Please pay attention to this post...
tex959 said:
Or Aids.. sure big pharma is selling buckets of expensive meds to treat symptoms.. But How close are we to an actual cure? And the end of the day the only thing we will have is preventative education IMO... Same with IBD or AIDS for that matter.
You clearly don't know anything about the history of the world HIV/AIDS pandemic. In this country, where there is the best funding for treatment, AIDS has gone from an acute disease that kills fairly quickly, to a chronic manageable disease in which most victims can live pretty much average life spans as long as they maintain adequate treatment. As for a cure? Please name me one viral disease that has been
cured. You can't, because there aren't any.
As for the people (mainly Jen) talking about a cure for this apparent viral disease...it will
NEVER be cured. Why? Because, first, (as previously stated) there has never been a viral disease that has been
cured. Second, there will never be enough money invested to adequately test for any kind of treatment. To think that everyone can "pitch in" a few dollars in order to make a difference is naive at best. The only thing that might be discovered is the causative agent; however, that won't cure anything...it will only attach a name to the disease process. The ONLY cure is prevention... I.E. QUARANTINE.
Having said that, I'm not buying this whole "separate ventilation system" requirement for an adequate quarantine. As someone who knows a few things about the transmission of various viruses, I don't think for a
second that this transmission was through any part of the ventilation system. It just doesn't make sense. For one thing, viruses don't just randomly float through the air infecting whatever they come in contact with. They are usually spread by respiratory droplet (hence the term "airborne") or through direct contact with an infected individual. Since snakes don't have a true cough reflex (which propels the respiratory droplets in human illness), the likelihood of them transmitting a virus by an airborne vector (respiratory droplet) is slim at best, and
extremely unlikely if the two animals are in separate rooms.
The transmission
had to be through contact by Jen. I don't care what she says about her "sterile procedures," I know that she wasn't practicing strict quarantine precautions due to the fact that she has already admitted to the fact that she made a number of mistakes in her procedures (however, I'm too lazy to go back and dig out the exact quotes). If someone wants to be totally sure that they're not transmitting something, then they need to wear rubber gloves (and preferably clothes covers, i.e. a disposable gown, etc.) when handling any animals in quarantine. They then need to dispose of the gloves within the quarantine room, and remove the gown (and dispose of it in the quarantine room), or change clothes before going into their main facility...but more importantly, there is no substitute for good hand washing! Infection control specialists in hospitals have shown this statistically
over and over again.
Wyatt sold Jen a sick snake, and Jen didn't quarantine it properly...and we've all seen the end result. The problem was not some new "super virus," the problem was the lack of proper quarantine...and the ventilation system had nothing to do with it...regardless of what Jen claims.
My main point in this post is this... The extremes of airborne precautions that have been proposed in this thread are ridiculous. They don't follow known methods of disease transmission in reptiles, and quite frankly there are only a few human diseases that they would even be applicable to (primarily TB which isn't even a virus).
I am concerned that people are "demonizing" this new "scary, mystery virus" to the point that they're no longer paying attention to the facts surrounding viral disease transmission.
Thanks for reading.
