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Old 10-02-2014, 05:34 PM   #26
Mercutio
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No-one would argue that nutrition is completely impossible below the poverty line but it functionally is.
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Old 10-03-2014, 09:23 AM   #27
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From a personal anecdote, poverty and nutrition is a delicate balance. Nutrition is hard to come by during poverty, and when a cumulative disadvantage further stratifies your choices it becomes even harder. In Florida we do not have Trader's Joe or an abudant location with local farmers to go to. Walmart or Publix were the choices. Publix had the quality needed with organic products and freshness. Walmart had better pricing. When I used to make my weekly budget I have to constantly compare my receipts from previous weeks or months to see where I can save a penny or two. I had the privilege and the burden all at once to combine the budget of two people and compartmentalize that for a nutritious meal for two people. Coupons were allies where Publix would have a two for one deal or Walmart accepting competitor coupons. The difficult part was ensuring that the meal was not only nutritious, but that it was also tasteful. My partner is very particular with food, and very unhelpful in that regard. More often than not, repeating the same meal more than twice was a burden on the both of us. The most difficult part of the budget was following a vegetarian diet. We tried for a good year, but we found ourselves short several times because of the cost barrier. There is also the problem that vegetables rot quickly. As two university students, shopping for vegetables more than once a week became problematic. Our last ditch effort was shopping for everything Friday night, and spending Saturday morning cooking most of it. We would freeze it over and that worked for a while.

With life circumstances obstructing the way, we both became depressed and our past economic standing only added to it. My partner was worse off as his depression in combination with his lack of a drive to eat, he dropped from a healthy range of 140 pounds to 115 pounds. He is not that tall, so you could you image how his bone structure began to show. I went through a similar weight reduction, but I was ten pounds out of my desired weight range. It has been a over a year later after we dropped our strictly vegetarian diet and he has managed to float around 123-129 pounds. I have yo-yoing gaining ten pounds, losing five, gaining five, and so on. Poverty is a struggle. Our consolidation is the future that we are attempting to build, and our hopes that it is all worth it in the end of what will be our beginning after we graduate.
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Old 10-03-2014, 11:21 AM   #28
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Vegetarianism tends to not be a good idea, yeah. Especially if you're a picky eater who wouldn't be happy living off of a heavily restricted meal plan like "ok we get canned beans for a week."

Honestly you sound like you're really making it work despite your situation, and I respect that. Good luck!
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Old 11-01-2014, 05:08 AM   #29
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This thread is stupid let's change it!

"Hunger kills more people than Ebola but isn't considered a problem because rich people can't die of it."

Discuss.
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Old 11-01-2014, 07:49 AM   #30
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First, it is definitely considered a problem by many non-hungry members of society.

Second, the assertion is overly narrow. Rather than limit it to rich people only, the assertion would carry more weight if it included the middle class (almost none of whom go hungry) and even parts of the poor class (who likewise do not go hungry, whether because of lifestyle choices and capabilities or whether because of assistance from friends, family, and/or the government).

Third, Ebola requires a cure we do not yet have. Hunger requires not so much scientific solutions as social and economic ones. Example: first-world demand for quinoa as a novelty grain resulting in third-world farmers selling their quinoa to the first world at the expense of their very own people. Example: the United States produces enough corn to feed several nations but pours that corn into the bellies of livestock and automobiles instead. This is not to say that the war on hunger doesn't also benefit from scientific advancement: just that while Ebola has no cure, hunger already has a cure scientifically but that cure is held up by social and economic factors.

Not a complete answer / rebuttal / weighing in. Just three thoughts that come to mind.
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Old 11-01-2014, 02:33 PM   #31
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Rich people would find it quite hard to die of ebola. It is treated like other diseases like cholera or influenza, which also cause diarrhea. Dehydration kills. IV fluids prevent dehydration.

Not only that, but Ebola has not actually killed enough to outpace "people killed by atomic bombs" or "people killed by 9/11" either. Should we also be worried about those? Car crashes, vending machines, and falling down in the bathtub have also killed more people than Ebola has.

The issue with Ebola is that it is perniviously deadly for poor and disease ridden people, not to mention that you can catch it from eating poor people food.

The only reason people are afraid of Ebola is because of misleading statistics and the novelty of it. Privilege doesn't even begin to enter into it, as much as your massively charged and accusatory question suggests otherwise.
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Old 11-01-2014, 03:57 PM   #32
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Unless I'm mistaken Shuckle, I'm pretty sure Ebola also causes hemorrhagic fevers. If it was just as simple to treat as "drunk fluids" like cholera it wouldn't be a problem.

And what the fuck is poor people food?
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Old 11-01-2014, 04:06 PM   #33
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You are grossly misinformed about the world's most famous Biosafety Level 4 virus.

Quote:
Four of the five known ebolaviruses, including EBOV, cause a severe and often fatal hemorrhagic fever in humans and other mammals, known as Ebola virus disease (EVD).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_disease
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ensis_path.svg

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Replication of the virus in monocytes triggers the release of high levels of inflammatory chemical signals.

Endothelial cells (cells lining the inside of blood vessels), macrophages, monocytes and liver cells are the main targets of infection. Macrophages are the first cells infected with the virus, and this infection results in cellular death. Endothelial cells may be infected within 3 days after exposure to the virus. The breakdown of endothelial cells leading to vascular injury can be attributed to EBOV glycoproteins. The widespread hemorrhage that occurs in affected people causes edema and hypovolemic shock.
Translation into lay terms: the cells that line your blood vessels die; you bleed internally; and you bleed internally so badly that you go into shock and die.

This isn't something you can just magically combat with fluids like with diarrhea. You absolutely do try to keep the patient hydrated, but there isn't much they can do when their liver fails within days and their body, for lack of competent vascular linings, becomes a giant blood sponge. Some patients are placed on dialysis because their kidneys go to shit. Have you ever had a case of diarrhea do that to you before?

The lowest estimate I see on the mortality rate is 25%. I grew up being told it was 90%, and I see that estimates have since been revised to an average of 50%. Imagine if your next case of diarrhea came with a 50% chance of survival. That's insane. For comparison, typhoid fever kills between 10% and 30% of untreated patients, and 1% even with treatment. The mortality rate of listeriosis is assessed as 20-30% and is treated so seriously that when there's even a single cantaloupe-related outbreak the entire susceptible stock nationwide is destroyed. And Hantavirus in the American southwest produces a pulmonary disease with a mortality rate of 38%. "It is often fatal despite mechanical ventilation and intervention with potent diuretics." And Ebola still manages to have a fatality rate of on average 50%. Acting like Ebola isn't a big deal because "lol dehydration" is not right. The reason it's not a big deal mostly is because the only means of transmission currently in this country are so rare. If it ever made the vector jump from African fruit bats to an American species of bat, bird, or other animal, we'd start caring a whole lot more.
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Old 11-01-2014, 09:00 PM   #34
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Ebola mortality depends on the strain. Some are relatively tame and may have low rates like 50%. But once you step into territory like Ebola Zaire, you're looking at high rates like 75 to 90%, Ebola Zaire itself being a 90% lethal virus.
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Old 11-01-2014, 10:12 PM   #35
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The Ebola episode plaguing West Africa at the moment has a kill rate of, last I checked, 70%. Of course, we have to keep in mind that this is kindof an inflated number if we're considering how it affects us, because the developed world has significantly better health care than West Africa. Still a not nice number. The United States is currently 7/8 as a survival rate for patients we treated, with another active case who will likely push it to 8/9.

And Myles, a 50% mortality rate isn't low or tame relative to anything.
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Old 11-01-2014, 10:45 PM   #36
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Originally Posted by Stealthy View Post
The United States is currently 7/8 as a survival rate for patients we treated, with another active case who will likely push it to 8/9.
It's important to note that this is also not sustainable in the long term on a large scale. The handful of patients you indicate have been so few in number and so high profile (medically speaking, not in terms of societal influence) that they have been both 1) afforded and 2) been able to be afforded the very best that American medicine can buy. If we had a genuine epidemic in a small city (pop. between 75,000 and 250,000) that engulfed 5-10% or more of the people who lived there, I'm pretty sure you'd start seeing mortality rates that neared the 50% marker. Quoting straight off of the WHO website:

Quote:
Supportive care-rehydration with oral or intravenous fluids- and treatment of specific symptoms, improves survival. There is as yet no proven treatment available for EVD.
It's not as though the shiny waxed floors and pristine white walls of an American mega-hospital are going to do anything more for you than a West African hospital. Both can manage oral and intravenous hydration. Both can administer antipyretics. Both can offer emotional support to the patient. If there were some state-of-the-art surgery, synthetic valve, or drug that could only be administered in the US, then sure. The closest thing we do in fact have to that are the trial vaccines being looked at with increasing urgency. Aside from that -- in my admitted never-been-to-a-West-African-hospital ignorance -- I don't think there's a significant difference between what we can offer and what they can offer aside from the general "better facilities," "better staff," etc. For this specific disease, mind. I'm not saying all hospitals are equal for all things. Just that we're all about equally fucked when it comes to Ebola.

To offer a specific example, the case of acute renal failure and the urgent need to place the patient on dialysis. As easily done as said when you only have a net influx of 2 to 3 cases more than you'd have expected that particular week. Outright impossible if your community is suddenly flooded with patients who have lost renal function because a virus decided to make all of their endothelial cells go *SPLUT*. There simply wouldn't be enough machines to go around. And what about the replacement kidneys? Where are all of the short-term survivors supposed to get their replacement kidneys from? Not enough donors even for the diabetics and other renal failure patients on the waiting list. Now you want to add thousands of Ebola patients to that waiting list as well?

Long story short, it's easy to keep a patient alive when, because the eyes of the world are upon you, you become willing to mobilize all of your efforts to keep that one person alive against all odds. It's much less easy when one person becomes one thousand -- at just your hospital alone, never mind the dozens of other hospitals around the country facing similar problems.

Long story short Take 2, it's easy to dismiss West African hospitals as part of the problem behind the high mortality in West African cases of EVD when they're the ones who have to put up with the floods of infected patients and not us.
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Old 11-03-2014, 12:09 AM   #37
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Ebola isn't going to be able to become big enough in this country in order for any hospital to have to try and take on a thousand ebola patients at one time though, not only because of our superior health care, but because we have safe and sanitary water supplies unlike the afflicted West African nations which make it quite a bit harder for ebola to spread or even get started in this country. What we are seeing now with a handful of cases at a time popping up in a certain locale because somebody coming back from West Africa brought the disease back to the country and decided that they didn't need to self quarantine is going to continue to be the case in the future, it may grow somewhat, but nightmare scenarios of hospitals flooded with hundreds or thousands of ebola patients isn't going to happen barring something catastrophic.
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Old 11-03-2014, 11:40 AM   #38
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Talon, the difference is in the patients. Americans typically don't have 2 or 3 other diseases or parasites alongside Ebola. It's rare that an American will have even one. It's mostly due to that clean water thing Deh mentioned.

Also, Americans tend not to consume things with Ebola in them. The only thing I could see as problematic if Ebola got into it would be fish because Sushi is pretty popular. Every other meat Americans eat is cooked and thus Ebola-free. Contrast to Africa where cases appear out of nowhere because hunger is such a major problem that people have to eat the fruit bats. Contrast to Africa where "Ebola lives in fruit bats don't eat them" is not common knowledge and cannot be easily told to the kinds of people who would be eating fruit bats.

Also, Americans tend to not bury their dead directly. West Africans often handle the burials of their family members, which means coming into contact with all kinds of bodily fluids, which means infection.

And, Talon, let's not forget that the wealthy nation of Nigeria was able to pretty quickly eradicate its Ebola outbreak, while the poorer nations like Liberia still struggle with the disease. Wealthier nation, higher quality health care, better education, etc. It's right next door to the Ebola nations, too. America thinks it's going to have a pandemic alert? Not likely!
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Old 11-03-2014, 12:19 PM   #39
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Differences between patients: grossly medically ignorant to think that Americans have only 0-1 diseases at a time. "That's Aaron, the diabetic! All he has is diabetes. Everything else is perfect with him." "There's Kenny, the guy with high cholesterol! But don't worry! He doesn't have aaaaaaaaaaaaaaany other diseases on top of that." Ridiculous. You've learned some neat trivia about parasitology and are grossly misapplying it here to Ebola. There is no medical evidence which suggests that Europeans and North Americans are health-wise more likely to survive Ebola than West Africans are. The number of people of non-African descent and who do not reside in Africa to have ever contracted the disease worldwide remains less than a hundred. For all intents and purposes, you have absolutely nothing to work with here statistically. You may as well conjecture that Americans are robust against filariasis or trypanosomiasis for similar reasons to the ones you've put forth for Ebola.

Argument from consumption: This has absolutely nothing to do with your foolish claim that Ebola is all about the dehydration, that it is as easily treated as cholera or as easily survived as the flu. It's also not how Ebola is typically spread, be it from animals to people or be it from people to people. So it's just utterly, utterly irrelevant.

Argument from burial rites: Again, this has nothing to do with your ignorant belief that Americans will mightily survive Ebola once contracted. You're distracting with arguments about how/why Americans are unlikely to get the disease in the first place, but I never argued otherwise and this has nothing at all to do with your ignorant claims about what threats the disease presents to those who have it.

Argument from Nigeria: Here you go. The lack of an Ebola epidemic in Nigeria this year has nothing to do with Nigeria's "superior medical science". Medicine -- in the sense of IV fluids, Harvard-trained doctors, and the best hospital equipment money can buy -- didn't factor into the story at all. Common sense, not bowing down to political threats, and isolating the patient did. Ebola isn't tiny in Nigeria right now because it broke out there but got its ass kicked by medical science: Ebola is tiny in Nigeria right now because the one opportunity it had to break out there this year was curbed by quarantine, the most rudimentary, inexpensive "medical action" one could ever take in combating infectious disease. Also reported here, the state dispatched medical workers to monitor 18,000 (and later 898) suspected cases ... but all they did was monitor their temperatures and watch for telltale signs of the disease. To act like ooooooonly Nigeria can do this from a medical science perspective is ridiculous. As the article correctly points out, insofar as Nigeria succeeded where Guinea, Lagos, and Liberia failed, it had much more to do with bureaucracy, with how the government mobilizes responses to suspected outbreaks, and had nothing at all to do with how skilled the doctors were, how amazing Nigeria's medical supplies were, how state-of-the-art their hospitals were, etc.
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