Quotes

"Fascism and communism both promise "social welfare," "social justice," and "fairness" to justify authoritarian means and extensive arbitrary and discretionary governmental powers." - F. A. Hayek"

"Life is a Bungling process and in no way educational." in James M. Cain

Jean Giraudoux who first said, “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”

If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law. Sir Winston Churchill

"summum ius summa iniuria" ("More laws, more injustice.") Cicero

As Christopher Hitchens once put it, “The essence of tyranny is not iron law; it is capricious law.”

"Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." Ronald Reagan

"Law is where you buy it." Raymond Chandler

"Why did God make so many damn fools and Democrats?" Clarence Day

"If I feel like feeding squirrels to the nuts, this is the place for it." - Cluny Brown

"Oh, pshaw! When yu' can't have what you choose, yu' just choose what you have." Owen Wister "The Virginian"

Oscar Wilde said about the death scene in Little Nell, you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

Thomas More's definition of government as "a conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of a commonwealth.” ~ Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples

“Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.” ~ Jonathon Swift

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

This is Jonas Salk's Birthday- Now: The Hunt for an Ebola Vaccine

Jonas Salk, the man who discovered the polio vaccine, would have celebrated his 100th birthday today.

The possibility of 1.4 million cases in West Africa by January 2015 is scary, but it doesn't approach the 100 million deaths from the Spanish Flu in 1918-1920. I remember my father talking about it. He was a boy when he contracted it. His folks got it too. It seemed as if everyone in the world got it or was affected by it. Everyone wore surgical style masks when they were in public. My father's family survived, but they were lucky and his father was a physician. That may have helped.

Now there is Ebola. Certain strains have killed 90% of those whom were infected in Africa.

Keeping it from spreading to other continents is an imperative that is lost on our PC President and his Administration. m/r

The Hunt for an Ebola Vaccine by Paul Howard, City Journal 28 October 2014

We could have one by next year, but it may not be enough to stop the virus’s deadly spread.
The effort to contain the spread of Ebola through traditional infection-control measures in West Africa may fail. The nations suffering from the outbreak are poor, and their medical infrastructures are already strained past the breaking point. Many hospitals in Liberia lack even basics like gloves, soap, and bleach. Meanwhile, the American effort to build treatment units and train medical personnel in the region has been slow to launch and will likely get going too late to make a material difference in halting the spread of the virus. In a worst-case scenario, the Centers for Disease Control has predicted, there could be 1.4 million cases in West Africa by January 2015. To date, West Africa has seen nearly 10,000 cases of Ebola, with 5,477 fatalities, according to the World Health Organization. The CDC believes that those figures may be low; there may be two to three times as many infections as reported.
The American media has been obsessively focused on whether the United States should impose a ban on travel from the most severely affected countries. The problem with that idea is that a vast humanitarian disaster in West Africa would quickly spill over into other countries not affected by the American ban. An asymptomatic virus carrier could circumvent a ban by taking a plane from Liberia to Paris, say, and then Paris to the United States. A travel ban would likely push patients underground, too, limiting public-health authorities’ ability to track and treat the disease. There is simply no “zero contagion” policy possible for the United States. The real nightmare scenario for America would be if Ebola spreads to more globally connected, developing countries with public-health systems unequipped to deal with it. That would be a disaster for the global economy. And if the disease made the jump to Central America, a humanitarian disaster could unfold on our doorstep.
If the virus continues on its current trajectory, our best hope to stop it lies in the development of a successful vaccine. Vaccines against Ebola have been tested on macaque monkeys since the 1990s. After 9/11, the U.S.began investing heavily in Ebola research, concerned about the virus’s potential as a bioweapon. Various pieces of legislation, including Project BioShield in 2004 (reauthorized in 2013), and billions of federal dollars have been focused on financing the development and stockpiling of “medical countermeasures” against likely agents of bioterrorism—including hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola and Marburg.
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