Thoughts on the Ebola Outbreak
by safeleo on August 21st, 2014, 7:54 pm
Alright, this is going to be a bit of a ramble here, but I wanted to have a serious discussion with people about this whole thing. So when the 2014 Ebola Outbreak hit, there was a lot of stuff about people freaking out (per usual, if the media so much as breaths the word "infection" there's going to be a panic) and I did write a couple of paragraphs on why I personally think Ebola is no threat to first world countries, and that it probably wouldn't spread much further in Africa either, depending on certain things. Anyway, after this whole cure came out and they helped the two Americans recover (I refuse to say that they cured them yet), I've seen a lot of people saying things along the lines of "oh, now that two white people get it you suddenly have the cure?" and "why didn't you give it to the Africans" and that kind of stuff. To my understanding, the company that made the test cure had only 5 doses, and the cure was previously untested. (I'm not talking about the blood transfusions going on in Africa, I'm talking about the supposed cure.) To be perfectly honest, the fact that we gave an untested cure to someone is more terrifying than Ebola it's self. Back in the 60s or 70s, I don't remember the exact period, there was a drug called Thalidomide that was meant to treat morning sickness in pregnant mothers. This drug was tested to the extent that the AMA required back then, and was distributed across the country. As it turned out, a weird side effect of this drug was severe deformities in children because of a slight variation in the molecule that made up the drug. That is what a tested drug could do, I can't imagine giving someone an experimental drug. It's kind of like playing russian roulette with a random number of bullets in the gun. Anyway, these are my thoughts on the whole thing, to be honest I think they gave the drug to the doctors first because they didn't want to make it look like they were abandoning Americans, and if something does happen to come up with the cure later on, they don't want to deal with the international backlash.