…now tests virus-free.

Good news. She will remain in the hospital for a while, but she’s also beginning to produce antibodies to the disease.

[ADDENDUM: I was going to add that she is recovering despite never having received a transfusion from a survivor, but it turns out that:

Ms Romero was treated with a drip of human serum containing antibodies from Ebola sufferers who had survived the disease, and other drugs which a government spokesman declined to name.

One was the experimental anti-viral medicine favipiravir, according to the respected national newspaper El Mundo.

I'm not sure what that "human serum" would be. Plasma? Did her blood match that of some survivor in Britain? Or a combination of survivors? It's very unclear.

Also at the link, there's an interesting piece (lower left on the page) about William Pooley, the British nurse who was stricken in Sierra Leone and flown back home for treatment in a special facility, much like Dr. Brantly. Pooley has just returned to Sierra Leone to care for more victims:

The 29-year-old said he was 'delighted' to return to Sierra Leone's capital Freetown as he attempts to prevent 'as many unnecessary deaths as possible'.

There is uncertainty, however, over whether the Suffolk-born nurse is immune to catching Ebola again.

Although it is widely assumed the same person cannot develop the disease twice, the assumption has never been proven by scientists.

The scale of the current outbreak - with already 16 times more deaths than the previous most fatal outbreak in 1976 - could provide the first test to the theory.

Mr Pooley will arrive in Sierra Leone, where 932 people have died of Ebola, tonight and resume work tomorrow in an isolation unit run at Connaught Hospital by British medics.

I assume that Pooley will continue to wear protective gear.]

Peggy Noonan drives me pretty crazy with her on-again-off-again insights. When she’s good, she’s very very good. But when she’s bad, she’s foggy.

This is very good:

A third component of public anxiety has to do with what normal people can see and imagine, which they have a sense the government isn’t capable of seeing and imagining.

What normal people can see and imagine is that three Ebola cases have severely stressed the system. Washington is scrambling, the Centers for Disease Control is embarrassed, local hospitals are rushing to learn protocols and get in all necessary equipment. Nurses groups and unions have been enraged, the public alarmed—and all this after only three cases.

What would it look like if there were 300? That is not a big number in a nation of over 300 million. Yet it would leave the system hyperstressed, and hyperstressed things break down.

How many people and professionals have been involved in the treatment, transport, tracking, monitoring, isolation and public-information aspects of the three people who became sick? Again, what if it were 300—could we fully track, treat and handle all those cases? If scores of people begin over the next few weeks going to hospital emergency rooms with Ebola, how many of their doctors, nurses, orderlies, office staffers, communications workers and technicians would continue to report to their jobs? All of them at first, then most of them. But as things became more ragged, pressured and dangerous, would they continue?

This is why people are concerned. They can imagine how all this could turn south so fast, with only a few hundred cases. This is why the White House claims that we will not have a widespread breakout is fatuous: Even a limited breakout would take us into uncharted territory.

The only thing that will calm the public is competence. Until they see it, warnings about hysteria will be experienced as patronizing and deeply self-serving.

Noonan has put her finger on something many may have thought, but few have articulated so clearly.

What’s more, she clearly explains another thing I’ve said several times, that the Democratic party line on the travel ban is absurd and sets up a strawman:

The question is whether the U.S. should, for now, ban the issuance of visas to citizens of the three West African nations where the illness is known to exist. That is what a travel ban would be.

Those opposed to it have taken to noting that there are no or very few direct flights from the affected nations to the U.S., and that citizens from the affected states can fly to other nations first, and then connect to the U.S.

That has nothing to do with the question of a ban. Direct versus indirect flights don’t matter because airplanes don’t catch and die of Ebola, people do. No matter how you get to the U.S. from the affected regions, to get in legally you need a visa.

There is the charge that a travel ban would isolate the three nations. But why “isolate”? First, we are only talking about U.S. travel; we are talking about keeping citizens of the affected nations from entering the US. Help can and would continue to go into those nations. Charter planes certainly could and would go in. Other airlines might too. Health workers would continue to go in, as would supplies of all sorts.

On returning from the nations in question, U.S. citizens and others would presumably have to go through a quarantine. But health-care volunteers, of all people, wouldn’t let that stop them.

The president, in his Saturday address, argued against a ban: “Trying to seal off an entire region of the world—if that were even possible—could actually make the situation worse.”

Well, no one has called for trying to “seal off” anything, not to mention “an entire region of the world.” This is just the president trying to paint those who oppose him as frightened and delusional.

You go, girl! Exactly and precisely. But setting up strawmen and knocking them down is one of Obama’s favorite occupations.

An ebola response team is being organized:

In response to a request by the Department of Health and Human Services, a 30-person team will be ready to “response quickly, effectively, and safely” should more Ebola cases arise inside the U.S., according to a Pentagon press release.

“Secretary [Chuck] Hagel today ordered his Northern Command Commander, Gen. Chuck Jacoby, to prepare and train a 30-person expeditionary medical support team that could, if required, provide short-notice assistance to civilian medical professionals in the United States,” Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby said in statement.

The team of 20 critical care nurses, five doctors trained in infectious disease and five trainers in infectious disease protocols will be sent to Fort Sam Houston in Texas for up to seven days of training provided by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.

My questions:

(1) Why on earth did it take this long? We’ve known about the extent of this ebola epidemic and the strong possibilities it could come here for many, many months.

(2) Why the Pentagon? Why not the CDC?

My preliminary answers:

(1) A combination of hubris (“it can’t come here; we’re so smart we’ve prevented that”) and a complete inability to think ahead and prepare for contingencies. Some people would add “actually, the government wants it to come here,” but I don’t agree. That doesn’t further their cause at all, especially the open border cause. Of course, there’s another possible cause it could further: a state of emergency and granting of more powers to the government. I just don’t see this particular crisis being used in that way; too much potential for it to spiral out of control.

(2) The CDC has not covered itself with glory in this matter

That it took this long to prepare this sort of response is an embarrassment and an outrage.

[ADDENDUM: Gee, they finally figured this out, too.

And in some good news, the hospital workers who saw Duncan during his first ER visit are now off the hook for ebola isolation, and his family members are close to being let out of quarantine as well. That they all may be safe underlines the fact that ebola becomes exponentially more contagious as it progresses. That it was two nurses who contracted it from Duncan despite wearing protective---even if somewhat inadequate---gear, while none of the family appears to have caught it despite wearing no gear at all, makes it even more evident how incredibly virulent ebola becomes later on. Duncan himself seems to have contracted ebola from rather mild (skin to skin rather than mucous membrane to body fluid) contact with a patient who was in late stages of ebola, despite her seeming lack of typical symptoms such as vomiting or diarrhea.]

[ADDENDUM II: Louise Troh, Thomas Duncan's fiancee, is coming out of quarantine, and though she craves privacy and a chance to grieve right now (this coming week would have been her wedding day) she plans to tell her story in the future. She's been through an extraordinarily horrific experience, although fortunately she seems to have been spared contracting ebola:

As her boyfriend Thomas Eric Duncan lay dying of Ebola in a Dallas hospital bed, Louise Troh battled loneliness and fear that she too had contracted the disease while confined to a stranger's home under armed guard...

After three long weeks, she will be able to have a clean bill of health, leave the house and be done with twice-daily temperature readings by government health care workers. She likened the period to being a prisoner.

"I want to breathe, I want to really grieve, I want privacy with my family," Troh told The Associated Press on Friday, lamenting that she was missing Duncan's memorial service at his mother's church in North Carolina because of the quarantine. Troh says she and Duncan planned to get married later in the week...

Jenkins and Troh's pastor George Mason delivered the news of Duncan's death to her during the confinement period...

Mason said he is coordinating efforts with the city, county and philanthropic community to help Troh and the family recover. Because of the Ebola infection risk, crews stripped Troh's apartment down to the carpeting, saving only a few personal documents, photographs and a Bible.

"They were left with nothing. They are completely devastated by this, so there's need to have their lives rebuilt," Mason said.

Troh plans to partially recover financially with a book written about her life, from growing up in Liberia, meeting Duncan in a refugee camp in Ivory Coast, Duncan's years-long quest to come to America to be reunited with his girlfriend and their 19-year-old son, and his death in an isolation ward.

"It will be a love story," she said.

Troh also issued a statement Sunday asking for privacy as she comes through the ordeal while thanking everyone who came to their side.

Troh's daughter, a nurse's aide who cared for Duncan before he was hospitalized, and who called 911 for help, is also getting out of quarantine---in her case, self-imposed. Although she was only being monitored by the CDC for fever, and was allowed to leave her home, she decided to err on the side of caution and not go out in public for the duration of the 21 days. She says that now, ""I'm telling you, just to step outside will be so great. To hug my mom and grieve for Eric [the name Duncan used with friends and family], not over the phone like we’ve been doing but in the flesh.”

I wish them well.]

[ADDENDUM III: I think that this statement by Louise Troh shows the caliber of person she is, and the fact that Duncan was her fiance reflects well on him, too:

Our hearts also go out to the two brave women who have been infected by this terrible disease as they were trying to help [Duncan].

We are also aware of how much this has affected many other people of my city, Dallas, and my country, the United States of America, even as it has in the country of my birth, Liberia.

We also know that many people who work in Presbyterian Hospital are hurting because of this tragedy. We pray that God will bring healing to all in our community soon.]

Today I had some Trader Joe’s uttapam for lunch.

I love southern Indian food, although if you haven’t ever had it it’s hard to describe and doesn’t sound all that tasty. But it’s very yummy. It’s completely vegetarian, but features unusual grains (unusual to us, anyway) such as chickpea and lentil flour, often in fermented form.

Yes, I know—sounds pretty “ugh.” But take it from me, it’s a wonderful cuisine, and many of its specialties have an especially toothsome comfort food quality.

The uttapam is somewhat like a pancake, although Wiki compares it to pizza. I never thought of pizza, though, because an uttapam’s dough is unbreadlike. What is it like? Soft and springy, resistant yet yielding, with the tang of something like sourdough and a slight spiciness that complements the grain and gives it just the right amount of zip.

And the coconut chutney is the finishing touch.

I don’t know how to make uttapam from scratch, and I’m probably not about to start. So imagine my delight when I saw that Trader Joe’s has a frozen version, and my excitement when I took a package home to try them. Voila! Pretty darn good, and if they were not quite on a par with the very best southern Indian restaurants, I really can’t fault Trader Joe’s for that. Excellent for a frozen version, and simplicity itself to prepare.

I was transfixed by this series of photos of Liberians who have survived bouts of ebola. We don’t tend to think of that group, but it’s a large one, although unfortunately not as large as those who’ve died from the disease.

Many of the survivors have lost whole families—spouses and children—and contracted ebola while caring for them. And yet many report being shunned now, as though they were still contagious, even though they are not. No wonder so many have eyes that look so sad. They have lived through a horrific experience, and the pain continues.

Some, however, are working at the hospitals, counseling and supporting other patients who are ill with ebola, and giving them hope that they might live through the experience.

Here are two of those survivors who are hard at work helping others:

This sort of testimony from Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown in an altercation in Ferguson, Missouri, is more or less what many of us expected would be his report when he finally testified as to his version of events. In addition, his story is backed up so far by the forensic evidence:

The officer, Darren Wilson, has told the authorities that during the scuffle, Mr. Brown reached for the gun. It was fired twice in the car, according to forensics tests performed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The first bullet struck Mr. Brown in the arm; the second bullet missed.

The forensics tests showed Mr. Brown’s blood on the gun, as well as on the interior door panel and on Officer Wilson’s uniform. Officer Wilson told the authorities that Mr. Brown had punched and scratched him repeatedly, leaving swelling on his face and cuts on his neck…

According to his account, he was trying to leave his vehicle when Mr. Brown pushed him back in. Once inside the S.U.V., the two began to fight, Officer Wilson told investigators, and he removed his gun from the holster on his right hip.

Unfortunately, this evidence won’t stem the tide of false information and resultant anger that has led to widespread condemnation of Wilson and the Ferguson PD. Facts will not matter. Would they have mattered if this had come out earlier? I doubt it. It was hinted at and suggested, almost from the start. Way too many parties have an interest in painting a picture of racism on the part of the cop and innocence on the part of Brown to let patience and facts stand in their way.

The Times reports he’s just “seething” with anger:

Beneath the calming reassurance that President Obama has repeatedly offered during the Ebola crisis, there is a deepening frustration, even anger, with how the government has handled key elements of the response.

Those frustrations spilled over when Mr. Obama convened his top aides in the Cabinet room after canceling his schedule on Wednesday. Medical officials were providing information that later turned out to be wrong. Guidance to local health teams was not adequate. It was unclear which Ebola patients belonged in which threat categories.

“It’s not tight,” a visibly angry Mr. Obama said of the response, according to people briefed on the meeting. He told aides they needed to get ahead of events and demanded a more hands-on approach, particularly from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The buck continues its failure to stop at the president’s desk. Actually, I don’t think the buck ever even visits the vicinity.

However, the president isn’t to blame for everything in the US ebola mess. He’s not to blame for the incompetence of whoever dealt with Thomas Duncan the first time he went to the Dallas Presbyterian ER. Nor is he to blame for everything wrong with an agency like the CDC; some of that has probably been brewing for ages.

But Dr. Tom Frieden is Obama’s own appointment. He’s responsible for that, and Frieden is a disaster. Obama’s responsible for not firing him. He’s responsible for appointing a hack like Klain to fix things.

Obama is described in the ridiculously Obama-serving Times article as having become alarmed when the second nurse from Dallas was diagnosed with ebola. But Obama’s responsible for not sensing that things were already out of control long before that. He’s responsible for the claptrap his mouthpiece Josh Earnest spouts when asked about travel bans:

“If we are trying to protect the American public, we should not put in a travel ban,” Earnet said. He added, “If you put in place a travel ban from West Africa, those individuals could go to other countries and try to travel here and disguise their original destination.”

Earth to Obama/Earnest: no they can’t, not if we put a visa ban into effect. I think they purposely misunderstand what people are suggesting, creating a strawman that they can knock down more easily, rather than responding to the actual proposal to ban commercial travel here by nationals of the ebola-affected countries. Obama is responsible for refusing to implement the proposal or even to represent it properly when he argues against it.

I wrote that Obama isn’t responsible for the errors committed in the ER of the Dallas hospital. And he’s not. But then again maybe he is, at least a little bit. Obamacare has been demonstrated to have increased patients’ use of ERs rather than decreased it, and so to the degree that the Dallas ER may have made mistakes because it was overburdened or short-staffed (and I don’t know whether either was part of the problem, but it’s highly possible), Obama is at least somewhat at fault for that, too.

Heck of a job, Barack. Heck of a job.

Maybe those blood transfusions from recovered ebola patient Dr. Kent Brantly are the ticket:

Two Americans have already been treated successfully for Ebola. Dr. Kent Brantly is one. He is providing blood for other victims, on the theory that it contains antibodies with which the body can fight the disease. A patient who received such a transfusion reportedly has fully recovered and another reportedly is making great progress.

And Nina Pham, who also received a transfusion from Brantly, is reported to be in fair to good condition.

So far, all the patients Brantly has helped transfuse have recovered. This is an extremely small “n,” though, so it’s impossible to draw conclusions from it. It could be that these patients are actually doing well because their disease was diagnosed and treated unusually early, and that the transfusions didn’t change its course. Or, it may be that they will take a turn for the worse later. But the trend is a good one.

It is reported that Brantly made the same offer for Thomas Eric Duncan, but that he didn’t receive a transfusion because he was not a match. Duncan was also diagnosed very late in the game, due to Dallas Presbyterian’s failure to recognize that he had ebola on his first ER visit. We’ll never know whether things would have been different for Duncan if he’d been treated earlier.

Here’s Brantly:

More ABC news videos | ABC Health News

[NOTE: Some research on the subject of ebola immunity transfusions in animals can be found here. And here's why there hasn't been much research on the topic so far.]

Here’s a clip of the finale of Paul Taylor’s “Esplanade,” one of the most beautiful dances I’ve ever seen. I’ve written at length about Taylor before, and about “Esplanade” in particular:

If I write that in one of my favorite works of his—”Esplanade”—he eschews conventional dance steps and uses movements that derive almost entirely from natural everyday motions such as walking, running, and falling, it sounds boring. But Taylor transforms these steps into one of the most exhilarating and joyous dances ever created, one that at times exhibits an almost sublime tenderness, and at other times makes the audience gasp with its bold daring, lightning speed, and the dancers’ sheer physical power as they hurl themselves with reckless abandon into each others’ arms and then down to the floor and up again.

That “hurl themselves with reckless abandon into each others’ arms” part begins at about 4:09, by the way. Note, also, that Taylor makes tremendous use of the floor—not just to stand on or take off from, but as a vehicle for the entire body to drop and fall to, roll on, and then rise from. That’s a hallmark of modern dance—as opposed to the more airborne ballet—of which “Esplanade” takes full advantage.

Enjoy:

I also love, love, love, that beginning movement of the excerpt, where the first dancer starts to move just before the music, but perfectly complements it.

Hey, that’ll work!:

President Obama has asked Ron Klain, who served as chief of staff to both Vice President Biden and former vice president Al Gore, as his Ebola response coordinator, according to a White House official.

“He will report directly to the president’s homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco, and the president’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, as he ensures that efforts to protect the American people by detecting, isolating and treating Ebola patients in this country are properly integrated but don’t distract from the aggressive commitment to stopping Ebola at the source in West Africa,” a White House official wrote in an e-mail.

Klain, a longtime Democratic operative, served as Biden’s chief of staff from 2009 to 2011 and as Gore’s from 1995 to 1999. He helped oversee the Democratic side in the 2000 presidential election recount as its lead lawyer, a role that Kevin Spacey portrayed in the HBO film “Recount.”

In other words, he will not challenge the administration in any way, and will mouth the party line to reassure the proles that all is in the very best of hands.

No experience except for the political. And the following [emphasis mine] is really a masterpiece in gracefully laconic understatement by the WaPo. My hat is off to the article’s authors:

Klain is not known for his health-care expertise, though he would get briefings on those policies in his capacity as a campaign strategist for Gore and the Democrats’ 2004 presidential candidate, John Kerry.

On the other hand, the doctors who’ve been dealing with this so far, such as Frieden, have been so bad at it that perhaps a complete naif would be better. If a person were organized, smart, independent, and honest it could work. But Klain’s status as party operative makes the “independent and honest” part pretty much an impossibility.

[ADDENDUM: More here from Ron Fournier. Excerpt:

13. Klain can't be a disruptively productive force without autonomy. I have to ask: How many senior White House officials, including the president, have ever created an organization chart? Anybody with a rudimentary understanding of management would know that you don't untangle a chain of command by injecting a new figure haphazardly into it. The answer is to put somebody atop it. Which brings me back to my first sentence, and the real problem here.

14. We shouldn't need an Ebola czar. The president needs to do his job better.

It depends, however, what the president thinks his job is.]

…mean that Dinesh D’Souza was right in The Roots of Obama’s Rage? In the book, he describes how one of Obama’s biggest motivations is his hatred of colonialism in Africa, and a desire to redress and/or revenge its wrongs for his father’s sake:

In his own writings Obama stresses the centrality of his father not only to his beliefs and values but to his very identity. He calls his memoir “the record of a personal, interior journey–a boy’s search for his father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American.” And again, “It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself.” Even though his father was absent for virtually all his life, Obama writes, “My father’s voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people’s struggle. Wake up, black man!”

The climax of Obama’s narrative is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father’s grave. It is riveting: “When my tears were finally spent,” he writes, “I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America–the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago–all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father’s pain.”

In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that “I sat at my father’s grave and spoke to him through Africa’s red soil.” In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father’s spirit. Obama takes on his father’s struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.’s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.’s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son’s objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father’s struggle becomes the son’s birthright.

And also on the topic of West African travel bans, here’s an article in Politico that purports to tell us travel ban advocates just why what we’re proposing isn’t a good idea.

Only thing is, the geniuses there make several major errors. The first is to completely misunderstand (or purposely misrepresent) what is being advocated, which is not a complete travel ban but merely a ban on West African nationals coming from there to this country on commercial flights—in other words, a denial of visas to that group of people. The second is the sophistic trick of saying that because something doesn’t stop the problem entirely, it’s worthless—ignoring the idea of slowing down or diminishing the problem. A third problem is that, like our condescending public officials in the public health game, they merely assert that “the reality, the experts say, is that those kinds of measures have failed before.”

Well, hey, if the experts say it, that’s good enough for me! No need to tell me where those measures have been tried, what they consisted of, and how failure was measured, and let me see whether I think there’s any analogy to the present situation that makes sense. I won’t bother my pretty little head about the details.

As a response to my recent mosquito post, commenter “cornflour” has sent in a link to the article “Cosmic Karma: Mosquitoes Have Flying, Blood-Sucking Parasites of Their Own”:

Although it’s oh-so-satisfying to hear mosquitoes have their own blood-sucking winged pests (though ponder for a moment that, scaled to our size, their parasites would be about the size of dinner plates, and unlike us, mosquitoes have nothing to whack them with), we may ultimately be losers in the business as well. The host range of C. anophelis, like its geographic range, is enormous. It has been found to parasitize at least 19 species of mosquito, but it has also been collected sucking blood directly from buffaloes and cattle.

Culicoides midges are known carriers of bluetongue virus, Oropouche virus and Schmallenburg virus while mosquitoes they parasitize carry Dengue, West Nile, and Japanese encephalitis viruses. If mosquitoes are flying dirty syringes that spread disease among humans, parasitic midges may further scramble the disease load, introduce new viruses to new vectors, and generally add another order of magnitude to disease transmission calculus. But no one really knows. The studies, as authors of this paper point out, have yet to be done.

Well, well, well.

The news should remind us all that life imitates art. This sort of thing was imagined quite some time ago:

Big fleas have little fleas,
Upon their backs to bite ‘em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas,
and so, ad infinitum.

Which has a provenance that goes back almost three hundred years, to Jonathan Swift, no less:

The vermin only teaze and pinch
Their foes superior by an inch.
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ‘em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.