Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, or How Not To Fight Ebola



Just as Robert Frost showed in "Good Fences Make Good Neighbors" that the opposite of the title was true, America has seen policies proposed that would make fighting Ebola more difficult.
In the last couple of years we have seen the Republican congress cut the amount of money going to the Center for Disease Control. This same mindset resulted in the Presby Hospital in Texas having the most infected medical personnel in the world, outside of Africa.
Now the same Republicans want to stop air traffic between the African Countries and America, a decision that has been decried by every expert on infectious disease. You need to move personnel in to fight the disease. Rick Perry, whose state supported hospital bungled their Ebola treatment, is calling for such a ban.
Republican Sen.Rand Paul, who believe it or not has an MD, is against our sending troops to Liberia to build treatment centers, because he believes these troops will come back and infect America.
There is much happening that also shows the underside of America. A volunteer who was in Africa to fight Ebola voluntarily quarantined himself for 21 days just to be extra precautious . His neighbors responded on social media to mobilize to burn his house down, which thankfully was prevented.
Because across the country K-12 education has been severely dumb downed, we have a nation that doesn't have any idea about how to look at infectious disease. If America dissolves into a group of no-nothings, we can blame the teachers' unions for being more concerned with protecting incompetents than actually educating our youth. This won't be the last crisis abetted and confused by an ill informed electorate.

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