Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for December 26, 2015

The rodent in a bubble.

Is he going to live with Pig’s sister Farina?

If he’s avoiding ebola, how is the hamster going to eat?

It’s a disease.

Hypochondriacal hamsters are harmful to harmonious home-life….

that disease broke out a lot last year in Africa, and parts of America. Lots of people died. Just like when the Swine Flu was spreading around back in 2008, or 2009

Ebola must be his ex.

How does he breathe?

An electric bola tie—the clip is an electric sign. Battery powered.

Ebola 200, with a 3 pin handicap.

I’m amazed that anyone who can use the internet has to ask what Ebola is…. I’m curious what you do on the net.

If they do sneeze. He won’t catch any germs? I’m assuming his ball blocks out all germs.

xxx

That “grace of god” came a little late for the 8000.

It is a really nasty disease… which was confined to Africa until recently.

Ebola is an extremely dangerous disease – in a society that attributes infectious diseases to witchcraft. When viruses are understood, it’s dangerous but much more containable than influenza – the Spanish flu killed 50-100 million, thousands of times more than the worst known Ebola outbreak. Even under the best conditions, the virus doesn’t survive long outside of a warm-blooded body (it doesn’t have to be a human body; it’s believed that this is a disease of some animal species that occasionally jumps to humans); it can’t spread through water (like cholera and typhoid fever), via insects like malaria and bubonic plague, nor will it spread far from a sneeze or cough like influenza.

It takes an exceptionally tiny amount of Ebola virus to spread the disease, and it’s one of the deadliest viruses known. On the other hand, Ebola is not “airborne” – but that just means it requires liquids to survive even for a few minutes outside of the body. If an Ebola patient sneezes on you, you could catch it from viruses carried in tiny liquid drops. Within a few minutes, any droplets would have either fell to the floor, or dried out and killed the virus. It can’t spread through the ventilator, nor can there be live virus floating in the air minutes after the sneeze. But watch for liquids picked up by your shoes, or from touching any surfaces in the room!

But the main danger isn’t sneezing, it’s all the body fluids emitted from a patient – starting with diarrhea, and often ending in the skin breaking down so the patient bleeds all over. These are confined to the immediate area, so protective gear and lots of disinfectants will keep the disease contained, but that’s more difficult than you might think. Caregivers without proper protective gear are probably going to catch it and die – the two biggest problems with the disease in Africa are lack of rubber gloves and suits for the few medical personnel that are there, and the families that insist on providing care without any protection – including preparing bleeding dead bodies for burial, followed by a funeral in which the freshly infected family members can spread the disease to the rest of the village. Under traditional African conditions, the whole village dies, but generally it’s contained there because no carrier manages to walk to the next village. Add some motorized transport, and it can spread much further.

In first world countries, once the staff realizes what they’re dealing with, no one goes into the room with the patient without a full rubber suit. That provides 100% protection, but only if the wearers do everything 100% right. You have to leave the room and take your virus-covered suit off sometime; there is a way to do that safely, but it’s complicated and any errors might kill. One caregiver did get infected in the USA, apparently from contact with the outside of her suit when she removed it. There were other scares in the US due to hospitals being slow to recognize Ebola – rare tropical diseases are not the first thing 1st world doctors will think of, especially not when the intake nurse flunked geography so the patient’s records did not note that he’d just flown in from Africa.

This hits a little close to home. It was published 3 days before I went into the hospital with Legionnaire’s Disease.

The hamster was ahead of his time

Oh, people if you only knew…

Seems like he predicted 2020

If only people treated the current pandemic this way..

He’s in Ebola (Get it?)

Again! Prescient!