Health threats pass through our borders into the United States everyday through shipping ports and airports, says Kurt Eichenwald in his article, "Fear Infectious Disease, But Not Ebola." (Eichenwald, para. 1) In his article Eichenwald suggests that the United States has ignored the deaths of those who have died of Ebola in the sub-Saharan countries of Africa and that is the reason nothing has been done to stop it. He also continues on to say that this Ebola outbreak in the United States has led to a "political beanbag" between multiply parties of congress. (Eichenwald, para. 20) Instead of finding a solution for the disease, we are rambling on about who to blame for this, and of course, this is not going to contribute anything to the situation. This is Eichenwald's primary concern over this whole ordeal. He suggests that more people will die from automobile accidents while reading his article than those who will die from Ebola. Later in his article, he goes on about how some people feel that the United States should close its borders to prevent the spread of disease. He then asks how we can close our borders for a disease that has killed not but one since the article was written, but convince other countries to keep their borders open to us when disease from our country have caused tens of thousands of deaths in the past. (Eichenwald, para. 8) He concludes that shutting the borders to these developing nations would cause an economic crisis as we depend on one another so heavily. (Eichenwald, para. 6) Instead of wasting our time arguing about the disease, time needs to be made to plan out solutions instead of blaming people such as the President. Nature is the biggest threat and we need to be ready for when it hits. (Eichenwald, para. 15-19)
This article comes from a news post called Newsweek, which has been known to create reliable information. The author of the article as mentioned above is Kurt Eichenwald who is a very experience journalist and writer. He has worked previously for twenty years for the New York Times as an experienced journalist, columnist and senior writer. Eichenwald has won the George Polk Award for excellence in journalism twice in his career. On top of all this fame he also was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2000 and 2002, which recognizes achievement in literature, journalism and music. Last of all, he wrote a book called The Informant, which was nominated as one of the best nonfiction books of the decade. Knowing this, we can conclude that his work is very credible. As far as being credible to talk about the subject, he is not a doctor or any other type of expert in the field, but he has a lot to say about how there is no simple solution to this epidemic. In a couples points throughout his article, remarks are made about how Republicans are wasting their time using this epidemic as a political rant on how Obama is not doing his job. This could be true, but I feel as if he did not need to mention these parts in his article. The rest of the article seems to be non-biased. This article provided much information on how Ebola is not something that we should be afraid of currently. That people need to create a solution on how to fix all this instead of ranting on about irrational solutions. Being a current epidemic provides with the most current articles such as this one. These are usually the most reliable sources because they will not provide you with outdated information.
It is true in our world, that it is not possible to stop the spread of the disease. Health threats come through our shipping ports and airports every day, but is there any way that we could be able to stop this? Should we check every person as they enter our country or check every load of cargo that enters our country? No, I do not believe that would be possible. Not only would it be very time consuming, but it would just cost so much money and really, it would be very unrealistic. There really isn't a way to stop a disease such as Ebola from coming to the United States unless it has been identified and isolated in another place. This cannot very easily be done in these African countries where the disease originated because their health care system is still developing as their countries are. One thing mentioned in Eichenwald's article that surprised me is that the CDC requested $7.5 million to establish national public health institutes in developing nations such as those in Africa, but it was zeroed out. He also included that really, all they needed was what one American CEO would make in a year, which is close to $1 million. (Eichenwald, para. 13) Just a small amount of money (in organizational terms) was zeroed out to no funding for a project, that could have helped these developing countries learn more about diseases and help advance their healthcare system. Another thing that surprised me was that military plays a large role in response to possible pandemics. (Eichenwald, para. 16) It seems odd to me that we would send our own people overseas to fight disease. What role does our military take place when we are helping them? That is another thing that I am going to have to look into. If our military cannot fight it off, it's probably too strong. That's probably an overstatement, but in all seriousness, this disease needs to be stopped as we do not need thousands dying in our modern age. One new perspective Eichenwald gave me is how other countries would react if we closed our borders. Eichenwald suggests that if we close our borders to protect ourselves, how can we convince other countries to leave their borders open for us when diseases that originated from the United States have killed hundreds of thousands? (Eichenwald, para. 8) Ebola has killed but one person so far in our country, and we are freaking out about how it's going to become a huge epidemic. When we look on the logical side of things there are other diseases such as the flu which are more easily transmissible than the Ebola virus. Some people's ideas of closing our borders for one death is a ridiculous thing to do. I'm not quite sure how other counties would react to that, but I would hope that we are smarter than to close our borders, unless some ridiculous super disease breaks out. All in all, I do believe that we need to focus on creating a solution for the disease instead of rambling on about where our problem began. We are past that and we need to look into the future of this problem.
EICHENWALD, KURT. "Fear Infectious Disease, But Not Ebola." Newsweek Global 163.17 (2014): 22-24. Academic Search Complete. Web. 25 Oct. 2014.
This article comes from a news post called Newsweek, which has been known to create reliable information. The author of the article as mentioned above is Kurt Eichenwald who is a very experience journalist and writer. He has worked previously for twenty years for the New York Times as an experienced journalist, columnist and senior writer. Eichenwald has won the George Polk Award for excellence in journalism twice in his career. On top of all this fame he also was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2000 and 2002, which recognizes achievement in literature, journalism and music. Last of all, he wrote a book called The Informant, which was nominated as one of the best nonfiction books of the decade. Knowing this, we can conclude that his work is very credible. As far as being credible to talk about the subject, he is not a doctor or any other type of expert in the field, but he has a lot to say about how there is no simple solution to this epidemic. In a couples points throughout his article, remarks are made about how Republicans are wasting their time using this epidemic as a political rant on how Obama is not doing his job. This could be true, but I feel as if he did not need to mention these parts in his article. The rest of the article seems to be non-biased. This article provided much information on how Ebola is not something that we should be afraid of currently. That people need to create a solution on how to fix all this instead of ranting on about irrational solutions. Being a current epidemic provides with the most current articles such as this one. These are usually the most reliable sources because they will not provide you with outdated information.
It is true in our world, that it is not possible to stop the spread of the disease. Health threats come through our shipping ports and airports every day, but is there any way that we could be able to stop this? Should we check every person as they enter our country or check every load of cargo that enters our country? No, I do not believe that would be possible. Not only would it be very time consuming, but it would just cost so much money and really, it would be very unrealistic. There really isn't a way to stop a disease such as Ebola from coming to the United States unless it has been identified and isolated in another place. This cannot very easily be done in these African countries where the disease originated because their health care system is still developing as their countries are. One thing mentioned in Eichenwald's article that surprised me is that the CDC requested $7.5 million to establish national public health institutes in developing nations such as those in Africa, but it was zeroed out. He also included that really, all they needed was what one American CEO would make in a year, which is close to $1 million. (Eichenwald, para. 13) Just a small amount of money (in organizational terms) was zeroed out to no funding for a project, that could have helped these developing countries learn more about diseases and help advance their healthcare system. Another thing that surprised me was that military plays a large role in response to possible pandemics. (Eichenwald, para. 16) It seems odd to me that we would send our own people overseas to fight disease. What role does our military take place when we are helping them? That is another thing that I am going to have to look into. If our military cannot fight it off, it's probably too strong. That's probably an overstatement, but in all seriousness, this disease needs to be stopped as we do not need thousands dying in our modern age. One new perspective Eichenwald gave me is how other countries would react if we closed our borders. Eichenwald suggests that if we close our borders to protect ourselves, how can we convince other countries to leave their borders open for us when diseases that originated from the United States have killed hundreds of thousands? (Eichenwald, para. 8) Ebola has killed but one person so far in our country, and we are freaking out about how it's going to become a huge epidemic. When we look on the logical side of things there are other diseases such as the flu which are more easily transmissible than the Ebola virus. Some people's ideas of closing our borders for one death is a ridiculous thing to do. I'm not quite sure how other counties would react to that, but I would hope that we are smarter than to close our borders, unless some ridiculous super disease breaks out. All in all, I do believe that we need to focus on creating a solution for the disease instead of rambling on about where our problem began. We are past that and we need to look into the future of this problem.
EICHENWALD, KURT. "Fear Infectious Disease, But Not Ebola." Newsweek Global 163.17 (2014): 22-24. Academic Search Complete. Web. 25 Oct. 2014.