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Positive Ebola Test In Second Texas Health Worker
mdsolar tips news that a second healthcare worker at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital has tested positive for the Ebola virus. Like the nurse who tested positive a few days ago, this worker was involved in providing care to Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who seems to have brought the virus into the country. The CDC is working to identify further exposures to the local community, though the Times says a second infection among the 70+ medical professionals who were around Duncan is not unexpected. The largest U.S. nurses union says a lack of proper protective gear and constantly changing protocols are to blame for exposures. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization says infection rates in West Africa are such that within a few months, they can expect 10,000 new Ebola cases a week. They also say the death rate for the current outbreak has risen to 70 percent.
Will someone just tell me if it's time to panic or not?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
This has shown us that we have no idea how to handle any sort of outbreak.
Why?
If you aren't involved in healthcare, don't. Ebola spreads by contact with infected fluids, and is fairly difficult to spread. The competent healthcare infrastructure of the US, and generally better sanitary practices, means that we actually are able to quarantine infected individuals and slow the spread of the disease. The main worry is that the infected countries will keep sending us a few infections every few months or so for the press to talk about.
If you are a healthcare worker, you should worry, because much of the containment protocols necessary to keep YOU from getting sick aren't always being followed. Remember: If you are going to be handling Ebola anything, you need protective gowns and masks at all times.
If you have actually contracted Ebola and survived, hold off on sex for a few months.
This goes to show how much we rely on so-called experts in this area and they have no fucking clue what they're doing. The CDC, the NIH should have been all over that hospital. This is not a lab experiment, and until they can come up with the protocols to assure healthcare workers safety then they need to start quarantining all people who come in contact with a contagious patient or sending them to a standardized facility where the risks to the public can be minimized.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Personally, I'm wondering when it's going to burn itself out. January? March? June of next year? One would think, given the mortality of Ebola, EVERYONE involved or near it, would start behaving accordingly and taking appropriate actions to mitigate persistent spread. Even in the lesser educated, and uninformed West Africa, they have to start changing behavior at some point, right?
Do you work for the CDC or NIH? Or do you take your talking points from the vapid tripe spewed by the media?
The family of the guy who died is already playing the race card. They are complaining he received sub standard care because he was African.
Two doctors in Cairns, Australia were stood down over critical comments of the hospital's handling of a suspected Ebola case. Cairns and Hinterland Hospital and Health Service Chief Executive Julie Hartley-Jones said “These comments undermined the fantastic job our staff have done in managing this case, caused needless community concern and were ill-informed."
The health service is investigating - not their Ebola procedures - the investigation is disciplinary in nature.
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2014/10/13/19/38/doctors-stood-down-after-cairns-ebola-scare
I worked in an IT department in a hospital and even I had to go through biohazard and infection protection training. These workers came into contact with the patient's bodily fluids. That's sort of frowned upon for medical professionals. Forget ebola. Under normal circumstances, they could now have hepatitus, AIDS, or basically anything else. People this careless are a time bomb. Ebola was just the one that got them.
The sick ones face almost certain death yet they entered the area without even knowing how to cure it.
When shit happens on spaceship and you don't know how to deal with it, you seal the gate between parts and forget it. That's how the rest would survive.
Working as a nurse means making around 42k a year, and thats assuming you're an RN . Hospitals rely primarily on less educated LVN or licensed vocational nurses because theyre less expensive, with a handfull of RN's spread amongst the floors to handle more complex procedures or incidents and perform mentoring as necessary. a nurses hours are commonly quite random, and physicians are rarely consistent in their protocols with the RN or LVN especially when a major incident is being handled. Private hospitals can also be a pain in the ass as theyre run like a corporation and dont enjoy having to purchase advanced personal protective gear or endure visits from the CDC, a regulatory agency that might also stop to challenge their #1 or #2 status in some patient treatment service theyve plastered on every billboard in the state.
another problem with private hospitals is with enough patient deaths and worker infections, the marketing perception of the for-profit healthcare facility changes from competent and caring to killing field. Hospitals themselves may become increasingly unwilling to actually treat ebola patients, instead opting for end of life and infectious quarantine management.
Good people go to bed earlier.
...what gives us any reason to believe that these procedures will work with more than one patient or even significantly more?
If containment requires much more stringent procedures, facilities and protection than what was used in Dallas, it somehow seems even less reassuring because the more complex the protocol the harder it is to scale.
I've never been worried about the disease so much as I have this kind mindset that seems to be promoted about how "hard" the disease is to spread "if you follow procedures". While true on paper, the reality seems to be different and I think a mindset trying to downplay risk, panic, etc has led to a dangerously lax attitude.
i modded this funny, i'm assuming it's satire
So he has exposed two people (so far that we know) to this disease and they have a 70% chance of dieing...but thats should be fine because he is/was African. Seriously, STFU people. Race isn't an issue here. He was an idiot that was with an infected lady who died from ebola as well as other people that were around here that died as well. Then he decides to hope a plane and come to the US. Brilliant!
The CDC should have been all over the hospital jurisdiction or no jursdiction. People's lives are on the line.
It's quite evident that in the US there are people who can handle ebola. These people were not in Texas, and the stupid hospital admins did not realize that they needed the help. Regardless of that, it's been demonstrated that help has to be forced upon any hospital handling Ebola whether they like it or not.
--PM
They contracted ebola in the USA. Which means these ebola viruses is natural born US Ebola viruses, invested with more constitutional rights than an alien undocumented ebola virus. So these viruses must be given their due process. So it would take longer to process them.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Aboujt 1 /week. I think more people are killed by hammers than Ebola.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Are these russian drugs Psilocybin based, or are they Lysergic acid dyethylamide based? If it's the first, the trails will be shorter, and the strength of other hallucinatory experiences won't be as intense.
If the Onion is right, I think we're still like 46 white people away from a cure.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Exterminate the brutes.
Try hiring an American for once instead of some cheap ass Asian import.
It used to be back during the days when terrestrial broadcast television was king, that the FCC mandated that stations produce a certain % of public service programming. That's the reason we ever had television news reporting in the first place. Or educational kids shows that weren't just half-hour commercials for the latest toys and sugary breakfast cereals.
Then we went to cable, which doesn't have the same regulation, removing the public service programming mandate. From that point everything was driven purely by the capitalistic profit motive.
So instead of filling the multiple 24 hour news channels with thoughtful, in-depth reporting, we've got CNN screaming OMGWTF every five minutes trying to grab attention.
See, the Invisible Hand makes everything better. Do not blaspheme the hand.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The failures of this hospital in dealing with a novel and gravely serious situation are in no way indicative of remarkably incompetent individuals or sub-standard hospital policies.
Even the most complete training cannot provide experience. Day to day work in a hospital is boring and routine, and when faced with the unknown people are going to fall back on that routine, not what they were trained to do briefly and long ago. Nurses who haven't dealt much with explosive diarrhea or projectile vomiting won't have practice being meticulous about preventing splatter on every part of their skin or porous clothing. Simply telling someone to be careful and then sending them off unsupervised and unaided isn't terribly effective.
Hospitals cannot afford to maintain a full wardrobe of gear to deal with even one Ebola patient throughout the course of treatment, nor are they set up to dispose of that gear at the rate it piles up after use. Adequate supplies will need to be provided on a reactive (not proactive) basis. Protocols, however, simply assume that the gear is there and ready to be used by people well versed in their use. It doesn't do any good to have well thought out procedures in place if it isn't possible or practical to implement them.
People who blame the nurses, or the hospital, or the patient are holding them up to an unreasonable standard. These people are not special. They're not clowns and they're not villains. They're just normal folk reacting the way normal folk will, and neither the CDC nor anyone else has some magic wand to wave to prevent this exact same scenario from playing out the next time. It's unfortunate, but it is manageable and we should focus on making sure the right lessons are learned from it.
Some interesting viewing, somewhat related: http://www.ted.com/talks/atul_... http://thedailyshow.cc.com/vid...
Avoid people projectile vomiting or with explosive diarrhea .
And Texas Presbyterian hospital.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Not yet. It is not good news that a second doctor/nurse got ebola considering we are being told it is not easy to get ebola. It will be if others outside the hospital workers get ebola. Was not a perfect seal suits, but it shows it not as hard to get as they are saying it is.
I would set it to "worry" state until there have been no new cases for..... 3 weeks? or however long it takes to show the signs of ebola in new people. And that would only be for the Dallas area.
What is it with you idjits?
Have you decided to cater to the t-boppers (script-kiddies) exclusively? This method of beta-pushing is stupid, and will alienate any of us who have a lawn.
Here's the deal: When someone chooses "Classic", the server should serve the classic slashdot, irregardless of the
pressures from the new owners, advertisers, or federales.
The classic view, when chosen, should display ALL classic: comments, topics and such, NOT the F^&#@%! BETA!
Now, get off my lawn and put Coke in a bottle.
"If it turns into a real mess, all it would take is Rich people fearing for their own lives to put up the money to start mass producing this drug. Also, it appears the Russians have a few drugs starting trails as well."
Isn't it the job of the federal gob't to pony up the money in cases like this when it's a public health issue, and a potential national security issue? Is this not what we pay taxes for?
God knows they spend money on all kinds of less minor crap.
And the BS involved, I've been wondering for years why they'd *WANT* to be in the US.
They aren't called the 'Lone Star State' without reason. If you really don't know why, you might want to go read up on the Alamo and the surrounding situations that prevented them from immediate statehood or at least military support when they requested it. Another example of our bureaucracy at its finest.
That said the Texas of the 80s and before was a much more colorful place than it is now. A lot more rebellious too (I have multiple family in the southern parts of the state who will vouch about the sheriffs being suspicious of you if you DIDN'T have an open container in the vehicle, and various similar shenanigans.)
It's called an irresponsible Administration allowing people from countries with active Ebola outbreaks to waltz on into the U.S. as if they were going to Disney World. Basic flight restrictions should have been in place since the beginning of the outbreaks.
Hospitals in the U.S. have had little training in such virulent diseases and very few have the high level isolation units and gear required to prevent further infections.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The mathematics of the problem of Ebola propagation are clear. So are reasonable responses to limit propagation chances. But we let politics decide against science. Who are the science-deniers now?
http://pjmedia.com/richardfern...
"second infection among the 70+ medical professionals who were around Duncan is not unexpected"
But if every infection were to lead to someone having 70+ medical professionals around them, and each of these results in two more cases then you soon have exponential growth.
The only way to reduce the spread is for each infected person to infect on average fewer than one person.
Navy seals and other properly trained soldiers get shot, blown up, drowned, captured, etc. It's not necessarily their fault for not doing what they were trained to do, it's just that sometimes all the training in the world won't help. Hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, and simple stormy weather take lives every despite people doing everything right. Vegan marathon runners still get heart attacks and cancers. These nurses have not contracted the illness due to police academy level negligence, they were overcome by events, period - end of story. And they deserve your respect and admiration for risking their lives in the attempt to save one and prevent many others from falling to the same fate.
Your flippant condemnation strikes me as the arrogance of politicos whose greatest risk to life in many many years has always been the daily commute, yet still find ways to hang honest heros out to dry.
Not "seems", but "confirmed". Let's not sugar coat this.
I've just got to think that doing whatever to get folks ramped up would be easier with a nationalized health care system, if for no other reason than that checking for training compliance would be easier without needing to traverse the unholy, interlocking mess of hospitals, care homes, independent practitioners, practice groups, independent contractors, and associated hangers on that currently provide the "first responders" to this emergency.
Free marketeers couldn't have shot themselves in the foot better if they tried. The only problem is that they shot all of you in the foot at the same time. And none of this "the market isn't completely free" crap argument either - we theoretically have a more "free" market than just about any other country in the world. How is this "freedom" helping during this emergency? Because, as of now, all I see is that disseminating training, tracking providers and patients, and doing anything useful clinically has been made about a bazillion times more complicated by this vaunted "freedom".
That is all.
....We are soo fucked......and soo many people are oblivious to the real state of things.....
First off Ebola is not the one that will wipe out humanity, IMHO....There will be a large number of deaths, mostly in Africa, but it will burn itself out.
There is no way any nation is ready or able to contain an outbreak (of ebola or anything else for that matter), but we are lucky enough that Ebola is not as easily transmissible as the flu. Now something such as avian flu is a real cause for concern.....
If H5N1 evolves to allow human to human transmission we are in serious trouble (60% mortality rate).
In any case, whatever the next big pandemic will be is irrelevant. What is relevant is the lies all governments spread about being ready for x y or z. Which is total and utter BS they spread as to reassure the cattle (us) so there is no widespread panic. No medical system in the world is capable of coping with MILLIONS upon MILLIONS of patients all getting sick within a short time frame. Talks of isolation and quarantine are also full of shit as the SARS outbreak has shown us, as H1N1 and now Ebola....they cannot contain shit (and think about it logically, how could they unless they tracked each and every single human being on the planet). They want you to believe you are being kept safe, that your tax money is being spent on protecting you.....Truth is the only reason we have not had a major pandemic since 1918 (with a high mortality %) is........luck......Not our advanced medical tech`, not government planning and management, none of that...just plain dumb luck......
IV treatment IV vitamin C with sodium ascorbate is a powerful, less known antiviral treatment, stonewalled out of conventional medicine for ca 75 years http://seanet.com/~alexs/ascor... .... See also
Injectable C http://injectablevitaminc.com/...
Cathcart http://orthomolecular.org/libr...
and Klenner. http://www.doctoryourself.com/...
or read Tom Levy's book, Curing the Incurable:Vitamin C, Infectious Diseases, and Toxins
The more severe the virus, higher and more frequent doses used. As support for nasty viral illnesses overseas that have no vaccine, we also take zinc, 50,000 iu of vitamin D3 for 1-2 weeks, lysine and 200-400 mcg selenium. With Ebola, the real question will be when the last chance for a given level of IV vitamin C treatment (gram C/kg wt) 2-3-4 times per day will work, and when it will be too late - too little.
I've already been in a 3rd world situation where people look like over made actors in a sci fi movie with lots and lots of big pustules...and IV vitamin C worked well from the first infusion crusting over in ~8 hours vs 8 more days, over it in several days, so don't yak at me about iffy imagination stuff. However, I believe ignorance and cupidity are mankind's norm.
Let's see:
* allocate 70+ people to care for one patient
* no hazmat suits
*after daily caregiving of an extremely contagious and deadly person,
_ go home (too costly to keep the nurses separate for a few weeks)
_ kiss kids good night on the lips (hospital would not pay for childcare, nor would CDC, and the nurse is too uninformed/lax to care)
_ have sex with husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend (OMG cannot wait a few weeks0
_ fly around the country on an urgent matter (of course one cannot be contagious unless you are feverish vomiting pooping all over, right? the problem is that the virus does not know that)
_ use public bathroom, aircraft bathroom etc.
_ kiss your mom/sis/niece/nephew when you visit family cross country
Dunno about the first nurse, but the second nurse was especially careless. What on earth was she thinking? Could she hve not waited 21 days or more givne the gravity of the situation? Could the frigging beancounters at the hospital have somehow made an environment possible to limit contact with the patiend and keep the nurses as much possible on self-imposed separation for a few weeks?
IDIOTS.
Nope.....nationalized != Gov running every hospital, managing every doctor/orderly/etc.....At least not in first world countries.
It's just a single payer.....everything else is run in a similar fashion......
Cuba and some others might be a little different not sure......
You are absolutely correct. What they are not telling us is basically with a few infections here & there, it will quickly overwhelm our resources to track people suspected of being exposed to the virus. Also the long incubation period ( so far been observed to be between 2-21 days) means you have to track people for a long time (42 days to be safe) before you can clear them as Ebola free....
Good thing Ebola is not endemic to the Western World.....
If containing the ebola outbreak depends on the average american not behaving like an idiot then we are all dead meat.
I work in education at an institution that feeds into the nursing pipeline and oh boy these people are stupid, lazy and full of excuses.
Airport airline cleaners will be the first group to CASH in on the coming sick leave bull market.
Obomber. Just ask [insert target du jour here].
Big O just got the word: the Ebola pandemic is hitting low-middle income democrats and three weeks to the election!
Serious panic time mode for Big O now. By November 4 there will be 4 million democratic voters sick and soon dead. Projections call the election outcome a Republican victory and the next Presidential election a cake walk for Republicans.
Tough time for Big O.
Why the fuck aren't all the people exposed to Duncan on the god damned no fly list? Can someone explain this shit?
Thank you Overzeetop! I was looking for a reason to go into all-out-panic mode, grab my family, some shotgun shells, and head to the hills!
My family thinks I'm crazy, but if you're right, we'll all be dead before the 4th of July! DOOMED!!!!! REPENT SINNERS!!!!! ::Goes off to take medication::
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
which is why they probably did it. Can't have a spendy machine like that just lying around not making money.
we all know that if he did anything like that you would be complaining about how the scary black democrat was acting like a dictator.
killing healthy people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
We need a good plague. Let's get on with it.
Whatever happened to the cute doctor and nurse suites they used in the andromeda strain movie?
They provided a barrier between clean and contaminated sides that was always there.
None of this risk of touching the contaminated side while taking the suit.
Based on the modeling done so far (which is tracking with, and predicting the spread in Africa quite well) it will likely start to 'burn out' in December.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-math-model-is-predicting-the-ebola-outbreak-with-incredible-accuracy
Bullocks - the hospital poured thousands of $$ at Duncan (CT Scan, doctor visit etc) - then the CDC was made aware of it, and now, _after_ a nurse has flown to Cleveland, the CDC mandatorily requires the nurses not to fly during quarantine? They had the power to quarantine all the time, but the leaders of the CDC and the President (The Democrats) flubbed it and did poor emergency management. How many people have been exposed to Ebola now from that Cleveland to Dallas flight when the CDC could have taken the rational action earlier? Why is everything happening _after the fact_ with the CDC leader and President Obama?
The hospital admins are most likely to blame, not the poor nurses who were thrust into a life-threatening situation with inadequate resources and support: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/nu...
Right now the CDC's best case scenario for West Africa is 11,000 to 27,000 cases by Jan. 20 and worst case is 537,000 to 1,367,000 cases through January 20... With a mortality rate over 50% and probably closer to 70% that doesn't even begin to address the devastating effects that it is having on the economy. Preventing either kind of scenario from happening in the US should be a very very high priority. Alarm is warranted.
People are lining up to get ANY job. The 1% isn't leaving as many crumbs for the poor and middle class as they used to!
--PM
But by next year Ebola,if not brought under control, will be one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide.
--PM
..don't be a hero and always double-tap.
Obama was counting on his airport quarantines and delay terror tactics to attack middle-upper income Whites.
Now it appears that Ebola will attack low-to-middle income Black and Latinos, the core of the Democratic party, to the extent of 3 million sick and dead by November 4 (election day).
So, there goes the election to the Republicans (Senate control) as well as the next Presidential election (Republican President).
Obama should have left well enough alone.
I found this video discussing another event that happened on a Delta flight today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOI4ReOiK4E
Hospital workers aren't trained to deal with infectious agents?
What exactly are they trained for?
is that your pathetic little rant was probably the best you could do.
I suspect it was the American hiring that was the problem
It is part of the Obamcare package..[M. Savage] So did it really cost $500,000 to treat Patient 0?
face it folks, the virus is going to be all over the money supply
Studies of infection control discipline that compare nursing staff to doctors show that nurses are more hygienic than doctors. So how incompetent were these women, or how wrong have our assumptions about this virus' transmission been?
I wonder if the patient can be injected with large amounts of non-toxic fluorescent dye and UV lights be fitted to the periphery of the treatment areas to better detect contamination transfer? Ideally the dye would be antibody linked to have it bind to the virus surface preferentially.
d@3-e.net
Capitalism does not always work, but central planning does not work all the time either. There needs to be a give and take.
Why Not?
Extraordinary means require justification. So far we've killed 3 people. I think 3 people died in motor vehicle accidents while I typed this. You should never again be allowed to drive. It's too dangerous.
The thing that Americans need to remember is that these cases are still isolated to Texas. Wait until it reach the United States before you start to worry.
www.addmehits.com