We need to help people with ebola in other countries: or else we won’t deserve and won’t get help when the United States is the center of an epidemic.

I am a member of a doctor website called Sermo. I rarely write there, especially after I found advertisements to medical equipment and drug companies saying that they could pay to put announcements and articles on the site and “reach doctors”. Also, apparently some doctors on the site think that it is “safe” to write things. Ha. It’s the internet, silly, the opposite of safe. Your words could get back to your patient, ok?

Anyhow, there was a survey and 75% of the doctors on the site who took the survey (I didn’t)  said we should stop flights from Liberia. I think they are wrong, are not compassionate, and I would cross them off my referral list as discriminatory “I’ve got mine, everyone else can go to hell.” selfish gits. I disagreed and said that the United States could be the center of an epidemic, easily. Could be. Will, some day. We need to treat our international neighbors as we want to be treated.

That being said, I am pleased to see the CDC and United States hospitals now stepping up and getting their hazmat suits on. The rest of us need to NOT PANIC.

If you want to do something, think about your communities emergency preparedness. Are you prepared?

1. Do you have a weeks worth of food, water, medicines, supplies? Do you update the supplies (ok, I have food from 2009. Time to update.)

2.Do you have a weather radio? (http://www.emd.wa.gov/publications/pubed/where_to_get_weather_radios.shtml)

3. Do you have a family meeting point? Do you have an out of state person that the family is to call to check in? That everyone knows about?

4. Have you subscribed to emergency notifications? (http://www.emd.wa.gov/publications/pubed/noaa_weather_radio.shtml)

5. Consider buying your community a shelter box. Or teaming with friends to buy one for the community and another for a disaster area. Our Rotary group buys at least one a year for international disaster relief. (http://www.shelterbox.org/   and http://www.shelterboxusa.org/)

6. Do you have skills? Can you set up a tent, cook food, do medical care, start a fire, build shelter? What skills could stand brushing up? Have you taken a first aid class recently? Have you taught your children these skills? Do you have neighbors that would need help? You would want someone to help your grandmother, who lives four states away. Adopt a local elderly person or couple that you would help……

The picture is my daughter and niece in 2009 in a 19 pound canoe that is very tippy. They only tipped it over on purpose. They both have a lot of skills, some learned at cabins in Ontario, Canada. The cabins are one room and could also be described as shacks: but the kids get to use tools, paddle canoes, start fires, sleep in a tent……

My parents taught care of the tent so well that I have a kelty tent that my sister and I set up, took down and used, and it still does not leak. It is more than 40 years old! Aluminum poles, no shock cords and a fly. Excellent.