2nd nurse's Ebola case may have been worse than thought

[Warren DeMontague]

24. Airline: CDC Warned 'Possibility' Ebola Nurse Had Symptoms on Plane

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ebola-virus-outbreak/airline-cdc-warned-possibility-ebola-nurse-had-symptoms-plane-n227046

I've said elsewhere, I think it's incredibly unlikely that anyone will get sick from her airport or other travels. Still, the whiff of CYA around some of this stuff is strong. They never should have greenlighted her to fly, certainly not AFTER Pham was diagnosed with ebola, like they did. Whoever came up with the idea that a potentially ebola-exposed individual was "fine" if their fever was 99.5 as opposed to 100.4, deserves to be fired.

I don't think it's surprising, or a coincidence, that the two people Duncan infected happened when his illness was far along, probably in the process of lifesaving heroic measures. I am definitely not interested in demonizing a health care worker who put her own life on the line for that guy. Ebola is most often transmitted when the prior patient is very sick, in the terminal stages of the illness... when the virus has begun converting the body, wholesale, into a puddle of trillions of copies of itself.

Each of those copies, of course, being incredibly infections, since ebola can be transmitted by a very small number of virons... which makes the new meme about how "ebola is ridiculously hard to catch" mind-boggling bullshit. It's easy to catch, if you happen to be unfortunate enough to be around the virus itself.

But demonizing or mocking people who might not want to share a bathroom or a plane aisle with someone the CDC has determined was "possibly symptomatic" with this thing... it's not cool.

And behind the overblown panic is the very real realization that this is a massively lethal, communicable pathogen, and one patient can cause a whole messload of havoc, even if our health systems can contain the secondary infections... witness the Patrick Sawyer situation in Nigeria, which was contained but only after 20+ more infections and some real nail-biting moments, particularly in Port Harcourt.

It's all the more reason why we should have suspended the travel visas for nationals of those 3 countries, until this is over, months ago, as Alan Grayson suggested. That would have prevented Duncan from coming to Texas in the first place.