The difference between US and UK Ebola coverage

Ads are enabled in the US. That's confused me multiple times when I've been in the US and got unexpected ads.

You're right. I haven't been taking your age into account. I think what bothers me is that you tend to speak using a lot of generalizations and hyperbole, like your Clinton causing the recession or Americans are 90% fat comments. We definitely share a dislike of government, but I disagree with your comment about Clinton. He may have done some things that had some small influence, but no one can do that single-handedly, nor do I give him complete credit for the good economy during his presidency. I think if you were older you would understand that intuitively.

I saw in the news the other day that a teacher who had stayed in Dallas at the same time that that patient died of ebola was put on leave just for being in the same city because of community concerns. I looked at the comments in the article and most of them were people thinking it was totally unbelievable. Yet there were a few who seemed completely reasonable who thought that it was a good decision "just in case" and a few more who were just silly. Most of us have done enough homework to know that it is not likely to make more than a few people sick, and have better things to worry about.

Yeah we have our share of stupid, ignorant, overzealous, greedy, self centered, etc. people here, but because of the media that's all you see. People on holiday don't always help our reputation, and we use pounds to measure weight instead of Kilograms(or Stone, hehe). Don't let that fool you. If you ever come to the US, I hope you'll take the time to go somewhere untouristy and experience what we're really like.

This is a little misleading. Ebola was not 'discovered' until the 1970s. I has been contained in each of the outbreaks prior to this one due to quick response and the rural location with minimal population. It was recognized as a far more dangerous disease than most, but due to it's rare and unexplained occurances, not much more was done in regard to it.

Diseases like malaria, HIV, and others were much more widely spread and therefore much more deadly due to scale. The international health relief organizations have been spreading vaccinations and information about prevention of the largest killers for decades in an effort to save lives and relieve the suffering of the affected people.

Now Ebola has a real foot hold in several countries in Africa where it has never been seen before. The people in those countries had no plan of action in place, and now the disease is spreading. The percentage of people who die of ebola is many times higher than any of the other diseases that most of the modern world has ever seen.(around 50% with good medical treatment) In 2 of the countries, the number of doctors and nurses who became infected or died early on in the early stages of the outbreak was too much for the health systems in those countries, which began closing hospitals and became unable to provide ANY services to ANYONE for ANYTHING! Total collapse of their health care systems.

When doctors without borders issued warnings about the crisis, there was only limited response by the world. No one was seeing the depth of the problem or how badly out of hand it could become without a large and rapid response from the entire worlds medical system. All of the people who normally respond to this type of problem were already busy helping sick people. Many people have died due to ebola, but not from ebola, because so much of the system required redirection to slow the pace of this horrible (and I mean horrible way to die) disease outbreak.

Bringing humor to something this horrible is not wrong. At this point, any way to get people interested enough in ebola to listen is worth trying. If the people in the emergency room in Texas has been paying attention to the news on ebola, they could have better protected themselves and their community. Maybe even saved the life of their patient.

O.K. I'm done, stop with the fighting and calling each other racists please.

I have to day, it is quite funny. As a Texan I actually think this accurately represents many people's reactions to the 3 (3?) Ebola cases in Dallas. Some people are really freaking out. I found it funny, thanks for posting!

I completely agree with you on that. Looking back on that post, it doesn't make sense to blame that whole recession thing on one guy who was in charge of a huge government made up of tons of people. I fail to see the logic behind my wording it like that, and I hope you realize that I don't actually think like that.

I knew it wasn't hundreds of years, I was just in a rush to type that up (The Walking Dead was on ) and didn't have time to perform a five minute Google search just to get a few date-confirmation thingies. I thought it would be a good idea to say 'hundreds of years'. Dunno why.

Thanks for getting me that information

As a Canadian I feel tore sometimes between siding with British or American opinions/comments. But I tend to side with the Americans due to Britain thinking of us as a burden when we were a colony of Britain. And the US military are kinda the people that protect us. We also tend to help Americans more then Brits. (e.g. During 9/11/01 we let tons of American flights land in Canada. And without that the planes would have had nowhere to go.)

Just wondering, where do you get that impression from? It's not something I would have thought of.

During confederation Britain was more than happy to let us go because we were a financial burden to them. We had a treaty saying no matter how bad we made stuff or how much we sold it for they always had to buy it from us. And keeping soldiers here to protect us from a pending US invasion. Bottom line we were expensive to take care of.

Yet America and Canada have clearly defined their borders. Also - what can the UK do? There is a massive occean in the way of the UK and USA making it difficult to do much.

Canada hasn't really left. It's still part of the Commonwealth. It just left the British Empire to join the Commonwealth

funny but pretty biased...

Not necessarily agreeing or disagreeing with this statement because I am not in a position to comment on that, but I don't think that this is a reason for:

I am not sure about what the financial state was and the burden that everything was to who, but as an Englishman, I can tell you that no matter what the extent of either of the above mentioned were that these shouldn't really shape your supporting of opinions and comments. I love Canada (you would probably know that ), many others in my country and across Britain do too, I am sure that we would never had thought of Canada as a burden, and even if some did, should it really shape the supporting of opinions?

So I suppose what I am trying to say is; support opinions and comments that you actually support deep down, not on financial history

Anyways, this got a bit off track. I think that the video was quite funny, Russell Howard does have a way of making the harsh things in life funny... But it's there for comedy, a laugh, a joke, not to be taken too seriously! The "Adebola" one certainly cracked me up, thanks for sharing Soul!

was going to read rest of the thread, but this simply couldn't wait -_-
Possibly the stupidest thing I have ever read on EMC forums

External Reasons why Canada became its own country

• cancellation of the Canadian-American Reciprocity Treaty (a free trade policy whereby products were allowed into the United States without taxes or tariffs starting in 1854, which was then considered to be beneficial for Canada), in 1865 by the United States, partly as a revenge against Great Britain for unofficial support of the South in the American Civil War
• the U.S. doctrine of Manifest Destiny, the possible threat of invasion from the U.S.--(Canadians had fended off American invasions during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812) increased by the Alaska Purchase of 1867, which was supported on the floor of the U. S. Senate (by Charles Sumner, among others) precisely in terms of taking over the remainder of North America from the British
• the American Civil War, which horrified Canadians and drove many away from any thought of republicanism, along with British actions during the war, and American reactions to Canada
• the Fenian raids
• the Little Englander philosophy, whereby Britain no longer wanted to maintain troops in its colonies.
• political pressure from British financiers who had invested money in the loss-making Grand Trunk Railway
• The Trent Affair

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Confederation
(We've been doing this in History for the past month and I just had a huge unit test on it so I had to know my facts pretty good.) Also I was referring to siding with different country's histories, not current day comments. I like both countries and plan to visit the UK soon.

Lel I love how this somehow turned into a Canada discussion.

Why should any of this influence whether you respect an American opinion more than a British opinion is what I am trying to get at? All of the stuff you have mentioned is in history so it should not heavily impact what side you are on? Surely it should be what you personally feel and not based on history?

And, uh, I don't even know how it got onto this...

"Let's talk about Ebola"
- "Nah we gonna talk about Canada instead"

This guy is funny. Even though ebola is a serious thing he makes a comparison which makes it more relaxed.

The Queen has no real authority here, she is just a figure. If we wanted to make a new law and she opposed the idea, the law would still go through. She hasn't opposed anything we've done, so why remove her to cause conflict?

Not my spaghetti ;-;

Back on track now, this guy is late night host/comedian. They get trendy news or hit ideas and make it into a joke, that's there job. So when you have a thing like Ebola, and tons of people react differently. This is potential comedic gold. They aren't making fun of Ebola hes making fun of how people react to Ebola. And American comedians make fun of British people and UK comedians make fun of American. This guy is trying to make British people laugh that's his audience, Americans think this isn't funny because he insults how Americans are dealing with Ebola. His audience is British so he wants to please British people so he will get money. This could easily be an American comedian making fun of Brits.