What Ebola Outbreak Would Look Like In U.S.

Doctor warns whole cities could be shut down

WND

LEO HOHMANN

According to a senior health fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, the world has no strategic plan to contain the worst Ebola outbreak in history while scientists are saying an outbreak on U.S. soil would require sweeping measures.

Total quarantine of cities or sections of infected cities and restrictions on air travel could be expected.

“We’re now in a perfect storm,” Laurie Garrett said in a CFR conference call Thursday in which she described the United Nations World Health Organization as “bankrupt” and drowning in debt. “There is no strategic plan for how this epidemic will be brought under control.”

The same term, “perfect storm,” was also used to describe the Ebola outbreak Thursday by the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, Dr. Tom Frieden, in testimony before Congress.

If the statements are true, each nation must come up with its own plan to protect its people.

In the United States, that job falls to the CDC in Atlanta. As Frieden testified Thursday, the CDC raised its emergency operations center to Level 1, the highest possible alert in an effort to better coordinate a CDC-organized surge of health professionals and equipment being rushed to West Africa in an effort to contain the Ebola outbreak.

Nearly 900 people have died of Ebola in four west African countries since February.

Frieden also told Congress that it’s “inevitable” that someone with Ebola will get on a plane and fly to the United States, risking an outbreak here.

If, or when, Ebola does show up in the United States, the only way to combat the virus is through strict quarantines, said Dr. Arthur Robinson, a biochemist with Oregon-based Doctors for Disaster Preparedness.

“I don’t want to contribute to scaring everybody but at the same time, you’re dealing with total quarantine,” Robinson said. “You might have to quarantine entire small cities. Hopefully that doesn’t happen but it could.”

Robinson, who stresses that he has no inside knowledge of the government’s plans other than what he’s already seen play out, says he doubts the United States would be adequately prepared for a major outbreak of Ebola on its soil.

“I’ve spoken to people who are experts on African diseases and they are not very sanguine about CDC’s ability to deal with things like this,” Robinson said. “Their experience in dealing with bacterial warfare is almost zero, but that’s almost what you have here.

“We know almost nothing, this is a world we’ve barely scratched the surface in,” he continued. “We are probably not prepared. We have nothing that stops a virus other than quarantine and hoping it dies out. It has its own DNA, a code that is also able to penetrate a living cell. The virus takes over the living cell. The cell pops and then those viruses infect other cells. But by itself it is inert. It has the DNA but it does not have the machinery to reproduce itself without a living cell (as its host).”

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Reposted with permission