Tuesday, October 07, 2014

Because that makes sense.

From Foreign Policy comes this bright idea to isolate the Ebola outbreak:
First, arapid point-of-care diagnostic that can find Ebola virus in a single droplet ofblood must be developed. A point-of-care test avoids the need to ship samplesto a laboratory and then wait for days to learn the results. In the early daysof the HIV epidemic, firm diagnosis could mean a terrified week for worriedpatients -- today there are home test kits sold in drugstores across Americathat can reveal HIV results in an hour. And, of course, today women can learnwhether they are pregnant almost instantly with kits that they can purchasefrom neighborhood shops. Such Ebola-specific tests are in development now, modeled on diagnosticsalready used to rapidly find everything from abnormal cholesterol levels toblood glucose levels that are dangerous for diabetics to common infections.Some major donors have already provided funding to accelerate the developmentand testing of such devices, and it is well within the realm of realisticpossibilities that reliable exams will be ready for commercial development andapproval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in less than one month's time. 
See, travel restrictions wouldn't be a hundred percent effective, and plus they could be (and I quote) "viewed as discriminatory against people of color and/or Africans," so instead of enacting any travel bans now, we should wait until we spend enough grant money to invent unicorn diagnostic kits. After all, what are a few extra people vomiting blood when other people's feeeelings are at risk?
.