SL 623

~ Laura

The way that we care for old people in this country is sinful.

Learning from the past to fix the future.

Cool personal history – Murder in the Time Before Google

Want to buy Judy Blume’s house? 

Ebola is a disaster in places without Western medicine and health standards. This is a fiasco that could have been avoided. Shame.

Yeah, I’m not doing this.

Think you drink a lot? Well, some people put your glass of wine with dinner to shame.

Published by Laura

19 thoughts on “SL 623”

  3. I am skeptical about the top decile numbers. It would not surprise me if someone debunks them in the coming days.

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    1. I have known people, in the US, who regularly drank two six-packs of beer a day, or more. (I knew many more people in Russia who would regularly drink a bottle of vodka a day, maybe washing it down with beer, and who would not irregularly drink a couple of bottles of vodka.)

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    2. I don’t doubt the numbers. The prevalence of alcoholism in the U.S. is something like 8%. I’ve known more than a few people who are on the sweet side of the ten drinks a day line and still hold down jobs and such.

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  4. The top decile must be all alcoholics.

    Yes, and because they are such a big portion of sales, it has interesting and important effects on policy, I’m sure.

    Does it make sense that you can be in the 1st or 2nd or 3rd decile w/o drinking at all, or is that just an unfortunate way of saying that about 30% of people don’t drink at all? (It makes it sound like some people who don’t drink at all don’t drink even more [less?] than others.)

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    1. It’s probably less expensive than fresh fruits and vegetables if we’re talking about 10 cans of crappy 3.2 beer. It would be about $6 a day, unless you had taste buds. And if you started early and went slow, you would spend the whole day under the legal driving limit. Or could, if you were a 180 pound man.

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  6. I am not impressed with Nicholas Kristof’s article. Who is the “we” in his article? It seems like a knee-jerk criticism of some presidential/political priorities, but really ebola right now is happening simultaneously with some difficult international political times, with ISIS and also a resurgent Russia.

    If he’s talking about domestic American politics (the “we” presumably meaning Americans, rather than Westerners, rich countries, developed countries), as his final remarks indicate (fretting about semiliterate children in America and the lapses in vaccination — that’s not about Ebola), then he’s mixing a call to arms about Ebola with a critique of cuts in education spending at the national, state, and local levels and concern about the anti-vaccination crowd? That’s just bad, rhetorically.

    The Ebola crisis is horrific and it reflects extraordinary state weakness and poor medical infrastructure in Liberia and Sierra Leone. The international response also has shown the lack of systematic funding to the WHO, whose donation pool benefits more from private granting agencies as well as member states. It’s funding has been inadequate and the response has been necessarily anemic until individual states step in. But Kristof’s outrage that the disembodied “we” does very little to provide any insight into the source of the problem (which is not really Ebola as much as it is the lack of medical infrastructure and local understanding of disease transmission), and thus does not provide much more than outrage. Non-specialists can be forgiven for such a lapse; from Kristof, I expected more.

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    1. Good response about the root causes. Assigning blame to a generic “we” is never helpful (not particularly more helpful than assigning blame to a generic “you”).

      I am not an expert, but have generically been feeling like something is breaking down around international aid (though there, my lack of expertise especially shows in imagining a change) and that the current outbreak is the crisis mode of that break down. My kiddo was supposed to travel to Africa with her school (in fact, she would have been there now). The trip was cancelled after the ebola cases in Uganda and DRC, which are closer to the place they were visiting. In hearing about the response there (though the strain of the virus is also different), including statements from Uganda/DRC that they “know how to handle ebola outbreaks” (which first occurred in the DRC) there seems to be something different going on in Liberia/Sierra Leone.

      (Just looked at the CDC report, http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/history/chronology.html and, this is huge — there are more reported cases in this current outbreak than in all the previous outbreaks).

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      1. A big part of it is the disease has never been seen in West Africa before, and “fever, diarrhea, and vomiting” as early symptoms apply to at least dozens of diseases, many of which are endemic in West Africa. Mistreating an ebola case as malaria or lassa fever can cause lots of damage, and it’s a completely understandable thing to do if you’ve never seen ebola before and aren’t expecting it in the region. I’m also pretty sure Uganda has a much better healthcare system than the countries affected, which have some of the least developed healthcare systems in the world.

        Finally, my guess is smallness of the country and geographical proximity is a problem here? The DRC doesn’t necessarily have better healthcare, but it is large and most outbreaks have been in remote areas, so they die off before they can spread to urban areas. Here the outbreak started in a remote area, but since even the most remote area of a small country isn’t all that far from a major urban center, it takes a lot less for it to spread to a large population center.

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    2. Kristof said:

      “In Uganda, an excellent American-backed prevention initiative trained local health workers to recognize the virus and stop it from spreading, so, in 2011, an Ebola outbreak there stopped after just a single case.”

      You know what, I never heard of that success at the time.

      Is there a structural problem in the fact that if you do your job really well with regard to ebola (or other infectious disease) containment, no one will know that it needs doing?

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    3. I am not impressed with Nicholas Kristof’s article. Who is the “we” in his article? It seems like a knee-jerk criticism

      This can be repeated after nearly every Kristof column.

      from Kristof, I expected more.

      Eventually, one stops expecting such things from people like Kristof. He’s been a net negative for the paper for a long while, at least.

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  7. The West African countries are not American protectorates.

    Such opinion pieces scream hubris. Quarantine might have worked, but only at the start. At the start, there was no reason to suppose it would spread as it has. The virus might have mutated; not to become airborne, but a little bit easier to catch, a little bit more sticky on surfaces, something.

    There’s a question of scale. A 2 to 21 day incubation period, little education, and no functioning health system, is a tough combination. People who haven’t been taught the germ theory of disease aren’t going to behave in expected ways.

    I have the impression the early messaging to Western audiences attempted to keep people from worrying.

    I am impressed that someone was working on both Ebola vaccines and medical treatments before the current outbreak, when there was no market for the product. However, I read in a few months there will only be enough doses for 10,000. That’s probably not enough to protect hospital workers in the new hospitals in Liberia 10,000 divided by 70 hospitals, divided by three shifts, fewer than 5 vaccinated workers per shift. It’s very grim.

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    1. Quarantine might have worked, but only at the start. At the start, there was no reason to suppose it would spread as it has. The virus might have mutated; not to become airborne, but a little bit easier to catch, a little bit more sticky on surfaces, something.

      I think that’s wrong. At least, there have been believable warnings for many years about how Ebola would spread if it got a toe-hold. And I don’t think anything but a quarantine will work now. It just has to be a much, much bigger group quarantined than if you were doing it at the start.

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