Don’t Watch Cable News

gupta glassesIf you want to get scared keep cable news on all day. That’s my takeaway from a couple of days of doing just that! I’ve got the eebie jeebies over Ebola, or as it’s called in the Fox house, “The Ebola.”

That two health care professionals in bunny suits got infected seems totally Michael Crichton. Plausible fiction. But it’s real.

From here it looks like health care professionals were treating it too lightly. Dr. Nancy Snyderman, allegedly on voluntary quarantine, was ratted out for driving around her home in Princeton, NJ. Her quarantine is now mandatory.

And, as Crichton would have probably fictionalized for added drama, one of the two Ebola stricken nurses took two flights on jam-packed airliners. They’re petri dishes in the sky already. This is insult to injury.

I’m not an immunologist. I’m not a doctor. Take what I say with that admission.

We should have already figured out a cure. Maybe we already have in ZMapp–if there were any available.

Ebola is a nearly perfect disease to fight with genetically engineered drugs. Some people fight it off. Their blood has the answers.

ZMapp hasn’t been run through all the tests to be approved. It works flawlessly in monkeys. Human trials must be completed. Drugs have unforeseen side effects.

Beyond that, ZMapp takes time to produce. The drug is infused in growing tobacco leaves in a process is called “pharming.” This limits mass production.

This should have been done years ago, but it’s easy to not prepare for rare events.

Pandemics can happen. The last was the flu in 1918.

It infected 500 million people across the world, including remote Pacific islands and the Arctic, and killed 50 to 100 million of them—three to five percent of the world’s population—making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history. – Wikipedia

Today I worry about Ebola like I worry about a plane crash or car crash. All are possibilities, but remote.

In a week my opinion might change.