It’s been a hell of a week. I’ve managed to piss off more people than I usually do in a year, and this from a guy who has a god-given talent for being irritating. Mrs. Left does not refer to me as “Shrek” for no reason (although my ears are similar and I do have an unusual fondness for donkeys). But perhaps being a pain in the ass has hidden benefits. I was overjoyed when last Friday’s Celebrities Behaving Badly garnered 68 hits, but yesterday Kibbitz Corner almost broke triple digits with 98 page views…and I didn’t include a single full frontal Kim Kardashian Istagram nude shot, so maybe folks are actually reading me (I like using “folks” ever since Obama admitted out loud that “We’ve tortured some folks“…the whole homey vibe makes waterboarding a lot easier to swallow, don’t you think?)
Before I directly address the topics in the title, let me cover an island of good news in what is otherwise a sea of sorrow: It was revealed today that billionaire author J.K. Rowling did one of the kindest and most selfless things I’ve heard of in a long time. Rowling sent a hand-written note in purple ink from Albus Dumbledore, a wand, an acceptance to Hogwarts, a list of school supplies and an autographed Harry Potter book to Cassidy Stay, the fifteen year-old girl who survived a home invasion gun attack in Texas that left her entire family dead last month. In a public appearance in Houston on July 12, Cassidy quoted Dumbledore from his speech at the opening of “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”: Happiness can be found even in the darkest times, if one only remembers to turn on the light. I, for one, found it refreshing to hear the victim of a recent tragedy drawing emotional and spiritual support from a more recent mythical character than the two millenia-old one usually invoked. Dumbledore has a lot of wisdom to impart, and he doesn’t threaten an eternity of torment from Dementors if you fail to believe in him.
About Ebola: Let me preface my remarks today by noting that I’m not a virologist or a microbiologist. When I was in med school, there was no course in epidemiology offered, and if they did have any electives in public health, I didn’t take them. Global epidemics originating out of African jungles, transmitted from primates to fruit bats and on to humans weren’t even a blip on the horizon in 1975, although Michael Crichton’s 1969 “Andromeda Strain” may have been a prescient foretelling of woes to come. No one had ever seen a case of AIDS, even if some may have gone undetected long before public awareness peaked in the 80’s. We were so innocent back then that when I was doing a third year med school rotation in the ER at Evanston Hospital and a patient came in with some strange sores on his penis, we had to pull out our textbooks and call in the dermatologist…we’d never before personally witnessed a case of genital herpes. In 2014 most sophomores at IU could make the diagnosis (sadly).
My point is that I’m no expert, I’m just an old doc with half a glass full of common sense…and I probably should be reassuring everyone about the skill of the CDC and the technological superiority of American medicine and the infinitesimally small statistical chance of any of us personally contracting Ebola. All of those things are true, and you can probably Google a Youtube video of Sanjay Gupta telling you exactly those things on CNN. Meanwhile, I also know that the CDC has raised its alert level for Ebola to “level 1 activation”, which, if it were Dubya’s old color code homeland security system, would be somewhere in the red area.
Two individuals I typically detest and revile have made some public statements for which they are receiving massive grief. Ann Coulter, writing about the missionary medical inclinations of Kent Brantley, questioned why he felt compelled to work with Ebola patients in Africa when he could have done just as much good staying here in the USA: “If he had provided health care for the uninsured editors, writers, videographers and pundits in Gotham and managed to open one set of eyes, he would have done more good than marinating himself in medieval diseases of the Third World.” In a similar fashion, Trump tweeted last week: “The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back. People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences!” Heartless? Selfish? Callous? Perhaps, but as my good friend Marcey likes to say, “Stop me when I’m lyin’.”
Here’s the truth of the matter. Kent Brantley and Nancy Writebol probably pose no risk to the general population. They truly are in the most secure isolation wing of any hospital anywhere on the planet. The isolation facilities at Emory University Hospital are specifically designed to house scientists who may have been exposed to smallpox or anthrax or Ebola or bugs being researched in the deepest bowels of the CDC that we’ve never heard of. And both Brantley and Writebol have been treated with the only vials in the world of some magic bullet that might actually have some effect on the deadly virus. It’s the people we haven’t heard of that should worry us. The fellow stopped at the airport in NYC ultimately tested negative for Ebola. But what about the next guy, the one who isn’t even feverish yet, the one whose plane lands in Baltimore or Bangor, and he goes on for the welcome home dinner in Little Rock? Could that happen? Yep.
BW
Kibbitz Corner 