<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" There&amp;#039;s been a lot of understandable contempt directed at the anti-vaccination crowd in this country because of the latter&amp;#039;s efforts to bring back Diseases Of The 19th Century as a regular American miniseries. Meanwhile, around the world, diseases are kicking our ass. In Saudi Arabia, there&amp;#039;s an outbreak of what is being called Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, a deadly coronavirus similar to SARS. It&amp;#039;s also apparently spreading around the world; cases are turning up as far away as Malaysia and Indonesia. There have been 350 cases and more than 100 deaths reported worldwide from the virus, although the World Health Organization (WHO) has laboratory-confirmed only 254 cases with 93 deaths. Most of the reported infections have come from Middle East countries including Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. While public health experts have been tracking the disease for nearly two years, in recent weeks health officials are reporting a sharp rise in cases. The WHO reported at least 78 confirmed cases since the beginning of the year, and that diagnosed cases sharply increased in mid-March. Apparently, the disease begins in the camel population and then spreads to humans. It also appears to be spread by human-to-human contact, as many of the victims are health-care workers who are working with MERS patients. &amp;quot;The younger animals have the virus and become infected and become little virus factories,&amp;quot; said Lipkin, who explained that camels are extremely common in Saudi Arabia and surrounding countries. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s almost like dogs in the U.S. Except they eat the camels ... there&amp;#039;s so much opportunity,&amp;quot; for the virus to spread, he said. Elsewhere, there&amp;#039;s a massive Ebola outbreak in west Africa that already has killed over 100 people and is still spreading. There are several theories explaining the outbreak, Africa&amp;#039;s worst in seven years and the first to kill in the continent&amp;#039;s west. One was published last week in the New England Journal that established &amp;quot;the emergence of a new EBOV strain in Guinea,&amp;quot; which had &amp;quot;evolved in parallel&amp;quot; to other disease veins. Our political system, of course, is not in any way prepared for what might happen if one of these little lovelies hops a plane to LAX or somewhere. Sequestration, that brilliant idea meant to force &amp;quot;hard choices&amp;quot; on the government, beat hell out of the Centers For Disease Control. The budget agreement struck by Senator Patty Murray and Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, didn&amp;#039;t improve things very much. Meanwhile, microbes march on. The anti-vaccination crowd aren&amp;#039;t the only people whistling past the graveyard. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a20748/mers-and-whooping-cough-record-levels-042814/>