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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.")
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. So long as there's no bodily fluid contact, you're fine.
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.
And, think about it... something THAT infectious, it wouldn't matter - you wouldn't GET to the hospital before you'd infected dozens of people.
Ebola is being blown out of proportion. Sure, it's serious. It's not to be fucked with. But it's just a disease.
I have friends who work on the frontline of medicine - checking samples that come in for everything from cancer to Ebola. Sure, they have precautions. There are grades of danger for particular samples, etc. There are "classes" of labs that handle the more dangerous stuff. But pretty much it's rubber gloves at the end of the day. The chemicals they use to break samples down and analyse them are actually ten times more dangerous than anything they have come in.
Just don't lick it, and you're fine.
As someone who lived through the SARS panic in Asia, I would say no, we're not "there" yet. Apparently it has taken a bit longer than it should have for the rank-and-file health workers in the USA to get clued in on this, but I would venture to say that the number of them who remain unaware of this threat today is approximately zero. If anything, I'd expect to see a lot more "false alarms" than actual infections in the next few weeks.
Once the public is aware, the infection rate will plummet. Because of SARS, I still avoid doorknobs and elevator buttons whenever possible (use your keys, lighter, sleeve, etc. to buffer such contact), it just makes sense to do so. Once the protocols for avoiding Ebola become widely known, this so-called "epidemic" will quickly dissipate.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
The fact that the nurse in Spain, and the one in Dallas both contracted the disease despite wearing full protective gear - and in full knowledge that the patient was infectious - is pretty scarey. You have to imagine that both of those people were fully aware of how dangerous the situation was and were doing their very best to avoid doing anything to compromise their own safety. Clearly we either need better suits or better training, or some kind of a 'buddy system' where two people watch each other to ensure that they don't accidentally do something wrong.
There was a piece on NPR a few days ago that said that the Doctors Without Borders people use a buddy system like this - and despite having hundreds of people on the ground in Africa for a month or more, have only had three staff infections.
Without some improved level of protection, asking doctors and nurses to expose themselves to a disease with a 70% mortality rate (latest WHO estimate...up from 60%), no immunization and no known cure, is asking a lot. Clearly we aren't going to be able to make a vaccine or a cure in any reasonable timescale - so we really need to be working hard to improve protection. The idea of using robots for at least some of the jobs is interesting - but probably impractical for all but the simplest tasks.
We know that this disease can spread exponentially the "base reproduction" figure (the number of people who catch the disease from one infected person) is between 1.7 and 2.3, and it takes 2 to 3 weeks for the infected person to develop symptoms and pass it on. So there is a potential for the disease to double every 3 weeks. We have just a couple of victims in the USA right now, so in a year, we could have a million victims and 700,000 deaths. Clearly, we have to reduce that base reproduction number below 1.0 - but if...with proper protection gear and highly aware workers...both the Spanish and Dallas initial cases were able to spread to one additional victim, we're clearly not going to get anywhere close to a 1.0 rate anytime soon.
What I don't understand: Wouldn't it be possible to put the wearer through a disinfectant decontamination shower before he or she takes off the suit?
well no, I bet a dollar there was a tear in his suit. Simplest explanation is always right.
Be prepared to lose a dollar. The protocol for donning and removing the protective gear is very complex, and very hard to get perfect. When putting the suit on, it's possible to get gaps between the goggles and suit without even knowing it.
Goggles?! - Proper biohazard suits are full-body and pressurized, with a full-head hood and absolutely
no openings in the vicinity of the head. Or any place on the front side of the body for that matter.
And when taking it off, a tiny flap of the contaminated suit brushing against a clean surface is almost impossible to detect.
Eh, again? - There's a multi-step decontamination procedure before taking off the suit.
Taking off a still-contaminated suit would be a major fuckup, and a (potentially) contaminated suit should never
be in an environment where any "un-suited" contact can happen.
Have a look at how this works at the BSL-4 level (skip to about minute 13).
What kind of amateurs are running this place?
For example, Ebola has made this transition to airborne transmission before. Influenza has been transmitted by diarrhea before. Bubonic Plague is another disease that has managed the transition to airborne transmission. And of course, AIDS was readily transmitted by blood transfusion and shared needle use even though that's not its original mode of transmission. So there's four examples right there, including Ebola itself.
The variety of Ebola that is suspected of being transmittable via small particle dispersal is the Reston variant. It has not been proven that the Reston variant is transmittable by small particle aerosol dispersion, just suspected. It's worth noting that the Reston variant is not pathological in humans. No humans who have acquired it have become ill. The presence of influenza virus in children's diarrhea is not necessarily a new mode of transmission. It may have always been present but no one looked for it until very recently. Just as influenza has shown up in bird shit since forever, it doesn't seem unreasonable that it might be present in the diarrhea of children. From what I've been able to find out it does not appear that influenza has mutated and is being transmitted through a new mode. Pneumonic plague is not a new mode of transmission, and the bacterium that causes it is the same as the one that is transmittable by insect bites. Besides, plague is not a virus. AIDS has always transmitted via bodily fluids. Blood transfusions and shared needles are still transfer by bodily fluid.Every virus that can survive in the blood is transmittable by these means by default. None of the examples that you provided qualify as an example of a virus changing its mode of transmission.
I don't want to misattribute something to the CDC, but what I read was glaringly clear on this point.
What the unnamed party said, was, "there HAD to be a breach of protocol, because this person is infected. However, we haven't identified what the breach was yet"
Circular reference?
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