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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 3-Oct-2014
3-Oct-14 World View -- Five new Ebola patients become infected every hour in Sierra Leone

Web Log - October, 2014

3-Oct-14 World View -- Five new Ebola patients become infected every hour in Sierra Leone

Turkey's parliament approves military operations in Syria and Iraq

This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com

Beach sands become an unlikely business opportunity
Turkey's parliament approves military operations in Syria and Iraq
Five new Ebola patients become infected every hour in Sierra Leone

Beach sands become an unlikely business opportunity

Palm Island project in Dubai. These islands were created with some 385 million tons of sand. (Spiegel)

Palm Island project in Dubai. These islands were created with some 385 million tons of sand. (Spiegel)

The beaches of Cape Verde, Kenya, New Zealand, Jamaica, Morocco and other countries are changing from sandy resorts to masses of black dirt and stones. The reason is that sand miners are harvesting all the sand on these beaches, and selling it. It is used in the production of computer chips, plates and mobile phones. However, the biggest use is by far the construction industry. Global consumption of sand mining is estimated at 40 billion tons per year, with 30 billion tons of that used in concrete for the construction industry. Spiegel

Turkey's parliament approves military operations in Syria and Iraq

As we've been reporting, the attack by Islamic State / of Iraq and Syria (IS or ISIS or ISIL) on the border city of Kobani, Syria, has resulting in hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing into Turkey in just a few days, and this has caused Turkey to completely reverse its Syria policy that it's followed since 2011.

On Thursday, Turkey's parliament approved a motion allowing, first, the deployment of Turkish troops in Iraq and Syria to fight terrorist groups, and second, to allow Nato troops and warplanes to base out of Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. The motion passed by 298 votes in favor, 98 against.

Despite the overwhelming vote, there was still vocal opposition. Turkish officials would prefer to be attacking Syria's president Bashar al-Assad, and Turkey doesn't trust the Kurds, whom they would be supporting against ISIS. Besides ISIS, the authorization extends to another terrorist group, the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party), which whom Turkey fought a civil war in the recent past.

Turkey's defense minister Ismet Yilmaz hastened to say that "immediate steps should not be expected." However, I would point out that events are moving quickly in the Mideast, with major changes almost every day, and now that the authorization motion has passed, the political pressure will be on to use the military. Today's Zaman (Ankara) and Hurriyet (Ankara)

Five new Ebola patients become infected every hour in Sierra Leone

Ebola is spreading at a "terrifying rate" in Sierra Leone, with five new infections every hour. In Liberia, the disease has reached every county in the country.

As I wrote last month ( "18-Sep-14 World View -- Will Ebola become a worldwide pandemic?"), it's now likely that the pandemic will run its course in Liberia, and Sierra Leone as well, meaning that all people there will sooner or later become sick with the disease, and either survive or not.

There seems to be a fair amount of anxiety in America, sometimes approaching panic, now that there's an Ebola patient in Texas.

But there is plenty of evidence that countries with good medical infrastructures will be able to control any outbreaks of Ebola. In Nigeria, for example, the country in Africa with the largest population, someone with an Ebola infection arrived by plane in Lagos in July, eventually resulting in 19 confirmed cases of Ebola and eight deaths. Some 900 people who were potentially exposed to the original case and secondary cases were monitored for 21 days. The infection was stopped in Nigeria, and a similar process stopped the infection in Senegal.

The relevant methodology for controlling the spread of Ebola is "contact tracing," which means that potential contacts are located, and their contacts are located, and so forth, with the resulting people monitored for 21 days.

According to CDC Director Tom Frieden:

"Contact tracing is a core public health function. We always err on the side of identifying and tracking more contacts rather than less. Our approach in this type of case is to cast the net widely."

The real danger, not mentioned by Frieden, is that Ebola will spread into a war zone somewhere, where it's impossible to do contact tracing. For example, Ebola infections in Syria and Iraq would be very difficult or impossible to control. Guardian (London) and Bloomberg

(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 3-Oct-14 World View -- Five new Ebola patients become infected every hour in Sierra Leone thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be posted anonymously.) (3-Oct-2014) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 3-Oct-2014 3-Oct-14 World View -- Five new Ebola patients become infected every hour in Sierra Leone

Beach sands become an unlikely business opportunity

Turkey's parliament approves military operations in Syria and Iraq

Five new Ebola patients become infected every hour in Sierra Leone

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 3-Oct-2014
3-Oct-14 World View -- Five new Ebola patients become infected every hour in Sierra Leone