The politics of Ebola

For the unscrupulous right wing and for the liberal community as a whole, it's about immigration more than Ebola.

And immigration is about race and party advantage.

So don't expect the "activists" and the "committed" on either side to make much sense about this, ever.

How much sense did anyone make back in the 1980's when it was only AIDS, a disease that really was mostly a gay plague, factoring in prostitutes and intravenous drug users?

At that time, the overriding goal of absolutely everything any liberal ever said or did about AIDS was to advance the gay rights agenda and help destroy an American moral consensus that at that time still sent homosexuals to jail and viewed homosexuality with disgust and loathing.

Dealing with the disease itself was far from Job One.

I suppose if Ebola disease ever really got a beachhead in the US it would also mostly make its home among those groups.

But we already know it spreads more easily because its effects on the individual are much quicker and very messy, in terms of "bodily fluids."

And there continues suspicion that it can be airborne.

To the extent that it can it's a menace to all and a much greater menace.

And, unlike HIV, the virus seems to linger, potently, outside the body, for some unknown deadly length of time.

‘Don’t Touch the Walls!'

From this story, it appears nothing will stop this disease but absolute quarantine of very large regions of Africa.

Health workers can't arrest the disease by isolating the sick if the population in general and the sick in particular are going to refuse to cooperate.

The only alternative is to isolate the entire population - whole towns, whole cities, whole countries and regions.

Only troops could even make a good stab at this, trying to end travel to or from such potentially large areas of Africa within which the same methods that have so far been useless would doubtless continue, and continue to be largely useless.

I don't see it happening, anyway.

Really, white countries and international agencies using necessarily desperate and violent military methods to quarantine whole black African countries and leaving the black people inside the perimeters to just die off in huge numbers until the disease runs its course?

[Update. Black governments are doing it, themselves, in Africa, with the support of other black governments and, so far, no back-talk from outsiders.]

Meanwhile, the US and likely others are working hard to develop a vaccine.

There is still no vaccine for AIDS.

Will Ebola be an equally tough nut to crack?

CDC director: Scale of Ebola crisis unprecedented

From Yahoo News,

The next few weeks will be critical, said Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is sending more workers into the affected countries to help.

"It will be a long and hard fight," Frieden told a congressional committee Thursday.

In his prepared testimony, he estimated it would take at least three to six months to end the outbreak, under what he called a best-case scenario.

Nothing connected with this outbreak so far has been remotely like a "best case scenario," so you can scratch that one, right now.

A medical charity told the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee that the world was too slow to react to the crisis, until recent headlines about two American aid workers who became infected in Liberia and were flown to the U.S. for care.

"Ebola is out of control in West Africa, and we are starting to see panic now around the world," said Ken Isaacs, vice president at Samaritan's Purse.

Focus. He said "Out of control."

Frieden didn't rule out the possibility that a traveler could arrive in the U.S. unknowingly infected with Ebola. 

But he said he is confident there will not be a large Ebola outbreak here. 

The CDC has put hospitals on alert for symptoms and to check whether people are recent travelers so that they can promptly isolate any suspected cases until proper testing can be done.

He may have done all he can do, at this point.

But the situation is like the early days of the fictional plague described in Camus' novel.

Nobody is facing the hard questions about the spread of the disease in Africa and beyond, basically due to poverty on the one hand and populations as well as political leaders unwilling to take the necessary measures on the other.

And God only knows what our politics, domestic and international, will make of this, once it really hits the fan.

Look what our ridiculous politics have done to airport security measures since 9/11/2001.

And look what they did to AIDS, back in the day.

Reputedly, the Black Plague killed half of Germany.