this might not work too well

They are far too slow and invasive to use in mass screening settings.

Can anybody decode that sentence for me?

The infrared thermometers have been studied in very rigorous

From that paper:

"Depending on the manufacturer, NCITs are held between 1.2 and 6 inches (3-15 cm) from the body."

And my point was that a cheap IR thermometer, shooting from three feet away, is not going to make a useful temperature measurement.

Being foul and obnoxious is a poor substitute for being right.

No, but I did not say it. Blobbs did.

How do you know? Have you tried it?

ow

Easy enough. Because you don't know much about anything that you haven't ac tually worked on, you assume that everybody else is equally ignorant about areas in which they haven't specialised.

t-guidance.pdf

Nobody has identified the IR thermometer yet, so claiming that the unit in the image you posted is "cheap" is a stretch. And what counts as a useful t emperature measurement in a preliminary mass screening does depend on what happens next.

I'm not sure that the two image show the same device. In the second image, the trigger is clearly red, and in the first what you can see of the trigge r looks more like grey. The colour-scheme is the same, and the design style , but the proportions don't seem to be exactly the same.

But you do have a habit of being foul and obnoxious. Being right is somethi ng you manage less often.

On Thu, 09 Oct 2014 23:44:59 -0400, rickman Gave us:

IF you DID know ANYTHING about IR temperature measurements, and you don't... THEN you would know that three feet of air is a problem, and especially for the fresnel lensed device.

IF it had real optics, THEN it could make an AVERAGED poll of a specific spot size, based on its FOV. Even that for one single degree FOV at three feet becomes a 2" spot size. That "spot" image is what gets averaged. That is why when it is at the minimum distance, the spot is the smallest, and the accuracy is the highest. But THAT is for REAL, true optical devices. These fresnel based things do not even perform at that level.

Specifically, precise, reliable skin temp measurements meant to be extrapolated into body temperature, MUST have a regimented procedure for taking it, and a laboratory grade tool for doing it.

IN the EAR, JUST LIKE the DOCTORS do it. WITH a proper device MEANT FOR THAT purpose.

Anything else is pure bullshit, and imagery then becomes the most reliable, because it shows definitive differences in a mass of people with normal temperatures, when one traipses through with an elevated temperature.

Using a non-calibrated, non-laboratory grade, non-instrumental, pseudo-reference-only device is... well... the description says it. Not a single reading can be relied on.

From 3 feet away?!!!

One CANNOT rely one such a method or tool!

Pattern recognition to pick out the temperature of the eye socket against the nose would be the simplest rough approximation. MkI human eyeball watching the display and telling floor walkers who to pull.

Using the people in the field of view as a crude calibration reference allows some compensation for the inevitable slop and drift with ambient temperatures. You only need to spot those that are too different.

It could quickly reach a stage where to contain it they have to quarantine anyone found with a fever just to be sure.

That is the problem with any mass screening. I am fairly convinced that it will produce far too many false positives of people with fever from seasonal flu to be any use. But it is more likely to be useful that the stupid questionnaire that UK "advanced screening" will utilise. Anyone who thinks they might be delayed by answering truthfully will simply lie. They personally have nothing to lose.

It is about useful as asking people on the US entry card "do you intend to kill the president and overthrow the US government". It is widely joked that only an American would be dumb enough to answer truthfully.

It is a bit worrying that a UK citizen appears to have expired of suspected Ebola in Macedonia yesterday. It may already be here!

If I lived in Liberia and knew that I'd been seriously exposed to ebola, and thought I might be having symptoms, I'd do whatever it takes to get on a plane to the US or Europe, where I'd have a better chance of surviving. Taking an Advil, or holding a cold coke can in your hand, should do it.

er

What makes you think that? Ebola seems to kill about half the people it inf ects, wherever you are. In the US and Europe people talk about "untested tr eatments" but there's - as yet - no convincing evidence that any of them wo rk. Travelling doesn't help your immune system, which does seem to be what make s the difference between the 50% who survive and the 50% who don't.

Taking any non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) would probably beat the test, but you can have the infection without having a fever - the guy who just died in the US didn't show fever symptoms until 10 days after he a rrived, which is consistent with the known range of incubation periods - fr om 2 to 21 days.

Mass screening, perhaps, but not for screening everyone coming into the country. Stick the thing in their ear when they go through customs. OK, so the fed has to buy a couple of thousand of them. BTW, they're talking about 150 people coming into the country PER DAY from that part of the world.

OK, this explains how it works:

From the finger position, it looks like the agent is trick shooting over his shoulder.

Now there's apparently a 2nd case in Dallas, TX. Everyone on the news is saying there must be a breach in the protocol. Some reports border on claiming the nurse in question was negligent.

I want to know: Has anybody considered that this nurse might have been exposed during the first victim's INITIAL visit to the hospital? You know, the time when they just sent him home with some antibiotics?

I guess the media is either too stupid to ask this question, or they just don't want to scare the shit out of everyone. Let's just blame it on the nurse....

Several reports state very clearly that it was on his second visit to the hospital that the nurse was in contact with the patient. Don't you think than anyone else on the planet is smart enough to figure out he may have been infectious on his first visit? I'm sure if she was anywhere around him on the first visit the hospital would have that info and would be sharing it.

I would like to think the hospital knows, but I'm not so sure.

As for smart people on the planet, sadly, they are in the very tiny minorit y. Also, you might have to put journalists into a separate (um, special) categ ory from the rest of us when it comes to asking intelligent questions. Did you happen to see Wolf Blitzer's performance on Jeopardy! Enough said.

Regardless, with a 3-week incubation time, I am curious to understand how i t is they "know" transmission occured after the first patient was admitted, and not simply as a result of his first visit. Unless, the nurse in quest ion had that day off? Or, I don't know what? I'm not an expert on this... .

But it's still in inescapable fact that the hospital initially let the guy go home. If they can't detect a full-blown Ebola case, you do sort of have to question their "certainty" regarding the nurse's infection timeline.

If it was on the news, I just must have missed it. My post isn't really about hosptial right or wrong, just that I didn't see any reporting that questioned the nurse's infection timeline - and it seeme d an obvious question to me.

So why don't you contact the hospital about it? I don't know why you expect the news media to do that sort of research. They report the news, not second guess the authorities.

The odds at present are about 70% fatality in the third world since lack of supportive measures and an overstretched medical service makes even basic rehydration problematic. Strikes me though they are missing a trick if people who have survived Ebola are truly immune afterwards they should be able to work in hazardous areas with less protection. (unfortunately such people carry a huge stigma and become unemployable)

Fatality is about 50% in the first world (and perhaps less if you can get the cost no object experimental drug which has now run out).

We now know that the two out of three containment treatment centres that have dealt with an Ebola case outside Africa have failed to contain it. That means on a Bayesian estimate that the transmission rate in a modern hospital care setting with trained barrier nursing and full PPE is ~2/3. The UK was essentially done by complete isolation of the patient from the carers inside a glove box. It could well be that no other PPE is sufficiently user proof for working with Ebola patients.

Even if the gear is perfect and the cause of a breach is that people make mistakes this still doesn't bode well for containing it. It is known that the medics form a high proportion of cases in Africa.

I notice that the suits are blaming the nurses for breach of protocol.

We have a couple of weeks to wait yet to see what the transmission rate is in the general population from the index case becoming infective.

On our news it said there was exactly one such bed available in London... But there were other cities that might have one too, in case of emergency.

I also noticed they said it was "hard" to follow the protocol correctly. Translation: expect breaches to happen. I expect that as the number of cases in the US rises, we will improve at treating patients without the staff becoming infected.

On Mon, 13 Oct 2014 23:22:02 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman Gave us:

Ummm... No. You only have two, and their proper function is quite questionable.

You cannot even post into Usenet correctly. Pretty stupid, BillyTard.