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Texas Health Worker Tests Positive For Ebola
Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person to have been diagnosed in the U.S. with Ebola, and who subsequently died of the disease, was treated at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas. Now, in a second diagnosis for the U.S, an unidentified health-care worker from the hospital has tested positive for Ebola as well. According to the linked Reuters story, Texas officials did not identify the worker or give any details about the person, but CNN said it was a woman nurse.
The worker was wearing full protective gear when in contact with Duncan, Texas Health Resources chief clinical officer Dan Varga told a news conference.
"We are very concerned," Varga said. "We don't have a full analysis of all of the care. We are going through that right now."
...
The worker was self-monitoring and has not worked during the last two days, Varga said.
The worker was taking their own temperature twice a day and, as a result of the monitoring, the worker informed the hospital of a fever and was isolated immediately upon their arrival, the hospital said in a statement.
(Also covered by the Associated Press, as carried by the Boston Globe, which notes that "If the preliminary diagnosis is confirmed, it would be the first known case of the disease being contracted or transmitted in the U.S.")
But last week it was reported that Sgt. Michael Monning contracted ebola while trying to get the quarantine order signed.
No, it says a possible second Ebola victim. He didn't actually have the symptoms of Ebola, but felt sick, and since he had been in Thomas Duncan's apartment, he went to get checked out just in case. But his test for Ebola was negative.
Does anyone know how the virus can penetrate a hermetically sealed suit?
It cant, but when the health worker does not use care to disinfect and properly remove the gear, he/she may not as well have worn the suit in the first place.
One of the workers infected in africa admitted that that was the cause of their infection; accidentaly touching their bare skin with the outside of the suit.
AIDS doesn't cause contagious blood, spit, diarrhea, and vomit to go everywhere. Ebola does.
AIDS doesn't infect health care workers who are treating patients unless there's a needlestick or sexual contact. Ebola does, with alarming frequency. Even if you DO have sex with someone with AIDS, it's not 100% that you'll get AIDS.
AIDS can't be spread by sneezing or coughing. It's possible Ebola *is*.
In terms of contagiousness, Ebola seems 10x worse. It's like saying "smallpox is no worse than chickenpox". Maybe if you put them both on a logarithmic plot and back up 50 feet!
--PM
There is virtually nothing (not even Ebola) that can get through basic procedures, even with humans treating them. Even without full isolation, just making sure that direct bodily contact does not occur is enough to stop basically anything - hence why doctors wear rubber gloves even if they digging into your internals with blood everywhere.
Such a thing would be so unbelievably infectious that we'd all have it - planet-wide - within a couple of days. It's just not in the nature of such things to be that infectious. Ebola is actually no worse than AIDS, from what I can tell from a quick search.
There are so many things wrong with this, it is hard to know where to start...
Many diseases are much more infectious than ebola. I recall from medical school that you can catch chicken pox (if you haven't had it or been vaccinated) from the air two hours after a patient has left the room. Influenza is also much more infectious than ebola, which is why is spreads around the world in weeks/months every year.
Fortunately ebola is not nearly so infectious. But if someone is having continuous watery diarrhea and bleeding everywhere (e.g. Ebola) and your job is to roll them over every hour, while they are thrashing around, to clean up their bloody virus-laden excrement, and your only protection is mask/gloves/gown - well, good luck.
HIV requires that you get infected bodily fluid (usually blood) into your own bloodstream, which is much hard than catching Ebola.
So you honestly believe those thousands who got infected licked another's bodily fluids?
Yes. In the countries with widespread Ebola, they have funeral rites that involve touching and kissing the corpse. In some instances, relatives washed the corpse, and then, as a sign of respect, drank the water. These countries have a deep distrust of official authority, including health workers, so there has not been much success at discouraging these traditional practices. Except for a few isolated and quickly contained instances, Ebola has not spread beyond the regions with these practices.
To get to the point that a nurse is infected means that protocol wasn't followed. That it wasn't EVERY nurse and EVERY doctor that touched the patient is quite telling.
We know some details about the nurse that was infected in spain: She touched her face with her hands before disinfecting them.
Yes, protocol wasn't followed. But here's the point: You need to follow protocol 100% of the time to be safe. You only need to make one mistake to be infected. For a virus with such a crazy lethality rate, that's not good. Treating an ebola patient is a lot like playing russian roulette.
Just don't lick it, and you're fine.
Very few of the people who are now dead licked it. Yes, the media loves fear stories and it's overblown, but you're underblowing it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
In some instances, relatives washed the corpse, and then, as a sign of respect, drank the water.
Here's a reference, in case anyone finds that incredible
Also, in some places they don't trust health workers, and actually attack them. They are afraid of the disease, but they are more afraid of the health workers.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Let's see: total number of Ebola Patients in the U.S. is ... 1. Mssr. Duncan is dead and cremated and no longer spreading the disease. So, the answer is "no".
You didn't bother reading the summary or the article, did you? Not just 1, Mr. Duncan. The next victim is the trained, well-equipped health care professional who - despite having far better protection and awareness than the vast majority of people in the world - just tested positive for having caught the virus from him.
What's your point in ignoring that glaring little dose of reality?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Don't let facts get in the way of your rant.
This latest case arose because of a man who arrived in the US like any normal person would. He was not flown under quarantine for treatment, he developed the disease already in the US.
Considering the record so far, it's far safer to fly people back to the US for treatment than to let them arrive on their own even if they show no signs of the disease. This allows us to reach a single conclusion and no other: that Dallas hospital has some explainin' to do.
If your advice had been followed, that man would still have died in the US, infecting this other person, and those who were successfully treated in the US may have died due to not having access to the same level of care.
I had brunch with my friend this morning, who is an MD PhD in infectious disease and works in a BSL-4 laboratory from time to time, so I asked about this.
BSL-4 is a standard that only applies to laboratories, the same standards aren't necessarily applied to clinical environments, and in the case of Ebola are major overkill. Ebola can't travel through the air, so positive pressure suits aren't appropriate, and they still have to be taken on and off, and that's when health workers seem to get infected. People who "test positive" for Ebola are not contagious, only people who have symptoms are, and they can only pass the disease through contact with bodily fluids -- this usually implies touch, since hemorrhagic fevers cause people to give off all kinds of gross effluent, but it's just not like a "virus" one gets from casual contact, like, say, rubella.
The fact is, Ebola isn't that contagious -- HIV is more virulent, and these two are nothing compared to the influenza or SARS. It's bad that health workers can get it, but this is still one person, so on a completely epidemiological basis it's really not a big deal. Characterizing a single case as somehow indicative of the safety of these procedures is sensationalism.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
One problem is to most healthcare workers, all of their training on blood-borne pathogens is geared primarily toward AIDS, unfortunately HIV is a very labile with a fairly high infectious dose, so basically if you do just about anything you kill it and it remains infectious in the environment for minutes to an hour if you do nothing. Ebola on the other hand is a robust virus with a very low infectious dose (1 -10 virus), anything strong enough to guarantee a 99.999% kill rate is going to also dissolve plastic, peel the paint off the walls and corrode any metals to uselessness.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds