<p>Nrdsb4, I am laughing at your dog. I can’t believe he knows how to turn off the TV and unplug the computer!</p>
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<p>Not to derail the thread, but so glad to know that HepC will be hugely a thing of the past within a few years thanks to new meds coming out this year and next. H has played an instrumental part in this, and I’m very proud!</p>
<p>That would be wonderful, @teriwtt. Kudos to your H and his colleagues!</p>
<p>Fantastic news, teriwtt, and you certainly should be proud of your husband!!</p>
<p>Yes, I was talking to my GI doctor last week about it (since she already had brochures about the new drugs in the exam room) and she told me she remembers as a new doc many years ago, the meds they had provided cures in about 10% of cases; then eventually that number went up to 30%, then 50%, so to have compounds that are showing 90-95% cure rates is phenomenal… lot better than liver transplants! It’s been a learning experience for me, too. </p>
<p>In the time that he has been working on this project, I have met one person and know another person who are HepC positive. In my little world of suburbia, I don’t get to meet many people who are at the highest risk, so hearing the stories of people who were infected and how difficult previous treatments were, has been enlightening.</p>
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<p>Can you provide some sources for these assertions? It would be helpful.</p>
<p>As regards compassion, it is not a zero sum game. These are human beings. I can feel compassion for all involved without needing to believe that any of them are perfect. No human is. </p>
<p>My sister’s best friend found that she is HepC positive, so I’ve been following the news with a lot of interest. Kudos to the team and your husband, Teri! The current testing guidelines are calling for people over 45 to get a HepC test. So… Most CC parents would need to be tested once:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.cdc.gov/hepatitis/HCV/1945-1965.htm”>http://www.cdc.gov/hepatitis/HCV/1945-1965.htm</a></p>
<p>No need to panic if the test results come back positive, it does not mean a person needs to take anti-HCV drugs. It means the person needs to be monitored for symptoms and be aware of HCV+ status.</p>
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<p>Yes, the timing is definitely interesting for people newly diagnosed in the last year or two. Some physicians are recommending those people hold off on treatment until the new drugs are available (if treatment is warranted at this point). One friend’s husband is at the point where he really needs a liver transplant, but now the question is, do you take the regimen of new drugs first, rid the body of the virus, or get the new liver in, then rid the body of the virus. Of course, each situation is different, but at least there are far more viable options at this time than there ever were. </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.liberianobserver.com/news/desperate-attempt-survive”>http://www.liberianobserver.com/news/desperate-attempt-survive</a></p>
<p>This one is notable for the reference to “female friends” in Liberia who are concerned due to their associations with him. None of this is at all surprising but the wedding stuff is just over the top. These people have a college age child together and no-one said anything about a wedding until people started questioning his motives for coming to this country.</p>
<p>Besides issues of humaneness which Consolation rightly mentions, all the focus on the Duncan family’s “worthiness” misses the point. Ebola was bound to find its way to the US one way or another, unless you assume that every system is perfectly designed and flawlessly implemented 100% of the time. This episode has shown us just how far away we are from perfection. Instead of debating whether the family should have been left to fend for themselves for 3 weeks, we should be discussing how to improve the woeful and disgraceful performance of the hospital and public health officials.</p>
<p>“This one is notable for the reference to “female friends” in Liberia who are concerned due to their associations with him. None of this is at all surprising but the wedding stuff is just over the top. These people have a college age child together and no-one said anything about a wedding until people started questioning his motives for coming to this country.”</p>
<p>Who knows! The Liberian article is so poorly written - it looks like it simply repeats chunks of newsfeed garbage from the US press… And the link to the right kills every little bit of credibility this source had for me.</p>
<p>Well, if the travel screening process relies on self-reporting then yes, this was entirely predictable.</p>
<p>@teriwtt Big, big thanks to all involved in new HepC treatments! </p>
<p>We have close family friends with an adopted 6th grader who is HepC positive from her birth mother. The family is deciding when to get the new treatments, whether to wait for new treatments or not. I am not well-informed about this, but gather that there are possible side effects, and that since she is asymptomatic but positive, there may be benefits to waiting. She does have to get regular liver biopsies, I believe.</p>
<p>Let us know if you start a new thread, since we are kind of derailing the Ebola one.</p>
<p>I feel very sorry for the family who is stuck in this mud, especially the kids. I have a feeling that will be ostracized by the community even after the passage of those infamous 21 days of quarantine.</p>
<p>I don’t fully understand the 4 people who are quarantined in an undisclosed location in a gated community and the other bunch who is self-quarantining in the neighborhood to a limited extent. It sounds like a rather large and random group of loosely connected people were all in and out of that apartment during the days in question.
Call me confused.</p>
<p>“According to the Associated Press, a reporter spoke with Louise Troh, the woman Duncan flew to America to be with. She learned about his change in medical condition from that reporter.”</p>
<p>This is also somewhat puzzling. You’d think she would be keeping up on his condition. idk.</p>
<p>How about this one:</p>
<p><a href=“What We Know About the Texas Ebola Case - ABC News”>http://abcnews.go.com/Health/texas-ebola-case/story?id=25962123</a></p>
<p>They repeat several times that his GF, whom his family refers to as his wife, traveled with him from Liberia. In an earlier report I read, friends in Liberia said that his son in the US was always trying to get him to come to the US to live. So apparently he ultimately decided to come, quitting his job. (He probably intended to marry his GF and apply for a resident visa once here. It is a not-uncommon thing, since getting an immigration visa while abroad is very, very difficult.)</p>
<p>The Liberian Observer article contains a lot of “information reaching” and “reports said” that do not cite sources. The name of the you pregnant woman who died is different from that given by the NYT. It talks about a 4 yr old boy being in the apartment, when everything else says he is 13. Big difference. Who are these women? What is their relationship to him? This is a very iffy story, which may or may not cast any light on the subject.</p>
<p>The CDC is finally fessing up that it (The CDC) and the US government in general were the causes of the Texas Ebola patient handling screw ups. </p>
<p>Texas was ready, but had to wait on US government instructions and permits, not Texas instructions and permits. </p>
<p>Pull Quote:</p>
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<p>But there is a missing science piece that the article does not mention - How waste is transported and disposed dictates how it is collected. And I bet that the clean-up could not begin until it was resolved exactly how the disposal should take place because how the clean-up is done determines which containers, solvents and disinfectants are used, as not all solvents etc. can be used in all disposal containers. There is way more to the delays than they are telling us. This is the too simple story. </p>
<p>And this is just the handling of the waste. Imagine the morass of conflicted FEDERAL regulations and protocols surrounding the handling of patients, quarantined people and the like. </p>
<p>This is the point I have been making all along. People are talking like the CDC and others in government know what they are doing with surety and even the CDC admits that the systems it had in place as of even TWO days ago were inadequate and in some places impossible to be followed. </p>
<p>The question is what else is inadequate about which they are not talking? There is definitely more to this issue, and this is why the lack of trust and cynicism of many people.</p>
<p><a href=“Ebola waste disposal has proven a thorny issue -CDC”>http://news.yahoo.com/ebola-waste-disposal-proven-thorny-issue-cdc-112658754.html</a></p>
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<p>Are you saying is that rats/mice may have a better immune system against Ebola and their physiology may not allow virus shedding as readily as human? Good to know.</p>
<p>Wow! Even more confusing! So did she, indeed, just come as well? Was she living here before and just went there to visit or came from there? In any case . . . as she is not actually his wife she would not get detailed updates I would imagine. Those would go to the official next of kin. </p>
<p>So in a nutshell . . . how many kids do they have together? Were kid(s) born in US or LIberia? Did he function as a “step-daddy” to the other woman in Liberia? That has me flummoxed as it was reported that this is his first visit to the US.</p>
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<p>Exactly. And I suggest that Mr. Duncan is not the only person in the world who would chose “lie and live” over “honest and dead.” So that’s a system that doesn’t work. The only thing that’s shocking is that we ever expected that it would.</p>