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" The other day\u2014Congressman Phil Gingrey who, with Paul Broun, makes up half of the Georgia-based legislative vaudeville act, Two Docs And A Crock\u2014sent a letter to the Centers For Disease Control, which happen to be in the general area of his district, warning that the children who have been coming through eight kinds of hell to get to this country might be little walking petri dishes, and that we better should watch out for that. As such, reports of illegal migrants carrying deadly diseases such as swine flu, dengue fever, Ebola virus and tuberculosis are particularly concerning. Wait. Whoa there, dear and glorious physician. How did we manage to crowbar Ebola onto that list? Unless some of these kids are swimming here from Sierra Leone, that&amp;#039;s one problem about which we don&amp;#039;t have to worry, since there never has been a case of Ebola&amp;#039;s breaking out anywhere but in Africa. But you can see what Gingrey&amp;#039;s doing here. He shoehorning Ebola onto his list of concerns about the Little Brown Ones (tm GHW Bush Enterprises, LLC) because a) he knows Americans are more aware of it than they are of, say, dengue fever, and b) because, alas, Ebola&amp;#039;s in the news because it&amp;#039;s running wild at the moment in west Africa, where it&amp;#039;s never broken out before. So congratulations to Phil Gingrey\u2014excuse me. DOCTOR Phil Gingrey\u2014has decided to use a medical crisis overseas to gin up politically expedient xenophobia over here. Extremely well-played, sir. The Ebola outbreak in west Africa is a genuinely awful story that has been genuinely underreported in the American press. And, while the people on the ground are confident the horror can be contained, the people who live in the areas where it&amp;#039;s going to be contained are going to die by the bushel for a while. Doctors Without Borders, the only aid organization that is treating infected people in West Africa, says, &amp;quot;The scale of the current Ebola epidemic is unprecedented in terms of geographical distribution, people infected and deaths.&amp;quot; According to the World Health Organization, this is the first time Ebola has been epidemic in urban areas since it was initially recognized in Zaire in 1976. That increases the likelihood that someone carrying the virus could travel to other parts of the world. The current outbreak, which began in March and affects Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, is also the first in all three countries. Doctors without Borders is warning of a real risk that the epidemic will spread beyond the 60 locations in which patients have already been identified. (I pause here to mention that, so far, the disease has not yet broken out in Mali, where there are French troops doing god-knows-what in the &amp;quot;war&amp;quot; on terror, but that the World Health Organization has put the country on alert.) Jagatic says Ebola &amp;quot;is not a very contagious disease and the reason it&amp;#039;s being spread in [West Africa] is because of cultural and behavioural practices.&amp;quot; As he explains, the body is most infectious at the time of death, &amp;quot;which is when they&amp;#039;re cleaning the body for the funeral and then people at the funeral touch the body, and then, while grieving, they&amp;#039;ll touch their faces, they&amp;#039;ll touch their mouths and noses&amp;quot; - the mucous membranes of the body from where the virus is transmitted. But this outbreak is different in that it has proven to be harder to contain than were previous ones. It has jumped countries with relative ease, travelling by bat, according to the epidemiologists. This is why what Gingrey said was so dangerous, not to mention indecent. Would anyone like to guess the reaction of the people to whom Gingrey is pitching this nonsense if it ever took hold in what passes for their minds? (Here&amp;#039;s NewsBusters, the wingnut-welfare rest home for aging tropes, passing along Gingrey&amp;#039;s bullshit, ably assisted by Larry Klayman&amp;#039;s terrarium for paranoids, Judicial Watch.) Hell, these are people who were ready to rumble merely at the sight of a schoolbus carrying immigrant children. Would anyone like to guess at the reaction of the anti-science faction of Wingnuttia if this nonsense ever took hold and doctors tried to tell people what hooey it actually was? Remember the scene in Jaws when the mayor says, &amp;quot;You say barracuda, and people say, &amp;#039;What?&amp;#039; You say &amp;#039;shark,&amp;#039; and we&amp;#039;ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth Of July.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s what we have here. You say &amp;quot;dengue fever,&amp;quot; and people say, &amp;quot;What?&amp;quot; You say, &amp;quot;Ebola,&amp;quot; and the hysteria goes red-zone. Which far too many of our politicians find advantageous. The idea that an elected official even would consider ginning up that kind of thing by appealing to the nativist ignorance of his audience is nearly beyond belief. That said elected official is a physician is an almost comical disgrace. That anyone anywhere would do it while people are dying unremarked in an authentically terrifying medical catastrophe, simply because his primary audience is made up of people who simply hate the undifferentiated brown people with whom they have to share the planet, makes Phil Gingrey an object of justified contempt. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a21189/diseased-minds/>