CDC director warns that Congo's Ebola outbreak may not be containable(washingtonpost.com) |
CDC director warns that Congo's Ebola outbreak may not be containable(washingtonpost.com) |
For Ebola particularly, WHO posts weekly updates. And a cursory look of the most recent posts paints an increasingly worrying situation.
[1] http://www.who.int/csr/don/archive/year/2018/en/ [2] https://www.cdc.gov/outbreaks/index.html
Just lists of most important tickets in a global todo list - because this would just rise to the top pretty quickly and make us rethink mid terms, Brexit and train delays.
Something that takes this concept and runs with it, taking both identifiable problems (Ebola outbreak) and solutions (do nothing, invade, stop subsidising petrol in that country)
I suspect that the equivalent of National Security Advisor in each major country does this. I guess what I want is to steal each of their daily briefing documents and make a combined one, and have it read out each day onthe daily news.
> Country becomes first to administer experimental vaccine without active outbreak of the deadly disease, in bid to protect 2,000 medics close to DRC border
> “In previous [Ebola] outbreaks, Uganda lost health workers, including the renowned Dr Matthew Lukwiya, as they cared for patients,” said Yonas Tegegn Woldemariam, WHO’s Uganda representative. “Scientists believe such invaluable lives would have been saved had a vaccine been in existence then.”
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/nov/06/u...
Short video about Dr. Lukwiya's story. He was on a sabbatical, but rushed back to provide aid, while others were running in panic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7LpjpuOvc8
> Merck's Jakub Simon, MD, MS, addressing a session at the American Society of Tropical Medicine's (ASTMH) annual meeting here, showed two charts tracking Ebola during this past spring's outbreak in the DRC's Equateur province and the subsequent one now raging in the North Kivu and Ituri provinces. In both, health workers on the ground have been using the Merck vaccine in a so-called ring vaccination strategy to contain the epidemic. Although not yet formally approved for marketing, the vaccine has been cleared for emergency use.
> In Equateur, immediately after vaccination began with the Merck product, the outbreak petered out.
> But the experience in North Kivu and Ituri has been quite different. Although new cases dropped significantly after vaccination began in early August, they never approached zero, and 2 months later they rocketed back to the level seen before vaccinations began.
Then there are the family and acquaintances who go to the hospital Emergency Room, because although they have no insurance, an Emergency facility is generally required to treat them.
On one hand, we have people who do not receive routine care, who only seek healthcare long after a point where early diagnosis or treatment would have been inexpensive.
On the other hand, we have people who use a military-grade triage center for flu symptoms.
Both situations are ruinously expensive. And continue to contribute to trillion-dollar government-budget shortfalls. To say nothing of the inevitable, preventable zombie apocalypse.
Those people are absolutely paying a cost; having to make healthcare decisions based on money, bad credit when you can’t pay the bill, job insecurity because you’re sick or injured, incessant (and often overtly insulting) debt collection calls/mail, and of course that perpetual gnawing anxiety that arises from knowing that all of these costs you’re paying for being poor are making you poorer.
I’m sorry you don’t like paying your deductible, though.
This is terribly misconstruing the facts. They get to go to ER treatement only, no midterm care. The problem is if they don’t pay, their credit record is heavily penalized. This may seem like nothing but for someone with out money or means it spells a quick down hill slide to homelessness. No problem =/= homeless
FYI the #1 cause of home foreclosures in the US is medical bills
When you're broke, you're broke. Just because you have health insurance doesn't mean you can afford to use it. I had better healthcare as a homeless person than as a massively indebted recent college grad with a health plan through work.
If you're referring to EMTALA requiring emergency rooms stabilize all patients, (1) EMTALA applies to everyone, and (2) EMTALA is not healthcare.
In case you don't know, one of the reasons that some chronically homeless people don't have healthcare is that many don't bother to get it. There's guy in my neighborhood that told me he hasn't gone (but probably should go) to our local government to get his $100-ish/month, food stamps, and healthcare. Also, he ends up in a local emergency room because someone calls an ambulance when he's drunk, passed, and shaking out on the sidewalk. I've called an ambulance a few times for people in that state myself. He also ends up in the emergency room because he routinely gets assaulted while sleeping on the street because there's are not enough shelters for him.
When we first met, my wife was still in school, and I had been working in computer stuff for about 10 years. I had good benefits, and thought that medical insurance was a solution to a big problem.
Then watched as my wife tried to get treated for some routine stuff. Not available via the campus clinic, and yet her student "insurance" was not accepted anywhere else within 150 miles without a "co-pay" that was larger than the cost for uninsured patients.
The situation only got worse when we were married later that year. My insurance would only apply after she had sought coverage through her school plan.
We called it "anti-insurance": a form of coverage that, when encountering actual insurance, annihilates it in a violent explosion of virtual particles and real paperwork.
Yeah. The system is fucked.
I believe you.