Tuesday, September 30, 2014


News Clips For The Day


Secret Service Problems

http://news.yahoo.com/fence-jumper-ran-much-main-floor-white-house-212405509.html

Fence-jumper ran through much of main floor of White House: report
Reuters
September 29, 2014

The man who breached security at the White House this month overpowered a U.S. Secret Service officer and ran through much of the main floor, penetrating farther into the building than previously disclosed, the Washington Post reported on Monday, citing three people familiar with the incident.

A Secret Service official who spoke on condition of anonymity said an alarm box near the front entrance of the White House had been muted, the Post said.

“The Secret Service has no comment on that at this time due to the ongoing investigation,” Brian Leary, a spokesman for the agency, said of the Post story. A White House spokesman declined comment.

The suspect, Omar Gonzalez, 42, was charged with unlawfully entering a restricted building or grounds while carrying a deadly or dangerous weapon. Officials said he was carrying a knife when he jumped the White House fence and entered the executive mansion on Sept. 19.

A prosecutor said in court last week that officers found more than 800 rounds of ammunition, two hatchets and a machete in Gonzalez' car.

Gonzalez, a decorated Iraq war veteran, had been arrested in July with a sniper rifle and a map on which the executive mansion was marked, the prosecutor said.

The Post said Gonzalez ran past a guard immediately inside the door, past the stairway leading up to the Obama family's living quarters and into the East Room, where he was tackled at the far end of the room by an agent.

The alarm box near the entrance, designed to alert guards to an intruder, had been muted at what officers believe was the request of the usher's office, the Post said, citing the Secret Service official.

The officer posted inside the door appeared to be delayed in learning the intruder was about to come through, the Post said. Officers are trained to lock the front door immediately if they learn of an intruder on the grounds.

Secret Service Director Julia Pierson is expected to face questioning at a congressional committee hearing on Tuesday.

(Writing by Jim Loney; Editing by Peter Cooney)



Fence-jumper made it farther in White House than Secret Service let on
CBS NEWS September 29, 2014, 4:33 PM

...

The man, 42-year-old Omar J. Gonzalez, ran unobstructed for 70 yards across the front lawn of the White House before entering through the North Portico. On the way, he brushed by a Secret Service officer with a drawn gun, sources tell CBS News' Bill Plante.

Gonzalez then proceeded to run through the entrance hall to the cross hall of the White House, past the staircase that leads up to the first family's residence. He was confronted by a female Secret Service agent, who he overpowered, and made it all the way to the East Room, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, told CBS News, citing whistleblowers. Gonzalez was brought down by a door leading to the Green Room, a parlor adjacent to the East Room, which is used for formal events including bill signings, press conferences, receptions and ceremonies.

...

The agency declined to comment, citing an ongoing investigation into the incident. The White House says the results of the review will "further enhance" security.

"He had just gotten inside the door [of the North Portico] . . . And was then wrestled to the ground by one of the Secret Service personnel . . . in the foyer," former Secret Service Director W. Ralph Basham, told CBS News, explaining his understanding of the apprehension. Basham spoke with current director, Pierson, as recently as this weekend.

Basham said that he believed "as soon as the individual got in the door . . . he was apprehended by one person."

The major security breach occurred Sept. 19, just minutes after President Obama, his daughters and one of their friends boarded the presidential helicopter for a weekend getaway to Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland. The first lady had traveled there separately. It prompted the Secret Service to erect a second fence about 12 feet further away from the White House than the permanent fence, creating second barrier that would-be fence jumpers would have to climb.

Officials originally argued the reason agents didn't shoot the suspect, Omar Gonzalez, as he sprinted across the lawn or release guard dogs to detain him was because he appeared unarmed.

The revelations will only heighten concerns about an agency that has had several high-profile security failures in recent years. On Sunday, the Washington Post reported that it took agents four days to realize a man had fired bullets that struck the White House in 2011.

...

"I don't see people being held accountable and I don't see changes that make the security situation better, so part of [the hearing] is to discuss the perimeter at the White House but I think the problems are much deeper seated than that," Chaffetz, a member of the committee, told CBS News Sunday. "There are other incidents that we might talk about but we're also going to reach back during her tenure to review what has happened and not happened."



http://fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/RL34603.pdf

Congressional Research Service
The U.S. Secret Service: History and Missions
Shawn Reese
Analyst in Emergency Management and Homeland Security Policy
June 18, 2014

In March 2003, the U.S. Secret Service was transferred from the Department of the Treasury to the Department of Homeland Security. Prior to enactment of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (P.L. 107-296), the U.S. Secret Service had been part of the Treasury Department for over 100 years. Since the September 2001 terrorist attacks, there have been consistent and continuing questions concerning the U.S. Secret Service. Are the two missions of the Service compatible and how should they be prioritized? Is the Department of Homeland Security the most appropriate organizational and administrative location for the Secret Service?

These, and other policy issues such as the Secret Service’s role in securing presidential inaugurations, have been raised and addressed at different times by Congress and various administrations during the long history of the Service. Additionally, there has been increased interest in the Service due to the inaugural security operations and the protection of President Barack Obama.

Some may contend that these and other questions call for renewed attention given the recent increase in demand for the Service’s protection function (for example, see P.L. 110-326 enacted by the 110th Congress) and the advent of new technology used in financial crimes. Numerous pieces of legislation related to the Service have been introduced and enacted by the 113th Congress, with all of the enacted legislation being appropriation bills.

Introduced in the 113th Congress, H.R. 1121, Cyber Privacy Fortification Act of 2013; H.R. 1468, SECURE IT; S. 1193, Data Security and Breach Notification Act of 2013; and S. 1897, Personal Data Privacy and Security Act of 2014 are related to personal data privacy and security, and confidential informant security. This report discusses these issues and will be updated when congressional or executive branch actions warrant.




This second news article dated today is largely a repetition of yesterday's so I only clipped the most salient parts. One article in the last few days quoted an official as saying that security has been less effective since the Secret Service was moved from the Treasury Department to Homeland Security in 2003. I personally think there have been several other problems with Homeland Security, especially the failure of FEMA during Katrina. It seems to me that when they set up Homeland Security they simply put too many different functions within it, so that they aren't able to do any of them as well as they should. I don't blame all this on Obama, and I don't want him to take too many hits over this issue, but I have to agree that the "service" of the Secret Service needs to improve.

First, I would like to know why the alarm box had been muted. I'll bet that won't happen anymore. Second, the guard at the door wasn't very alert or the runner wouldn't have gotten through the door -- which should not have been unlocked -- and then managed to get so far ahead of him, even if he was sprinting very fast. The door guard was armed, but he didn't shoot. A female agent tried to intercept him, but she was overpowered. Luckily another agent spotted him and tackled him to the floor.

I'm glad Gonzalez wasn't shot. They need to talk to him to investigate his connections, to see if he had anything to do with any conspiracy group. The picture of Gonzalez looked like he is a thoroughly frightened man. I can't help wondering what he was going to do with the 800 rounds of ammunition, machete and two hatchets, or why he left them in his car. He apparently had no accomplice. I don't think he was a very coherent person in his planning – very likely schizophrenic. I'll clip further articles as they appear.





Half the world's wildlife gone over last 40 years
By ELIENE AUGENBRAUN CBS NEWS
September 30, 2014, 6:00 AM

The world has lost 52 percent of its biodiversity since 1970, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) announced in a study released today on the state of our planet.

According to the Living Planet Report 2014, "the number of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish across the globe is, on average, about half the size it was 40 years ago. This is a much bigger decrease than has been reported previously, as a result of a new methodology which aims to be more representative of global biodiversity."

Scientists studied trends in more than 10,000 populations of 3,038 mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian and fish species and calculated a "Living Planet Index" (LPI) that measures the health of species in various environments and regions. While the LPI in temperate regions declined by a worrisome 36 percent from 1970 to 2010, in tropical climates the index dropped 56 percent. Latin American biodiversity took the biggest hit globally, plummeting 83 percent.

Jon Hoekstra, chief scientist at WWF, broke it down another way: "39 percent of terrestrial wildlife gone, 39 percent of marine wildlife gone, 76 percent of freshwater wildlife gone -- all in the past 40 years."

The toll was greatest in low-income countries. High-income countries showed a 10 percent increase in biodiversity. However, less affluent parts of the world more than canceled that out. Middle-income countries lost 18 percent of their wildlife populations, while low-income countries showed a 58 percent decline.

And the bad news does not end there.

WWF reports that the global human population already exceeds our planet's biocapacity -- the amount of biologically productive land and sea that is available to produce the resources we rely on for food, fuel, building and other needs, and that is needed to absorb the amount of carbon dioxide we generate. Indeed, it would take the equivalent of 1.5 Earths of biocapacity to meet our current demands, the report says.

The problem may get worse as more of the world adopts or aspires to the levels of consumption common in richer countries. "If all people on the planet had the Footprint of the average resident of Qatar, we would need 4.8 planets," the report says. "If we lived the lifestyle of a typical resident of the USA, we would need 3.9 planets.

The Global Footprint Network, a WWF partner, calculates the balance between each country's demand and capacity to arrive at a figure it calls the Ecological Footprint. In an email to CBS News, Hoekstra explained that the Footprint relies on publicly available data and is generated for each nation annually. The findings are expressed in units called global hectares, a measurement of land with the average level of biological productivity. The planet currently has a biocapacity of 1.7 global hectares per person; the Footprint exceeded that level in 91 out of 152 countries studied.

Worldwide, our Ecological Footprint decreased by 3 percent between 2008 and 2009, mostly due to a lower demand for fossil fuels, WWF reports. However, the latest figures available from 2010 show the Footprint resuming an upward trend.

Just two countries account for a third of the the world's total Ecological Footprint: China, at 19 percent, and the United States, with nearly 14 percent.

"High-income countries use five times the ecological resources of low-income countries, but low income countries are suffering the greatest ecosystem losses," Keya Chatterjee, WWF's senior director of footprint said in a press release. "In effect, wealthy nations are outsourcing resource depletion."

To counteract these trends, WWF recommends a number of steps: focusing more on sustainable development, using resources more efficiently, incorporating environmental factors into measures of economic growth, and increasing efforts to protect natural habitats around the world. Carter Roberts, president and CEO of WWF, warned, "We're gradually destroying our planet's ability to support our way of life. But we already have the knowledge and tools to avoid the worst predictions. We all live on a finite planet and its time we started acting within those limits."




“Scientists studied trends in more than 10,000 populations of 3,038 mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian and fish species and calculated a "Living Planet Index" (LPI) that measures the health of species in various environments and regions. While the LPI in temperate regions declined by a worrisome 36 percent from 1970 to 2010, in tropical climates the index dropped 56 percent. Latin American biodiversity took the biggest hit globally, plummeting 83 percent.... Jon Hoekstra, chief scientist at WWF, broke it down another way: '39 percent of terrestrial wildlife gone, 39 percent of marine wildlife gone, 76 percent of freshwater wildlife gone -- all in the past 40 years.' The toll was greatest in low-income countries. High-income countries showed a 10 percent increase in biodiversity. However, less affluent parts of the world more than canceled that out. Middle-income countries lost 18 percent of their wildlife populations, while low-income countries showed a 58 percent decline.... WWF reports that the global human population already exceeds our planet's biocapacity -- the amount of biologically productive land and sea that is available to produce the resources we rely on for food, fuel, building and other needs, and that is needed to absorb the amount of carbon dioxide we generate. Indeed, it would take the equivalent of 1.5 Earths of biocapacity to meet our current demands, the report says....

“Worldwide, our Ecological Footprint decreased by 3 percent between 2008 and 2009, mostly due to a lower demand for fossil fuels, WWF reports. However, the latest figures available from 2010 show the Footprint resuming an upward trend.” What were we doing right in these two years to achieve a lower consumption of fossil fuel? Could it simply be that in that period of economic mini-depression people had less money for gasoline, heating oil and coal, or that businesses retracted their operations due to the financial squeeze?

What do we need to do to help our “ecological footprint” – just what we already know about, but find so hard to enforce, especially with Republicans ruling the Congress and blocking ecological bills – “using resources more efficiently, incorporating environmental factors into measures of economic growth, and increasing efforts to protect natural habitats around the world...” We could stop cutting down the rain forests and other forest land and draining swamps. Build houses of some other material besides wood, stop removing animal habitat to produce more agricultural land, ban the killing of certain species for “bush meat” and capture poachers. One item mentioned about intrigued me – the fact that fresh water wildlife has disappeared much faster than marine species. Could the combination of building dams that restrict the free flow of rivers and the pollution of fresh waters by industrial plants and mining operations (coal and gold, particularly) be the causes?





Hong Kong protesters play chicken with China
CBS NEWS September 30, 2014, 7:01 AM

HONG KONG -- Hong Kong's leader has told thousands of protesters in the city's streets that the central government in China will not meet their demands by backing away from a decision to limit voting reforms, but as CBS News' Seth Doane reports, the protesters aren't backing down either.

Instead of dispersing as their government has requested, protesters were replenishing supplies Tuesday morning, and there was a sense that they intended to stay for a while. In fact, says Doane, with China poised to celebrate its big "National Day" holiday on Wednesday, crowds were only expected to grow in a show of defiance.

Tens of thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators have been digging-in for days, and while they are are taking a more peaceful tone -- with some even singing in the streets -- they're also getting more specific: setting an October 1 deadline for democratic reforms, and demanding that Hong Kong's Beijing-backed chief executive step down.

For now, it doesn't look like they'll get their wish.

"The central government will not comply to illegal threats," Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying said Tuesday.

Protesters have vowed to remain united. In a show of solidarity overnight, thousands waved glowing cell phones in a sort of electronic vigil.

These have been the most significant protests since Hong Kong was handed over to Chinese rule from the British in 1997.

Over the weekend, police in riot gear used tear gasto try to disperse crowds, but the heavy-handed response may have only encouraged others to join.

"I watched the news and I saw the tear gas and I think the police had gone too far," said one man who decided to take to the streets.

"We are not armed, we are not using violence. We are just sitting on the street, we are hands-up," lamented another protester. "We only use umbrellas to defend against tear gas and pepper spray."

All those umbrellas prompted a nickname for the movement: "The Umbrella Revolution."

At the core, the demonstrators want the right to directly elect their new "chief executive" in 2017. Beijng's communist government has decreed, however, that only candidates vetted by a committee filled with Beijing loyalists will be permitted on the ballot.

Many in Hong Kong see that as reneging on the deal agreed with Beijing when Hong Kong was handed over. The arrangement was dubbed "One Country, Two Systems," and was meant to grant Hong Kong some degree of political freedom from the mainland, but the limits of that system are being sharply tested.

The scenes playing out in Hong Kong's streets now are leading some to draw comparisons to another student-led, pro-democracy protest in china; 25 years ago in the infamous Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Of course, there are a number of differences. Hong Kong has a robust media, so pictures of the demonstrations have spread around the world in real time. Very few of the images are making it to mainland China, however, where Instagram has become just the latest social media outlet blocked by government censors.

The difference in news coverage of the protests between Hong Kong and mainland China is striking: one Hong Kong newspaper's headline on Tuesday reads simply, "Democracy." An article in Beijing's China Daily newspaper, however, never even mentions "democracy," and talks instead only about snarled traffic, canceled bus routes, and the stock market being down.




“Tens of thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators have been digging-in for days, and while they are are taking a more peaceful tone -- with some even singing in the streets -- they're also getting more specific: setting an October 1 deadline for democratic reforms, and demanding that Hong Kong's Beijing-backed chief executive step down. For now, it doesn't look like they'll get their wish. 'The central government will not comply to illegal threats,' Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying said Tuesday.... 'We are not armed, we are not using violence. We are just sitting on the street, we are hands-up,' lamented another protester. 'We only use umbrellas to defend against tear gas and pepper spray.' All those umbrellas prompted a nickname for the movement: 'The Umbrella Revolution.' At the core, the demonstrators want the right to directly elect their new 'chief executive' in 2017. Beijng's communist government has decreed, however, that only candidates vetted by a committee filled with Beijing loyalists will be permitted on the ballot.... The difference in news coverage of the protests between Hong Kong and mainland China is striking: one Hong Kong newspaper's headline on Tuesday reads simply, 'Democracy.' An article in Beijing's China Daily newspaper, however, never even mentions 'democracy,' and talks instead only about snarled traffic, canceled bus routes, and the stock market being down.”

I have an interesting total of two people in China, sometimes a few more, who are regularly reading my news blog. They are probably more likely to be in Hong kong rather than beijing, I suppose. I imagine that they may be starved for outside news sources, and that the Chinese government doesn't even know about this blog. Actually, the only way to find it now is to, first, be on Google as your search engine, and then type in “Lucy Warner blog.” Some months back I could find it by entering the simple word “news”. That was probably the time period when I acquired most of my audience, as I am hardly a well-known personality.

It does please me to see that, even if there are only a few in each country, I am reaching people in a pretty wide range of nations, mainly in the US but also in some dozen other nations tabulated on the basis of a week. At times Ukraine had the highest readership of between a dozen and twenty; for a while Russia had a comparable amount, likewise Malaysia, and more recently Turkey, France, Germany and Romania. I am so glad to see that people in China are rebelling against this unfair reneging on China's promises as they took Taiwan over from Britain, even if the rebels should fail in their effort. It shows the persistence of the human spirit. There is no doubt in my mind that the freedom to think, then speak what we think, is basic to human happiness. Living under an enforced "moral order" such as Confucianism seems to be, and being threatened as children by the harsh saying about the "nail that sticks up" is crushing to individualism. Of course, that is the goal, after all. Such people are much easier to rule.





http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/acting-classes-could-help-kids-with-autism/?WT.mc_id=SA_googleplus_sciam

Acting Classes Could Help Kids with Autism
Aug 14, 2014 |By Simon Makin

Kids with autism may learn valuable social skills in drama-based therapies


Science and the arts have never made easy bedfellows, but three projects that unite psychology and theater could help treat autistic spectrum disorders (ASD). The skills developed in drama training closely correspond with three of the main impairments seen in autism: social interaction, communication and flexibility of imagination.

One drama-based intervention is the SENSE Theatre project, which aims to help children with ASD improve their social skills. “I knew from experience that acting can have a profound impact on how we interact with others,” says Blythe A. Corbett, a psychiatrist at Vanderbilt University and former actor, who started SENSE in 2009. “It can facilitate more flexible thinking and behavior.”

So far the SENSE project has run two summer camps that served as pilot studies. The camps begin with improvisation and role-playing games, move on to scripted sessions and culminate in the performance of a play. Corbett's team measured social perception and interaction skills before and after the camps. The children showed increases in social awareness and memory for faces after camp, as reported in Autism Researchearlier this year.

Similarly encouraging pilot studies have come from two other groups. The Shakespeare and Autism project, a collaboration between Kelly Hunter, a British actress with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Marc J. Tassé, an expert in developmental disabilities at Ohio State University, and their colleagues, uses drama games based on scenes from William Shakespeare's plays and the rhythm of iambic pentameter to implicitly teach social skills. And Imagining Autism, led by drama professors Nicola Shaughnessy and Melissa Trimingham, both at the University of Kent in England, is a weekly program for kids with autism that incorporates performance, puppetry and interactive digital elements.

None of these studies has compared the youngsters in drama with a group who did not get the intervention, so they cannot yet rule out other explanations, such as natural development over time. The SENSE and Shakespeare teams are now nearing completion of more rigorous studies that compare participants with kids who were wait-listed. Only time and scientific testing will tell if these methods work, but the existence of three independent groups, all claiming encouraging preliminary results, suggests they may be on to something.

This article was originally published with the title "Theater as Therapy."



"One drama-based intervention is the SENSE Theatre project, which aims to help children with ASD improve their social skills. “I knew from experience that acting can have a profound impact on how we interact with others,” says Blythe A. Corbett, a psychiatrist at Vanderbilt University and former actor, who started SENSE in 2009. “It can facilitate more flexible thinking and behavior.”... Corbett's team measured social perception and interaction skills before and after the camps. The children showed increases in social awareness and memory for faces after camp, as reported in Autism Researchearlier this year.... Similarly encouraging pilot studies have come from two other groups. The Shakespeare and Autism project, a collaboration between Kelly Hunter, a British actress with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Marc J. Tassé, an expert in developmental disabilities at Ohio State University, and their colleagues, uses drama games based on scenes from William Shakespeare's plays and the rhythm of iambic pentameter to implicitly teach social skills. And Imagining Autism, led by drama professors Nicola Shaughnessy and Melissa Trimingham, both at the University of Kent in England, is a weekly program for kids with autism that incorporates performance, puppetry and interactive digital elements.... The SENSE and Shakespeare teams are now nearing completion of more rigorous studies that compare participants with kids who were wait-listed. Only time and scientific testing will tell if these methods work, but the existence of three independent groups, all claiming encouraging preliminary results, suggests they may be on to something."

This article states that "rigorous" testing with comparison to children who did not get the drama therapy has not yet been done, but preliminary results are "encouraging." I am impressed by these studies, and I have dabbled enough with drama, art, poetry and music to know that those things "open" my mind in a way studying names and dates for a history class just doesn't. Music and art therapy have been used in treating other mental health problems with good results. Poetry is another art form that opens my mind also, as I seek in tangential ways to discover the meaning of a poem. Old fashioned poems aren't hard to understand, but modern poetry is like abstract art. Some people hate it, but I like it much more than heavily rhymed and rhythmical verse. The old poems are often telling a story, while the new poems usually are shorter and describe a feeling, a thought, or something visual. This explains why a good imagination makes anyone seem more "intelligent," than someone who depends totally on their "common sense." An article yesterday was about the brain redeveloping skills lost through brain damage, "stretching itself" so to speak to use its undamaged parts for the lost skills. This is a very interesting article, and encouraging. It's a good thing that these groups thought to test this therapy method. It shows that the brains of autistic people are flexible enough to improve with practice some of their problems. I look forward to finding more on the subject later.





U.S. troops race to stem Ebola outbreak in Africa
CBS/AP September 30, 2014, 7:32 AM

MONROVIA, Liberia -- U.S. mobile Ebola labs should be up and running in Liberia this week, and American troops have broken ground for a field hospital, as the international community races to increase the ability to care for the spiraling number of people infected with the dreaded disease.

Liberia is the hardest hit country in the largest ever Ebola outbreak, which has touched four other West African countries. More than 3,000 deaths have been linked to the disease across the region, according to the World Health Organization, in the largest outbreak ever.

But even that toll is likely an underestimate, partially because there aren't enough labs to test people for Ebola. WHO has warned that numbers for Liberia, in particular, have lagged behind reality because it takes so long to get test results back.

In addition, with too few doctors and nurses in the worst affected countries and not enough beds to isolate and treat the sick, the disease has whipped around communities, wiping out whole families.

The only way to stop its accelerating spread is to get sick people out of their homes and reduce the number of people they can infect. But the already weak health systems of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone - where the vast majority of the cases have been - have collapsed under the pressure of the disease. Aid agencies and WHO have moved in to set up treatment centers, and now several countries have pledged to do the same.

Two mobile Ebola labs staffed by U.S. Naval researchers arrived this weekend and will be operational this week, the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia said in a statement Monday. The labs will reduce the amount of time it takes to learn if a patient has Ebola from several days to a few hours.

The U.S. military also delivered equipment to build a field hospital, originally designed to treat troops in combat zones. The 25-bed clinic will be staffed by American health workers from the U.S. Public Health Service and will treat doctors and nurses who have become infected.

Ebola is transmitted through contact with bodily fluids, so that places health care workers at high risk of infection. They have become sick at an alarming rate in this outbreak, WHO says, with 375 infected so far.

The U.S. is planning to build 17 other clinics in Liberia and will help to train more health workers to staff them. Britain has promised to help set up 700 more treatment beds in Sierra Leone, and its military will build and staff a hospital in that country. France is sending field hospitals and doctors to Guinea.

But the needs remain enormous. The World Food Program said Tuesday it only has about 40 percent of the $93 million it needs to deliver food to people who are struggling to feed themselves because their neighborhoods have been quarantined or they've lost the heads of their households. WHO says around 1,500 treatment beds have been built or are in the works, but that still leaves a gap of more than 2,100 beds. Between 1,000 and 2,000 international health care workers are needed.




“U.S. mobile Ebola labs should be up and running in Liberia this week, and American troops have broken ground for a field hospital, as the international community races to increase the ability to care for the spiraling number of people infected with the dreaded disease.... In addition, with too few doctors and nurses in the worst affected countries and not enough beds to isolate and treat the sick, the disease has whipped around communities, wiping out whole families.... Two mobile Ebola labs staffed by U.S. Naval researchers arrived this weekend and will be operational this week, the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia said in a statement Monday. The labs will reduce the amount of time it takes to learn if a patient has Ebola from several days to a few hours. The U.S. military also delivered equipment to build a field hospital, originally designed to treat troops in combat zones. The 25-bed clinic will be staffed by American health workers from the U.S. Public Health Service and will treat doctors and nurses who have become infected.... The U.S. is planning to build 17 other clinics in Liberia and will help to train more health workers to staff them. Britain has promised to help set up 700 more treatment beds in Sierra Leone, and its military will build and staff a hospital in that country. France is sending field hospitals and doctors to Guinea.... WHO says around 1,500 treatment beds have been built or are in the works, but that still leaves a gap of more than 2,100 beds. Between 1,000 and 2,000 international health care workers are needed."


Mobile Army Hospitals as in the great movie “MASH” are being set up in Africa by the US Army and similar units by France and Britain, and there is still a need for 2,100 more beds as well as some 2,000 health care workers. The scope of this problem is really alarming. There have been over 3,000 deaths and “whole families have been wiped out.”

A disease that incubates for something in the range of 3 weeks without showing symptoms is a big part of the problem. After being infected, people can go about their daily life without becoming ill, but spreading the virus, long enough to leave their area and go for miles, including getting on airplanes and bringing it to other parts of the world. Meanwhile, we are all waiting for the few laboratories that are working on a vaccine to do their tests and get ready to produce it in large enough volume to provide immunity to the hundreds of thousand who have not yet contracted it. Luckily a vaccine will probably cure the disease even after symptoms have emerged, and blood transfusions from those who have regained their health can provide immunity as well. If the people could only be convinced to stay in one place or go to an isolation center when they first get a fever that would help even more. People who don't believe in viruses are hard to convince, though. Still this is one step forward in the fight. I'm glad our Tea Party Congress saw fit to give the President the necessary funding for this project.