Smart Phones, Social Media, CDC & Contagious Outbreaks

Your putting a lot more faith in a government agency than I ever could. I believe NSA already has tracking in place and I would think CDC could turn to NSA for all the relative info. to back track our movements, or who we communicate with. NSA might already utilize the built in thermistor on the smart-phones to track your body temperature?

The NSA would never let any information out to any "outside" organization. That might jeopardize national "security".

Certainly, they would NEVER release any information on any NSA operatives. That might cause the immediate collapse of the USA and it's security organizations.

Then the losers might have to find legitimate work. Imagine 100,000 Tinker.bells looking for real jobs. Think of all the bars and wh@re houses that might have to close down.

If we can't get health care workers to take proper precautions, we're doomed.

They could run for political office.

I think that you are missing my point here. This is much simpler than what Edward Snowden revealed the NSA is already doing. This has a direct public health benefit of both allowing for easier back tracking and emphasizing to health care workers that this highly contagious patient has changed your immediate life. A health care worker probably should skip that family reunion in Ohio.

There's only a couple things that's going to stop this pandemic, education and sanitation. Without both, it will run a muck as it has in Africa. We can try and close borders doors and gates as they did during the Black Plague (without success), but without the complete education on prevention and treatment and sanitation to follow it up on, they are doomed. CDC and the WHO can only do so much.

Guess what. Stopping Ebola is not rocket science.

Firestone Did What Governments Have Not: Stopped Ebola ..

That goes along with what I said about education and sanitation, they had both in place and effectively handling the containment.

That shows the value of early intervention.

Unfortunately, that has long passed in this case and the situation is so far out of control that containment will take orders of magnitude more effort than what Firestone ever did.

We are simply seeing what happens when the world does too little, too late.

"too little, too late", the American way.

Not limited to only the USA.

"too little, too late, then blame someone else", the American NEW way.

You forgot callously shooting down any "out of the box" ideas as an invasion of freedoms that don't exist.

or passing and implementing

any "out of the box" ideas

without reading them first.

and 'the list' grows.

not a good idea

There's an IMPLIED assumption here that every healthcare worker HAS a cell-phone...and...that everyone the healthcare worker happens to come in contact with ALSO has a cell-phone. That is simply NOT A VALID assumption.

You would be better off just arresting the person and then put a tracking ankle monitor on them.

You would still need a court order to use a ankle monitor or even to use their phone as a tracking device. The ankle monitor is more resistant to tampering, but still could be cut off and there have been a number of cases where this happens.

The only real reason people keep them on is the threat of legal reprisal. However, I don't think that would be as much of a useful deterrent in this case as violations could result is severe public consequences.

Funny, this was on the news tonight as I was reading here on the forum. They're looking at using cell phones for tracking ebola cases in west Africa.

Personally I'm wondering what can be done to improve the experience of wearing level 4 hazmat and disrobing from it. Sounds hellish. A better design would sure go over large... !

I like the design in the movie Andromeda Strain where the suit was part of a large umbilical cord that the wearer crawled into from outside the room, which I assume has a slight positive pressure.

Not very portable, but the system effectively isolates the operating theater from the staging rooms outside with no risk of contamination when de-suiting.

There were things that I liked about that containment design, too. Except as the image you show from the movie shows the umbilical tunnel is not positively pressurized to the room with the contagious baby.

No, it doesn't, look like it is and the suit looks very flimsy, too, but that's Hollywood.

As far as the pressure gradient goes, I don't think it needs to be much.

I have the feeling that how this Ebola handling has started out is simular to the "Saturday Night Live' Sketch of Three Mile Island.

'Life Imitating Art'