African child’s body found in landing gear of C-130
A US military aircraft which landed at Ramstein Air Base in Germany after a circuit of Senegal, Mali, Chad, Tunisia and Sicily was found to have a dead African child in the landing gear from one of those places, I’m guessing. From Reuters;
“At this point, it is unknown where or when the deceased entered the landing gear wheel well,” Kirby said, describing the apparent stow-away as “an adolescent black male, possibly of African origin.”
As concerns swell over an outbreak of the deadly Ebola disease in several African countries, the military also confirmed that the body was tested for communicable diseases. Those tests came up negative.
“The cause of death, as well as the other circumstances surrounding this incident, remains under investigation,” Kirby said, adding the body had been taken to a German facility for an autopsy.
Two Americans have been found to be infected with Ebola in Africa. A Liberian man died of Ebola while he was on a flight. So, you know, aside from the terrorist threat due to lax security in these African airports, but sending Ebola-infected victims on flights to Europe is right out of Tom Clancy novels.
“The aircraft is a rugged aircraft designed to operate in austere locations. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody that security at some of these fields is not going to be at the same level,” Kirby said.
Yeah, well, someone should have noticed a small boy running across the airfield and climbing into the landing gear.
Category: Military issues
Not to put on the tin foil hat but, has a TOD been released yet? i.e. do they know if the child was actually alive when it was placed (entered) the wheele well? Like John said sending viruses to Europe is more in the realm of Clancy novels, however with the current state of wrold affairs….
Not to put on the tin foil hat but, has a TOD been released yet? i.e. do they know if the child was actually alive when it was placed (entered) the wheele well? Like John said sending viruses to Europe is more in the realm of Clancy novels, however with the current state of wrold affairs…. test run?
Sad ending for the child but security should not have been so lax. It could have been a bomb shoved up in the wheel well instead, or a bucket of Ebola infected tissue.
Calm down, people. This isn’t a case of attempted biological warfare. Its the latest in a string of people who stow away in the landing gear compartments on planes. Usually these people are desperate to get out of wherever they’re from. Most of them die unpleasant deaths because wheel wells on planes aren’t pressurized or heated.
Agreed. And if I recall correctly, at most foreign bases where the US doesn’t have a SOFA or other long-term presence, local troops usually perform flightline security – not US troops. So it’s not like we have a great deal of influence over that.
Completely agree this is propbably the case as its the simplest explanation, however it never hurts to be prepaird.
It is only a matter of days or weeks before someone arrives at JFK International Terminal # 4 and sets off the chain reaction!
Honestly, they’d be doing us a favor. JFK loses track of my luggage every damn time.
JFK? Try Border Station: El Paso.
Aircraft that go to remote locations usually have a Raven team on the aircraft to provide security. I see some people heading to the hot seat over this if a team was on that plane.
It doesn’t have to be ebola fever. It could be a mutated form of measles or the flu strain that mutated into the Spanish flu.
The reports that many common diseases are resistant to antibiotics, and the majority of us have no resistance to these diseases, is more disturbing than anything else.
No offense, but West Africa is chock full of Darwin Award candidates… watch ’em try to steal copper cable that’s hooked-up.
Not entirely their own fault, as they have little or no practical education system to speak of.
So you get the intersection of First- and Second-world technology with Third-world unintentional ignorance. The results are all too often tragic.
The ebola virus has been around for quite a while and crops up every few years in one or another region of Africa. The current attention that the virus is getting, and the alarm it is causing in some folks, is due to two Americans contracting it. Both were in Africa working with infected patients. The virus is tranmitted from human to human through sex, open wounds, and the like. The virus is actually not a single strain and some strains are more pernicious than others. To be safe, don’t live among African fruit bats and don’t have sex with pigs or monkeys–at least in Africa–and you’ll be okay.
2/17 Air Cav: not exactly. First recognized case of ebola fever was noted in 1976. While it was doubtless around for a while prior to that, that’s around the same general time frame that HIV was first noted. Both are thought to have made relatively recent “jumps” to humans from the animal kingdom. Recent research points to bats as the likely reservoir species in the wild.
The mortality rate of all variants except ebola Reston and ebola Ivory Coast is thought to be very high – 40-90% is best estimate. Ebola Reston apparently infects but does not cause serious illness in humans. Ebola Ivory Coast has only had one human case, and that one became quite ill but recovered. That’s probably too small a sample from which to draw conclusions.
Ebola is also regarded as being highly contagious. It can – and often is – spread by casual contact with infected and contagious individuals and/or their bodily fluids or feces. Indeed, the traditional “washing of the body” in many African cultures is thought to have been a primary way of spreading the disease.
In short: ebola in a large city – even a large Western city with modern medicine – would be serious bad news. Further, its latency period can be up to 3 weeks, so infected people could travel long distances before becoming symptomatic and contageous. An isolated outbreak could easily become very widespread if not quashed quickly via interception/isolation/quarantine.
Bottom line: serious bad juju.
1000+ infected, 60 infection sites, three countries. This one could get out of hand, easily.
‘The Stand’ by Stephen King. 🙂
Just sayin’. After all, the bubonic plague/Black Death was brought to Europe by traders on ships harboring rats w/fleas, that jumped ship via docking lines. Wiped out major portions of Europe’s population in three separate waves.
There was a retro ‘discovery’ program run in the UK on villages that did not get affected by the Plague. The descendants of those who did not get the Plague, or survived it intact, were found to have a mutated gene that boosted their immune response to Yursenia P. So how many people have that gene in a population group?
The only real way to fight these mutated diseases is to isolate the victims, but if they contract it and don’t know it, and the incubation period is long enough for them to spread it, well…. That’s how the Spanish flu was spread.
The comments at D.U. are comedy gold….
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014858214
…or sheer fucktardery.
I’m trying to narrow it down.
roflmao
Now it’s the US Military’s job to implement anti idiot design in their vehicles to save the lives of idiots breaking the law and doing something incredibly dangerous.
DUer’s are comedic gold.
I would laugh, but it seems that their ideological allies run the country.
I am in awe of the engineering acumen of the morons at the DU. Cameras? Inflatable cushions to fill wheel wells? Wow…
Here’s my source: WHO–not the music group. Neither monkey sex nor fruitbats are within the scope of my expertise.
http://www.who.int/csr/disease/ebola/faq-ebola/en/
Suit yourself. Never figured you as one to accept the UN’s word w/o question, though. (smile)
Seriously: the only reason ebola outbreaks in Africa have been relatively contained is that (1) transportation networks there outside the major cities suck, (2) travel is too expensive for pretty much anyone but the wealthy, and (3) the disease kills off pretty much everyone it infects before they can go very far. It also spreads pretty easily. Remember: sweat is a bodily fluid too, and much of Africa is damned hot, humid, or both – and the villages and towns are crowded, so avoiding contact with someone who might be sick may not be possible if many people fall ill.
Let the virus get loose in a major city in a part of the world with a good transportation network, and those 3 conditions no longer apply. And that’s how you could see a major epidemic IMO.
And here I am trying to avoid undue worry among people. Sweat you say? Well, that’s that. I haven’t announced this publicly but I was recently offered a position as coach of West Africa Basketball team. I guess that’s out, now. Shit.
Any US citizens really have faith in our government to handle a outbreak situation like this? We can’t stop some assholes from crossing our border, but microscopic viruses with all the international travel coming in can be guarded against effectively…..
I’ll be out back digging a hole if anyone wants to join me.
Shades of Tom Clancy’s “Executive Orders”….
I think it was a combination of lax preflight checks/airfield security and some poor soul trying to get out of a 3rd world Shithole.
I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a biological warfare attempt, because anyone who knows about it would know stowing an infected corpse would be ineffectice.
Ebola is nasty. When I did housing inspections I had a homeowner who worked in the health field give me a book called “The Hot Zone”.
It covered some of the Ebola outbreaks. The “Reston” Strain of Ebola was named as such because the outbreak happened in an animal research facility in Reston Va.
The Reston Virus was from monkies in the Phillipines, Fortunately the Reston Virus has not been proven fatal to humans, though one lab worker was infected.
It was a pretty scary few days when it was happening. Of course the public never really knew about it.
One of Ebolas “good” traits is that it kills so quickly that it burns out before it has a chance to spread.
I worked at LAX for 2 years. During that time I was heavily involved in ground handling for one airline. One night after I had gone home, one of our crews was pushing back a 737. There was another crew from another company pushing back a Quantas 747-400. Once Quantas was on the centerline in the alley and was starting engines and preparing for disconnect, a naked guy ran out from the perimeter, climbed the main gear, and disappeared into the wheel well. The Quantas pushback crew did not see him at all. The pushback crew on the neighboring A/C (the 737) saw it and went over and told the Quantas guys what they had seen. The Quantas guys did not believe it. Our guys had to physically show them there was a naked idiot hiding in their wheel well. The LAX FD had to come out, set up a ladder, and jerk the naked guy down out of the wheel well. The would be stowaway wanted to go to Australia to meet in person a gal that he had met online. When he went to buy his ticket, Quantas could not get his credit card to work…. so logically he stripped down, jumped the fence, and climbed up the main gear. If that pushback crew had been all by themselves out in the alley, he would have gone undetected. True story.
http://www.aero-news.net/index.cfm?do=main.textpost&id=bba0d57a-1b08-4000-a1e6-8cf587dc9168
He was a teenager, not a “child”. They make it sounds like he was a 5-year-old or something. Still tragic, but not accurate.
Echoing what Old Dog said above, yes, lax security but WTF kind of pre-flight did the crew do? The wheel well of a C-130 is not 20 feet in the air like it is on a commercial jet liner. IIRC the wheel well is alongside the fuselage about a foot above the ground. How did the crew do a walkaround and not see the kid stuffed into the wheel well? There’ can’t be that much room in there?
I would guess maybe tired crew at the tail end of a long deployment + nighttime departure led to a less-than-thorough pre-flight inspection.
I imagine that there’s a crew chief and/or pilot getting his/her butt reamed out right about now because, as others have pointed out, what if that wasn’t a child but a bomb?