses has made it difficult for WHO to secure support from sufficient numbers of foreign medical staff.

I think that the WHO has brought up a legitimate question.

If hundreds of doctors and nurses are getting the virus even after using protective equipment, what chance is the general public going to have?

Of course one of the big problems is the misinformation that is being spread through the mainstream media.  We have been told over and over that Ebola can only be spread “through direct contact with infected body fluids”, but scientific studies have shown that this is simply not accurate.  Dr. Ronald R. Cherry believes that this bad information could be contributing to the spread of Ebola among medical personnel…

We know that airborne transmission of Ebola occurs from pigs to monkeys in experimental settings. We also know that healthcare workers like Dr. Kent Brantly are contracting Ebola in West Africa despite CDC-level barrier protection measures against physical contact with the bodies and body fluids of Ebola victims, so it only makes sense to conclude that some — possibly many — of these doctors, nurses, and ancillary healthcare workers are being infected via airborne transmission. It makes perfect sense that sick humans, as they vomit, have diarrhea, cough, and expectorate sputum, and as medical procedures are performed on them, have the ability to shed infectious Ebola particles into the air at a similar or higher level compared to Sus scrofa (wild boar) in the pig-to-monkey study.

There had been hope that a “miracle drug” known as ZMapp could be used to save the lives of at least some of these doctors and nurses, but there is a problem.  It turns out that some of the people that have gotten this drug have died anyway.  The following is from a news report about one of these individuals…

A Liberian doctor treated with experimental American anti-Ebola serum ZMapp has died, a minister in the west African nation said on Monday.

Abraham Borbor had been improving but died on Sunday night, Liberian Information Minister Lewis Brown told AFP.

“He was showing signs of progress but he finally died. The government regrets this loss and extends its condolences to the bereaved family,” Brown said.

Meanwhile, Ebola continues to spread.  As I mentioned above, cases of the disease have now been confirmed in Congo.  Not only that, it turns out that two different strains of Ebola were discovered by the medical tests…

Numbi said that one of the two cases that tested positive was for the Sudanese strain of the disease, while the other was a mixture between the Sudanese and the Zaire strain — the most lethal variety. The outbreak in West Africa that has killed at least 1,427 people in West Africa since March is the Zaire strain.

So now we have multiple strains of Ebola being spread around out there.

And the truth of the matter is that even the authorities admit that they have absolutely no idea how many people actually have Ebola.  As CNN recently reported, the WHO says that the official numbers “vastly underestimate” the scope of this pandemic…

“The outbreak is expected to continue for some time,” the WHO said in a statement Thursday. “Staff at the outbreak sites see evidence that the numbers of reported cases and deaths vastly underestimate the magnitude of the outbreak.”

We could potentially be on the verge of the greatest health crisis that any of us have ever seen.

But in the western world there is very little concern about this disease right now.  Most people seem to believe that it poses absolutely no threat to those of us living in the United States and Europe.

Hopefully they are right.

But what if they aren’t?

The post Ebola Among Health Workers: More Than 240 Sick, More Than 120 Dead appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

If Ebola comes to America and starts spreading, one of the first things that would happen would be for the CDC to issue “a federal isolation or quarantine order”.  The following is what the CDC website says about what could happen under such an order…

Isolation and quarantine are public health practices used to stop or limit the spread of disease.

Isolation is used to separate ill persons who have a communicable disease from those who are healthy. Isolation restricts the movement of ill persons to help stop the spread of certain diseases. For example, hospitals use isolation for patients with infectious tuberculosis.

Quarantine is used to separate and restrict the movement of well persons who may have been exposed to a communicable disease to see if they become ill. These people may have been exposed to a disease and do not know it, or they may have the disease but do not show symptoms. Quarantine can also help limit the spread of communicable disease.

Isolation and quarantine are used to protect the public by preventing exposure to infected persons or to persons who may be infected.

In addition to serving as medical functions, isolation and quarantine also are “police power” functions, derived from the right of the state to take action affecting individuals for the benefit of society.

“Isolation” would not be a voluntary thing.  The federal government would start hunting down anyone that they “reasonably believed to be infected with a communicable disease” and taking them to the facilities where other patients were being held.  It wouldn’t matter if you were entirely convinced that you were 100% healthy.  If the government wanted to take you in, you would have no rights in that situation.  In fact, federal law would allow the government to detain you “for such time and in such manner as may be reasonably necessary”.

And once you got locked up with all of the other Ebola patients, there would be a pretty good chance that you would end up getting the disease and dying anyway.  The current Ebola outbreak has a 55 percent percent mortality rate, and experts tell us that the mortality rate for Ebola can be as high as 90 percent.

Once you contracted Ebola, this is what it would look like…

Sudden onset of fever, intense weakness, muscle pain, headache and sore throat. That is followed by vomiting, diarrhoea, rash, impaired kidney and liver function and internal and external bleeding.

The “external bleeding” may include bleeding from the eyes, ears, nose, mouth and just about every other major body cavity.

So how is Ebola spread?

Well, medical authorities tell us that it can be spread through the blood, urine, saliva, stools and semen of a person or animal that already has Ebola.

If you are exposed to the disease, the incubation period can be from anywhere from two days up to 21 days.  But the average is usually about eight to ten days.

In other words, you can be spreading it around for over a week before you even know that you have it.

There is no vaccine for Ebola and there is no cure.

Not everyone dies from the virus, but most people do.

Needless to say, this is about the last disease that you want to catch.  And the doctors that are treating Ebola patients in Africa are going to extreme lengths to keep from getting it…

To minimise the risk of infection they have to wear thick rubber boots that come up to their knees, an impermeable body suit, gloves, a face mask, a hood and goggles to ensure no air at all can touch their skin.

Dr Spencer, 27, and her colleagues lose up to five litres of sweat during a shift treating victims and have to spend two hours rehydrating afterwards.

They are only allowed to work for between four and six weeks in the field because the conditions are so gruelling.

At their camp they go through multiple decontaminations which includes spraying chlorine on their shoes.

But despite all of those extraordinary measures, multiple doctors have already gotten sick.

For example, one of the doctors leading the fight against Ebola, Dr. Sheik Humarr Khan, died on Tuesday…

A doctor who was on the front lines fighting the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone has died from complications of the disease, Doctors Without Borders said Tuesday.

Dr. Sheik Humarr Khan fell ill early last week while overseeing Ebola treatment at Kenema Government Hospital, about 185 miles east of Sierra Leone’s capital city, Freetown.

He was treated by the French aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres — also known as Doctors Without Borders — in Kailahun, Sierra Leone, up until his death, spokesman Tim Shenk said.

And two American doctors that went over to Africa to help fight the disease are now battling for their own lives…

Dr. Kent Brantly, who was treating victims of the Ebola outbreak in Liberia, is currently being treated in an isolation unit in the Liberian capital, Monrovia, the AP reported Tuesday.

“I’m praying fervently that God will help me survive this disease,” Brantly said in an email Monday to Dr. David Mcray, the director of maternal-child health at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas. The Texas-born Brantly, 33, completed a four-year medical residency at the hospital, the AP said.

Brantly’s wife and two young children left Liberia to return to Abilene, Texas, days before he began to show symptoms of Ebola. They are being monitored for any signs of fever, a City of Abilene spokeswoman told the AP.

A second American, aid worker Nancy Writebol of Charlotte, N.C., is also stricken with Ebola, according to CBS/AP. Writebol had been working as a hygienist to help decontaminate people at an Ebola care center in Monrovia.

This is not like other Ebola outbreaks.

Something seems different this time.

But instead of trying to keep things isolated to a few areas, global health authorities are going to start sending Ebola patients to other parts of the globe.  For example, one German hospital has already agreed to start receiving Ebola patients…

A German hospital has agreed to treat Ebola patients amid widespread fears of a possible outbreak of the deadly disease in Europe. Over 670 people have already been killed by the disease in West Africa with doctors struggling to control the epidemic.

A German hospital in Hamburg agreed to accept patients following a request from the World Health Organization (WHO), Deutsche Welle reports. Doctors assure that the utmost precautions will be taken to make sure the disease does not spread during treatment. The patients will be kept in an isolation ward behind several airlocks, and doctors and nurses will wear body suits with their own oxygen supplies that will be burned every three hours.

Will Ebola patients also soon be sent to hospitals in the United States?

And of course there are many other ways that Ebola could spread to this country.  For instance, all it would take would be for one infected person to get on one airplane and it could all be over.

Federal authorities seem to have been preparing for such an outbreak for quite a while.  As my good friend Mac Slavo has pointed out, “biological diagnostic systems” were distributed to National Guard units in all 50 states back in April…

The Department of Defense informed Congress that it has deployed biological diagnostic systems to National Guard support teams in all 50 states, according to a report published by the Committee on Armed Services. The report, published in April amid growing fears that the Ebola hemorrhagic fever virus might spread outside of West Africa, says that the portable systems are designed for “low probability, high consequence” scenarios.

Some 340 Joint Biological Agent Identification and Diagnostic System (JBAIDS) units have thus far been given to emergency response personnel. The systems are “rapid, reliable, and [provide] simultaneous identification of specific biological agents and pathogens,” says executive officer for the DOD’s Chemical and Biological Defense group Carmen J. Spencer.

Let us certainly hope for the best.

Let us hope that this latest outbreak fizzles out and that we won’t even be talking about this by the end of the year.

But experts are warning that if a major global pandemic does break out that millions upon millions of people could die.

If that happens, many people will go crazy with fear.

And we got just a little taste of some of the paranoia that an Ebola epidemic in America would create in Charlotte, North Carolina earlier this week…

A corridor of Carolinas Medical Center – Main’s Emergency Room was roped off on the first floor, near the entrance Wednesday.

A security guard was posted outside, to prevent anyone from crossing the line.

During a 4 p.m. press conference Katie Passaretti, who is an infectious disease specialist with CMC, said precautions were put into place when patient was brought in Tuesday night.  The patient was traveling from Africa and arrived at the hospital around 11:30 p.m.

Around 3 a.m. the security precautions were put into place at the hospital, Passaretti said.

Passaretti said they determined the patient did not have Ebola.  The patient has been discharged home.

It is not too hard to imagine forced quarantines and people being rounded up and shipped off to Ebola detention facilities.

In fact, if Ebola were to start spreading like wildfire in this country, many people would actually start demanding such measures.

For example, one member of Congress is already proposing that citizens of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone (and any foreigner that has recently visited those nations) be kept out of the United States…

In a letter addressed to Secretary of State John Kerry and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat, proposed that citizens of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, as well as “any foreign person who has visited one of these nations 90 days prior to arriving in the United States” be kept out of the country. He urged the secretaries to “consider the enhanced risk Ebola now presents to the American public”.

So what do you think about all of this?

What do you believe will happen if Ebola comes to America?

Please feel free to share what you think by posting a comment below…

The post This Is What Is Going To Happen If Ebola Comes To America appeared first on The Economic Collapse.