Ebola Virus

smr wrote:This outbreak is starting to get out of control.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/08/23/ebola-spreads-in-nigeria-liberia-has-1000-cases/14489251/

The US media is beginning to report on this subject.

Danish media reports that health officials in the areas with a high density of indigents, are saying that the number of people currently infected is virtually unknowable, as the people are to poor or too ignorant to go to health centers.
In other words there are infected people; virtual bio-time bombs, laying sick at home, being tended by; and infecting, family and friends.

hi cythia,

My main point was the peat etc in a bucket or chamber pot or commode as contrasted with the usual latrine method which stinks to high heaven, has loads of bugs, and is just disgusting. If one's water goes out and one cannot use the usual plumbing, the carbon dry added to one's donations sure beats the alternatives.

Now diluted pee and ashes do help the garden, esp tomatoes, but added in autumn, not in spring. Thoroughly letting Nature process this stuff is crucial to hygiene. For solid matter one year is the minimum compost time. One year. Then - and only then - is it hygienically safe. If I did not know the health of all donors I would let it sit 2 years just to be safe. In a properly built compost pile, not just tossed somewhere.

For a true marsh treatment site or whatever like that research would need to be done, which I have not done beyond casually reading an article now and then. I kow marsh treatment can work if done correctly. Those interested should research it. My personal focus is just as an emergency backup to normal plumbing.

Bucket and bag of peat in the garage is one of those just in case things that hurts nothing, is fairly cheap and easy to do, and if one ever needs it one will be soooo glad one has it.

Folks may notice I am fairly big on cheap and easy and hurts nothing to do it. Won't hurt, might help sometime, along with how much would I really really wish I had it should events make the item in question something I'd sooo wish I had. I'm not interested in going overboard or into debt or any of that. One should do what one feels comfortable with, what comforts and is affordable to the person or family. It's a bit of peace of mind. eh. That's all.

In San Francisco, their is a lady that created a system to use the sewage and waste water of a home to fertilize the lawn. The process takes the sewage and waste water and treats it so it can be used to water the lawn. This was in response to the high water rates for watering the lawn. Currently, she is being sued by the water company!

I will have to research more on this topic but I know I can only use these type of ideas in Unincorporated areas or outside city limits. It's the same idea of installing wind turbines or solar panels on my current property...it's illegal according to my home owner's association and the city of Houston, TX, USA. To be fair, I probably can get the city of Houston's permission but the home owner's association will never allow it. A neighbor had both solar panels and wind turbine for power generation and the HOA made them remove it from the property.

Interesting story. Here there were a number of complaints because of caveats. When you bought a house site in a new development there would be caveats on the contract that restricted you from some actions. The most ridiculous one I heard of was mandatory dark roofs (in a sub tropical climate). This type of stupidity has now been banned by law, so in stand alone dwellings at least they can't stop you putting on solar panels, but wind turbines must pass a noise test. Our sewage and waste water systems discharge into a well buried rock filled trench, so the area of yard above is always the greenest. After 40 years the wildlife (kangaroos, wallabies and bandicoots) graze there by preference so no ecological damage.

smr wrote:In San Francisco, their is a lady that created a system to use the sewage and waste water of a home to fertilize the lawn. The process takes the sewage and waste water and treats it so it can be used to water the lawn. This was in response to the high water rates for watering the lawn. Currently, she is being sued by the water company!

I will have to research more on this topic but I know I can only use these type of ideas in Unincorporated areas or outside city limits. It's the same idea of installing wind turbines or solar panels on my current property...it's illegal according to my home owner's association and the city of Houston, TX, USA. To be fair, I probably can get the city of Houston's permission but the home owner's association will never allow it. A neighbor had both solar panels and wind turbine for power generation and the HOA made them remove it from the property.

Daryl wrote:Interesting story. Here there were a number of complaints because of caveats. When you bought a house site in a new development there would be caveats on the contract that restricted you from some actions. The most ridiculous one I heard of was mandatory dark roofs (in a sub tropical climate). This type of stupidity has now been banned by law, so in stand alone dwellings at least they can't stop you putting on solar panels, but wind turbines must pass a noise test. Our sewage and waste water systems discharge into a well buried rock filled trench, so the area of yard above is always the greenest. After 40 years the wildlife (kangaroos, wallabies and bandicoots) graze there by preference so no ecological damage.

smr wrote:In San Francisco, their is a lady that created a system to use the sewage and waste water of a home to fertilize the lawn. The process takes the sewage and waste water and treats it so it can be used to water the lawn. This was in response to the high water rates for watering the lawn. Currently, she is being sued by the water company!

I will have to research more on this topic but I know I can only use these type of ideas in Unincorporated areas or outside city limits. It's the same idea of installing wind turbines or solar panels on my current property...it's illegal according to my home owner's association and the city of Houston, TX, USA. To be fair, I probably can get the city of Houston's permission but the home owner's association will never allow it. A neighbor had both solar panels and wind turbine for power generation and the HOA made them remove it from the property.

Hi all,

You both give the reasons why we have avoided anywhere with a HOA like unto the plague, bunch of twits too often. We have two acres, semi-rural, old farmhouse circa 1870-ish. Congenial neighbors all around. Like minded on most things. No problems. Most yards have high old shrub and tree borders, which surely helps with the congenality.

Grey water and sewage are two very different things. Grey water is like from your kitchen sink and washing machine etc. Black water is sewage and it needs careful and well thought out handling. Dumping it on the lawn is NOT a good idea. It isn't only germs, it is medications and other stuff people dump sown the drain.

Another thing to consider is water from your shower, if it has been situated right, rinses solid matter out of your drain pipes. Get too chary with the rinse out and you can get some really foul backup problems. No, we have not had this problem because our plumbing was done correctly. We grey water the laundry into the yard, and are careful with the laundry detergent we use etc to be benign, but the bathrooms and kitchen go through the septic system, all of it. To keep things rinsed out.

Interestingly, Bill Gates funded a sort of X prize contest to create a waterless toilet for third world nations without working sewage systems. That sort of technology would be useful here where there is poor or limited infrastructure or the infrastructure is under a lot of stress (California abandoned many of its water projects in the late 1970's and early 80's under the influence of the Green movement. Cali currently has about enough water for a population of 25 to 30 million people, not the 40 million they have now).

More on that here: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/media-ce ... -challenge

Septic systems are quite common out where I live. We even have one that goes through our garden and lawn (about an acres worth of coverage) and we just can't stop everything grwoing. It goes into a holding tank with a filter and bacteria, and detritus free water comes out the other side, into the buried spreader pipes.
A bit expensive to install, but cheap compared to the cost of a sewage hookup to where we live....

smr wrote:In San Francisco, their is a lady that created a system to use the sewage and waste water of a home to fertilize the lawn. The process takes the sewage and waste water and treats it so it can be used to water the lawn. This was in response to the high water rates for watering the lawn. Currently, she is being sued by the water company!

I will have to research more on this topic but I know I can only use these type of ideas in Unincorporated areas or outside city limits. It's the same idea of installing wind turbines or solar panels on my current property...it's illegal according to my home owner's association and the city of Houston, TX, USA. To be fair, I probably can get the city of Houston's permission but the home owner's association will never allow it. A neighbor had both solar panels and wind turbine for power generation and the HOA made them remove it from the property.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/08/30/journalists-got-their-hands-on-an-islamic-state-computer-what-they-found-in-the-hidden-files-is-terrifying/

If people remember, I posted a link about a group of men that invaded a clinic and kidnapped all the patients along with medical instruments that were being used to treat the Ebola victims. The first thought was that this clinic had been intentionally targeted for nefarious reasons like weaponizing Ebola as an attack on various western countries. I hope I am wrong and it's just a mob that attacked the clinic but that's what I do if I was fighting a world wide jihad!

Without proper precautions and the right sort of lab setup, the only thing radical Islamists are going to kill with ebola is themselves.

What is more ominous in my my mind is how come the story seems to have simply dropped off the radar? Things are still changing and evolving over there, and there must be some mechanism to track the progress of the disease (even if it is to eavesdrop on cell phone conversations listening for keywords like sickness, disease, fever or death...the NSA apparently has no difficulty listing for keywords like TEA Party on the phones and emails of Americans).

Knowledge is power, so the more we know the better prepared we will be.

Thucydides wrote:Without proper precautions and the right sort of lab setup, the only thing radical Islamists are going to kill with ebola is themselves.

What is more ominous in my my mind is how come the story seems to have simply dropped off the radar? Things are still changing and evolving over there, and there must be some mechanism to track the progress of the disease (even if it is to eavesdrop on cell phone conversations listening for keywords like sickness, disease, fever or death...the NSA apparently has no difficulty listing for keywords like TEA Party on the phones and emails of Americans).

Knowledge is power, so the more we know the better prepared we will be.

I am (sort of) reminded of the Tom Clancy books Executive Orders and, to a lesser extent, Rainbow Six, both of which featured plans by extremists (Islamic in the first, environmentalists in the second) to utilise bio-warfare in terrorist actions.

Clancy also predicted the use of jumbo jets as the means of launching a suicidal strike (used by the so-called Islamists on Sep 11th, 2001) in his book Debt Of Honor. He even got in trouble with the American Government for being too accurate regarding submarines in his book The Hunt For Red October. We can only hope that his bio-plague scenarios never occur in real life.