This is like the way the human suffering after Katrina was overshadowed by the plight of some dogs. Here's something David Sedaris wrote about that:
People I know, people who had never before contributed to charity, emptied their pockets when a cocker spaniel was shown standing on a rooftop after Hurricane Katrina hit, eight months later. “What choice did I have?” they asked. “That poor little thing looked into the camera and penetrated my very soul.”
The eyes of the stranded grandmother, I noted, were not half as piercing. There she was, clinging to a chimney with her bra strap showing, and all anyone did was wonder if she had a dog. “I’d hate to think there’s a Scotty in her house, maybe trapped on the first floor. What’s the number of that canine-rescue agency?
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Dogs are like small children--we think of them as innocent, incapable of sin. It's also why a cinematic trope is a high human body count, while the dog survives.
But does this mean that Ebola can be passed from animals to humans and back? If so, what does this mean for our containment chances now?
A study of 337 dogs after the 2001-02 Ebola outbreak in Gabon found up to 25 percent of the dogs showed antibodies to the virus, a sign they had been infected. According to the AP, there are no documented cases of dogs spreading Ebola to humans.
That tells me all I need to know. Ebola can infect a Dog, and the canine immune system responds.
We don't know that dogs die from Ebola, but it seems certain to this layman that Dog saliva must contain virus.
Brando @ 7:31
Or as Mason Williams once noted,"Dogs are just dumb guys."
It's amazing how seemingly random images can set people off. ISIS is a crisis because of the beheading videos - not because of mass murder. The NFL has a violence problem because of the Ray Rice video, not because of a police blotter that goes back for decades. Now a panic over puppy dog eyes, not over hundreds (thousands?) of people dying a horrible death.
This is also why you don't have oral or anal sex with a dog without using a condom.
Well, beta, that at least solves the problem of the receptacles. BTW why don't they just empty them?
You take care of dogs. It's an insult to take care of people, mostly.
I heard about this, but our CDC is telling everyone they would be totally fine sitting next to an infected person on an airplane.
Dogs are like small children--we think of them as innocent, incapable of sin.
Indeed. As for Katrina, every human person in NOLA knew a hurricane was coming. Most of them decided not to leave, and to just hope for the best. Dogs didn't have a choice.
(Ebola is not the same thing as a hurricane at all and I have been following this story closely and hoping we would do more for months).
It's not just the dog itself. It's the fact that authorities have been downplaying the transmission risk and this seems so counter to that. If they are going to kill a woman's dog because it "might" have Ebola, it calls into question all their prior reassurances about how hard the virus is to transmit. It's bad symbolism. It makes them look like liars or incompetents.
Spain wants to kill a dog.
Are they planning on throwing it out a window?
Another reason to be a cat owner.
The way the human suffering of African-Americans was overshadowed by some dogs...A cute little blond girl goes missing and it's a national emergency. A Black child goes missing and it's "oh well, the Mom's a crack head". Like a child's degree of suffering is dependent on their skin color.
I remember as a kid watching one of those bad movies about killer bees attacking a bunch of people, and the family dog was running from the bees (I believe the director used styrofoam pellets to portray the bee attack), and my only thought was "I hope that dog gets away!"
"The way the human suffering of African-Americans was overshadowed by some dogs...A cute little blond girl goes missing and it's a national emergency. A Black child goes missing and it's "oh well, the Mom's a crack head". Like a child's degree of suffering is dependent on their skin color."
"African Americans"? I wasn't aware that the Liberians and other central Africans who have fallen victim to Ebola were Americans.
It's not a racial thing--people are far more sympathetic to animal victims than human victims. And the reason a handful of U.S. Ebola cases is going to resonate more with Americans than thousands of dead Africans is because it hits closer to home. Unfortunately, we have come to expect awful things befalling people in the Third World, much as we'd like those things to change we hold our own country to higher standards.
The first thing I thought was, "Jesus, the woman has a terrible disease and may die, and the first thing the government does is kill her dog???"
But does this mean that Ebola can be passed from animals to humans and back?
Oh yeah. That's been known for a long time. Ebola is not a human-only disease. If the dog has had the disease but no longer has it, then it's not dangerous, any more than a human who has survived Ebola is. You can't pass on the disease after it's run its course and you're no longer infectious.
The question is whether animal populations can serve as a reservoir for the disease, as they think fruit bats do in Africa. If it gets into a wild population and becomes self-sustaining then you'll never get rid of it completely. (Like the black death in the Southwest US - it's in the wild rodents there, and you get a case in a human occasionally.)
""African Americans"? I wasn't aware that the Liberians and other central Africans who have fallen victim to Ebola were Americans."
The reference was obviously to Katrina. C'mon man.
To suggest that race doesn't play a role in the level of sympathy felt/expressed by the general public, is grotesquely disingenuous. I'm not going to go full Crack, but please be honest with yourself.
I'm reminded of All Quiet on the Western Front, with days and months and years of human slaughter described, but the scene that cuts to your heart (and deliberately so, even the soldiers in the book are described as moved as they are not for the human suffering) is the horses screaming.
The question is whether animal populations can serve as a reservoir for the disease, as they think fruit bats do in Africa. If it gets into a wild population and becomes self-sustaining then you'll never get rid of it completely.
I think the main question for us is whether our north american animal populations can serve as a reservoir. It's quite clear they do in Africa, bats, chimpanzees, gorilla's I think...
BTW, if you anyone is interested in zoonosis, I just finished Spillover by David Quattlebaum and it was a pretty good overview.
WTF? They kill Toro for fun all the time.
The first thing I thought was, "Jesus, the woman has a terrible disease and may die, and the first thing the government does is kill her dog???"
"I'm from the government and I'm here to help!"
Brando,
Surely you meant to write, "People in the late stages of Western self-loathing are far more sympathetic to animal victims than human victims..."
To suggest that race doesn't play a role in the level of sympathy felt/expressed by the general public...
Exactly. If it were a Chocolate Lab set to be euthanized nobody would care.
I've seen pictures of her dog. It's not that cute. If it serves the interest of public health, it should be put down. It's not like it's a Lab. It would be wrong to kill a Lab.
To suggest that race doesn't play a role in the level of sympathy felt/expressed by the general public, is grotesquely disingenuous. I'm not going to go full Crack, but please be honest with yourself.
The only thing more ignored by the national media than a missing Black girl is any act of violence committed by a Black person against a White person.
broomhandle said...
To suggest that race doesn't play a role in the level of sympathy felt/expressed by the general public, is grotesquely disingenuous.
That works two ways:
Unarmed black "teen" killed by a cop (whom he attacked) = riots and national media attention for months or years.
Unarmed white "teen", who hadn't just robbed a store and didn't attack the black cop who killed him = who cares?
"To suggest that race doesn't play a role in the level of sympathy felt/expressed by the general public, is grotesquely disingenuous. I'm not going to go full Crack, but please be honest with yourself."
My mistake--I thought you were referring to the Ebola outbreak.
Race certainly plays a part, though it is tied into economic class. The general public assumes that blacks are poor (which they disproportionately are compared with whites in America), and all other assumptions flow from that. So when you read about two or three black people shot in West Baltimore over the weekend, it doesn't make big news--we expect such things in West Baltimore, and such things are sadly common. But a white person is found dead in fancy Fells Point, that makes headlines.
If a white girl goes missing, the reader often thinks "if someone I can relate to in a middle class suburb gets kidnapped, that could happen to my kid!" But if a black girl goes missing, the reader assumes (perhaps correctly, perhaps not) that the girl is from a poor neighborhood, and figures this is the sort of thing that normally happens there.
It also explains why the reaction to a black guy getting killed by a white guy gets more headlines than a black guy getting killed by another black guy. In the latter situation, the reader figures this is what poor people do to each other--it's sad, but to be expected, and we lower our standards for the poor. The former case sparks more interest and outrage, because society considers a white on black killing to be a rare occurrence.
Race plays a part in this, but it's the tying to economic class that explains it. And I'm not justifying those assumptions or reactions--tragedies are no less tragic because they happen to someone of a different race or social class.
"The only thing more ignored by the national media than a missing Black girl is any act of violence committed by a Black person against a White person"
"Unarmed black "teen" killed by a cop (whom he attacked) = riots and national media attention for months or years.
Unarmed white "teen", who hadn't just robbed a store and didn't attack the black cop who killed him = who cares?"
Both absolutely valid points, but neither invalidates my original statement.
To suggest that race doesn't play a role in the level of sympathy felt/expressed by the general public, is grotesquely disingenuous.
So lets use your logic:
Thousands of arabs being slaughtered in the middle east, but american blacks are all "Justice for Trayvon Martin! Justice for Mike Brown!". An Arab woman is set on fire and it's "oh well, she's just another raghead". Like her degree of suffering her dependent on her skin color.
ergo - blacks must hate arabs. Why are you such a racist? Why do you hate them?
That the game you want to play here?
Mr. Duncan has no died.
In related news, people on facebook seem to be unclear on the fact that there is no cure for Ebola.
now!
Yeah that's kinda funny. But as George Will points out, our compassion and obligation to domestic animals derives from the fact that they are chattel. We own them (both individually and as a species) and feel responsibility for them. They are helpless to take care of themselves in the modern world.
So there's a perfectly defensible reason we react differently to people in peril.
"ergo - blacks must hate arabs. Why are you such a racist? Why do you hate them?
That the game you want to play here?"
Nothing of the kind. And, frankly, that's a bizarre stretch.
I'm guessing (and it's just a guess) that the point of Althouse's post is the tendency of some people to feel more compassion for animals than they do for their fellow human beings. That's an understandable feeling in some instances. I certainly feel more more compassion for the pit bull, trained and goaded into viciousness, than I do for the piece of shit that made him that way. I also recognize that that's a morally nebulous, and un-Christian, feeling to have.
Send animals to be euthanized in PETA "shelters".
Send humans to be aborted in Planned Parenthood "clinics".
Harvest their embryonic, fetal, and adult cells for stem cell therapy.
people on facebook seem to be unclear on the fact that there is no cure for Ebola.
People on FB are unclear about a lot of things.
Ebola is not always a fatal disease. I've not read enough yet to see what helps you survive it.
Brando said...
"African Americans"? I wasn't aware that the Liberians and other central Africans who have fallen victim to Ebola were Americans.
Picking a nit here, but Liberia was a US colony populated by freed slaves who dominated the majority native populations. Perhaps they are American-Africans? They called themselves Americo Liberians.
Sierra Leone and The Ivory Coast likewise.
"The ebola story that really gets people's attention.
Spain wants to kill a dog."
Because whites are so good on focussing on the important stuff.
Justice for blacks here? No need to discuss it further.
A dog in Spain who might be put down?
Front page news anywhere whites gather to be "informed",...
Ebola is not always a fatal disease. I've not read enough yet to see what helps you survive it.
I'm well aware it's not always fatal, just often. Odds will probably improve in hospitals that aren't overwhelmed, or the virus may be less deadly now.
As for what helps you survive, I believe are IV fluids are the only definate answer. Everything else has been experimental cures and the n isn't big enough to say for sure. Proper research with controls is hard to do right now.
MadisonMan: From my reading on Ebola it seems to me that in the post-incubation "break-out" stage of the disease, what actually causes the most disastrous damage is the patient's own immune system, creating a cytokine storm in a desperate all-out response to destroy the viral invasion. An analogy, though inexact, would be the anaphylactic response of a patient with an allergy to bee stings. There is a theory (theory only, I stress) that the "cytokine storm" response might have been the reason for the disproportionate number of deaths among the younger, healthier patient population during the Spanish Influenza epidemic -- that is, older patients with immune responses somewhat impaired by age and children, whose immune responses were not fully developed, could not produce such a desperate, focused response -- the response being itself the actual cause of death. If the worst stages can be headed off early by keeping the patient fed & hydrated, staving off a drastic internal reaction, maybe survival goes up. And perhaps a slightly immune-impaired patient might have somewhat better survival odds, if the cytokine-storm theory is correct. FWIW.
"Picking a nit here, but Liberia was a US colony populated by freed slaves who dominated the majority native populations. Perhaps they are American-Africans? They called themselves Americo Liberians.
Sierra Leone and The Ivory Coast likewise."
I wasn't aware that the freed slaves outnumbered hte local population--I guess I would call them "African-American-Africans" then!
"I'm well aware it's not always fatal, just often. Odds will probably improve in hospitals that aren't overwhelmed, or the virus may be less deadly now.
As for what helps you survive, I believe are IV fluids are the only definate answer. Everything else has been experimental cures and the n isn't big enough to say for sure. Proper research with controls is hard to do right now."
From what I hear, it's not airborne, so it should be easy to contain compared with something like the flu. What I'm wondering is if this disease can mutate and become airborne, or become resistant to whatever drugs we have on hand.
Also FWIW, and speaking as a sloppily sentimental dog lover, the most horrifyingly stupid aspect of the kill-and-incinerate-the-dog concept is that they would be literally sending up in smoke the most immediate laboratory testing opportunity possible. Unless the dog is actually shown to be a repository for Ebola, let it stay in quarantine with the husband and be tested along with him at regular intervals. If it develops Ebola, isolate, test, go from there. If it forms antibodies, isolate, test, go from there. If it dies of Ebola, you have an initial suspicion that dogs are not likely to form a local repository for Ebola, unlike fruit bats in Africa, which apparently can live with cargoes of live virus. But kill and burn the dog at the outset, and you lose every chance you might have had to learn something, and that is So. Effing. Stupid. I cannot even describe the level of stupid that endorses that decision.
Shanna, Brando: FYI -- the strain of Ebola in play here is E. Zaire, with a general mortality rate of >60%. It has shown no indication of attenuation. There are other versions of slightly lower mortality rates which have had outbreaks in the past since the mid-70s, but they have stayed confined to Central Africa. (The only known exception, E. Reston, is believed to originate in the Philippines and has not -- yet -- made the jump to infecting humans, only other primates.) The treatment issue is staving off various forms of shock and organ failure: maintaining critical hydration and electrolyte levels, nutrition, etc., without which the brain and various organ systems shut down and death ensues. The problem is, for many, by the time you are fully symptomatic realistically maintenance treatment is probably too late to accomplish recovery absent other factors.
They did kill the dog. In case you were in any doubt.
"
But does this mean that Ebola can be passed from animals to humans and back?"
That is one theory of the origin but I don't think fruit bats or monkeys are as appealing. I would like to know if it is transmissible between dogs and human.
"To suggest that race doesn't play a role in the level of sympathy felt/expressed by the general public, is grotesquely disingenuous. I'm not going to go full Crack, but please be honest with yourself."
It's not race, broom, it's the volume of incidents in black America and the fact that blacks resist the usual police efforts to control crime. It now seems to be the fashion for the mothers of black thugs to protest the innocence of their sons even in the face of video surveillance, like Michael Brown. The sympathy meter has dropped close to zero.
Please believe me that Ferguson MO and the crazy efforts to indict that cop are making white America pissed.
Michael -- that's the question, innit? No one seems to have absolute answers, except in some strange, uncomforting circumstances. Fruit bats, we are told, "seem to be" reservoirs, holding the virus but not contracting it, capable (they believe) of passing it on through droppings contacting or consumed by primates who then contract the disease. The meat of both bats and primates, consumed by man, can communicate Ebola. The difference is that apes tend to die with Ebola in their systems, bats don't.
In lab experiments I gather pigs have been infected with Ebola, but I believe that like humans, if they don't die they recover and become asymptomatic after being contagious while sick. If my recollection of accounts of the Gabon paper are correct (don't count on it) dogs (they THINK -- this was NOT a lab study, they were looking at street dogs which had probably been eating contaminated garbage) can develop antibodies to the disease and are asymptomatic. They do not function as a reservoir species, like bats, otherwise Central Africa would have been emptied of dogs. There is NO evidence of a dog acquiring Ebola through proximity with a symptomatic human. Such evidence in the Spanish case would have been astonishing and invaluable -- but, of course, they couldn't bear not to be seen doing Something, even if it was the wrongest thing possible. So they did it, and made that poor woman's horrific experience just that much more horrific. Because they could.
The only circumstance where Ebola has been known to jump from an animal to human without physical contact (like meat consumption or touch) is E. Reston, where the virus from some infected primates was, on testing, found in the blood of two employees of the primate facility. What makes E. Reston unique is that while it infects and kills monkeys, in humans it has no known effect. After a period of time the blood of the men ceased testing positive for the virus
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