Originally published October 28 2014
Restricting 80% of air travel from Ebola-afflicted countries would give world three extra weeks to contain epidemic, says report
by Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
(NaturalNews) A scientific assessment published back in early September warned that, if air travel from West Africa wasn't restricted, Ebola would quickly spread across the globe. Using the Global Epidemic and Mobility Model to simulate incidence and seeding events for the disease, a team of international scientists determined that barring even just 80 percent of air travel from the affected countries would add an extra three weeks to the amount of time that the world has to contain the epidemic.
After calculating the number of people who travel by plane every day, the team integrated a special disease model that it used to generate a three-month forecast of Ebola spread. In the short term, researchers determined that the likelihood of Ebola spreading internationally was "small," though this has since occurred with the arrival of "patient zero" to Dallas, Texas, from Sierra Leone.
In the long term, however, it is basically inevitable that Ebola will spread outside the borders of West Africa, as it already has. If travel restrictions had been enacted early on, this scenario likely could have been avoided. But it now appears that containing the virus may be out of the question entirely, as the reproductive number in West Africa has exceeded 2.0 in some areas, and travel is still wide open.
"Unfortunately the modeled growth rate of the epidemic indicates that more aggressive implementation of the surveillance and containment policies have to be adopted," explained the authors of the assessment. "We have explored the scenario assuming an 80% airline traffic flow reduction to and from the West African region that provided evidence of a general time-delay of the distribution characterizing the probability of case importation of about three to four weeks."
Obama and CDC ignore science, say travel restrictions unnecessary
The scientists involved with this important research went to great lengths to make an honest assessment of how Ebola might spread, warning the world that restricting air travel was essential to mitigating the outbreak. And yet the agency responsible for protecting Americans, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), completely ignored these findings, as did the White House.
In response to petitions by a number of members of Congress to cut off air travel from West African countries affected by Ebola, the CDC recently announced that doing so isn't necessary. The agency even went so far as to claim that http://www.newsweek.com, as it would supposedly encourage West Africans to travel across land into the U.S.
The CDC obviously needs some geography lessons, as there is no way to walk from Africa to the U.S., unless, of course, you can walk on water. And Mexico has already made it abundantly clear that it has no intention of letting possible Ebola victims enter its own country, so that's not an option, either.
Both Obama and the CDC are making up ridiculous and completely illogical excuses at this point in a desperate attempt to avoid having to protect Americans from Ebola. Claiming that keeping Ebola in West Africa will somehow not keep Ebola in West Africa shows just how demented our leaders are, and even more how deluded the American public is to believe such inane lies.
"The concept that we should let... 1000 'Hot Zoners' into the US per week so that we can monitor the disease is stupefying," wrote one Newsweek commenter about the sociopathic tendencies of America's leaders to even suggest that a travel ban will somehow make the outbreak worse.
Learn all these details and more at the FREE online Pandemic Preparedness course at www.BioDefense.com
Sources:
http://currents.plos.org
http://www.newsweek.com
https://hotair.com
http://currents.plos.org
http://science.naturalnews.com
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