Sick Of This

I'm getting tired of posting stuff about Ebola, but as long as obama fails to keep the country safe by banning, or at least quarantining, people from Ebola-infested regions, stories like this one will continue to pop up.

The potential spread of Ebola into Central and Southern America is a real possibility, the commander of U.S. Southern Command told an audience at the National Defense University here yesterday.

“By the end of the year, there’s supposed to be 1.4 million people infected with Ebola and 62 percent of them dying, according to the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention],” Marine Corps Gen. John F. Kelly said. “That’s horrific. And there is no way we can keep Ebola [contained] in West Africa.”

If it comes to the Western Hemisphere, many countries have little ability to deal with an outbreak of the disease, the general said.

“So, much like West Africa, it will rage for a period of time,” Kelly said.

This is a particularly possible scenario if the disease gets to Haiti or Central America, he said. If the disease gets to countries like Guatemala, Honduras or El Salvador, it will cause a panic and people will flee the region, the general said.

“If it breaks out, it’s literally, ‘Katie bar the door,’ and there will be mass migration into the United States,” Kelly said. “They will run away from Ebola, or if they suspect they are infected, they will try to get to the United States for treatment.”

Also, transnational criminal networks smuggle people and those people can be carrying Ebola, the general said. Kelly spoke of visiting the border of Costa Rica and Nicaragua with U.S. embassy personnel. At that time, a group of men “were waiting in line to pass into Nicaragua and then on their way north,” he recalled.

“The embassy person walked over and asked who they were and they told him they were from Liberia and they had been on the road about a week,” Kelly continued. “They met up with the network in Trinidad and now they were on their way to the United States -- illegally, of course.”

Those men, he said, “could have made it to New York City and still be within the incubation period for Ebola.”

Kelly said his command is in close contact with U.S. Africa Command to see what works and what does not as it prepares for a possible outbreak in the area of operations.

Many thanks to General Kelly for saying out loud what many people with common sense are thinking. It'll be interesting to see what happens to his career trajectory after the obama administration realizes he is not parroting the party line.

And if the possibility of 'innocent' infected people flooding across our border isn't bad enough, there's the possibility of deliberate acts of bio-terrorism.

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria terrorists may use “carriers” to spread the Ebola virus as part of a low-tech biological terror tactic, according to national security and health experts.

Capt. Al Shimkus, a retired professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, told Forbes that ISIS/ISIL fanatics may infect themselves with the Ebola virus to use it as a suicide bio-weapon against the West. Shimkus says that the Islamic State terrorists wouldn’t even have to “isolate” the virus, but instead could send a few operatives into an Ebola outbreak region and intentionally expose themselves to the rampant virus.

Several experts say this is a “plausible theory,” because ISIS fighters could contract the virus and then openly travel to Western countries to spread Ebola as part of a suicide mission...

“In some ways it’s a plausible theory – IS fighters believe in suicide and this is a potential job for a suicide mission,” Professor Anthony Glees, the Director at Buckingham University’s Center for Security and Intelligence Studies, told Forbes. “They are sufficiently murderous and well-informed to consider it, and they know that we’ve been remiss in the UK.”

In May 2013, Amanda Teckman, author of the paper “The Bioterrorist Threat of Ebola in East Africa and Implications For Global Health and Security,” wrote that “The threat of an Ebola bioterrorist attack in East Africa is a global health and security concern, and should not be ignored.”

Rest assured, though, that American workers will rally to protect us from such threats ... or maybe not.

Airplane cabin cleaning crews at New York’s LaGuardia International Airport began a 24-hour strike on Wednesday, citing, in part, possible exposure to the Ebola virus.

 Around 200 Air Serv employees who work on domestic flights to LaGuardia began their strike on Wednesday evening. The group is seeking to unionize, and they said health and safety issues on the job - including exposure to blood, feces, and vomit without protective gear - are the main reasons. They are also concerned about possible exposure to the Ebola virus, which claimed its first victim in the United States on Wednesday.

“The whole country is shivering, worried about the problems of Ebola,” said Hector Figueroa, President of 32BJ Service Employees International Union, according to CBS New York.

“Airport workers are on the front line of protecting the public, to protect the public we have to protect the workers.”

Cabin cleaners per plane at LaGuardia have been reduced by up to half, and the time to clean planes has been cut down to as little as five minutes, workers said, as reported by CBS New York.

Sigh ... back to Granddad's remedy for everything...