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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.
Only if you need to be treated at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital.
They've demonstrated themselves to be completely incompetent. Eric Duncan should have been transported to a hospital with the equipment and expertise to deal with quarantining highly infectious disease. The first Ebola case in the US, if you recall, was a doctor admitted to a hospital with staff and facilities prepared to handle it.
Why?
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"
Will someone just tell me if it's time to panic or not?
No, the conditions in that hospital were shockingly lax. From what I've been reading the hospital administration should be brought up on charges. At the very least that infected nurse should sue the pants off them. Notice that none of the people he was staying with caught it. You can only catch it by ingesting another persons bodily fluids. This disease prays on your concern for the sick. Those that care for the diseased are the ones at risk. As they get sicker and sicker, people deal with the mess and viola... If the hospital had even remotely followed proper procedures everyone would have been fine.
On the bright side, we have a drug that appears to work. There have not been clinical trials as of yet, but PBS had special on it over the weekend that most researchers seem to think that the mechanism is simple enough that they think it should "Just work" anyway. It's very hard for them to produce though. Extremely labor intensive. They literally have to inject virus into tobacco plants, wait days/weeks then extract the drug from them. But, on the bright side, they said that once a persons been inoculated their body will produce the antibodies on its own, so they can provide transfusions to others infected as long as the blood types a match. So it appears we may have this licked. Even if we only have enough drug to treat a few thousand people, they can give transfusions to others who can give them to even more people and so-on.
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.
Ah yes, lets blame the victims, the very people who were trying to help a very sick, very dangerous man while he lay in a hospital bed dying.
What the fuck is wrong with you!?
If AIDs or hepatitis were anywhere near as communicable you would see a mass exodus from the medical profession: working with sick people would be a death sentence waiting to happen. You can work with, live with, eat with, share a bathroom with, even fuck (with appropriate protection) people who have HIV or hepatitis without contracting it and you can do so for years if you're careful. We've now had 2 out of a team of perhaps 60 who cared for Duncan get sick. Does that sound equivalent to you?
Only if you need to be treated at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital.
They've demonstrated themselves to be completely incompetent. Eric Duncan should have been transported to a hospital with the equipment and expertise to deal with quarantining highly infectious disease.
In case anyone doubts this: ratio of "normal" patients vs. infected healthworkers
third world: ~ 10:1
Texas: 1:2
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Unless you consider that we're doubling the number of cases every week, not increasing by 1. In which case we've got about 26 weeks left before the entire US population is infected or dead.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
That's called 20/20 hindsight, Mr. Armchair Surgeon General. Had you been there, with a patient with the symptoms of some viral infection, I'd have liked to see you saying "of course it's Ebola!", when in reality, there are dozens of alternative diagnoses, many of them much more likely.
Ezekiel 23:20
Really have you read the latest from the dumbfuck running the CDC? Would you consider the Washington Post a good source of information?
“We did send some expertise in infection control,” Thomas Frieden said during a news conference Tuesday. “But I think we could, in retrospect, with 20/20 hindsight, have sent a more robust hospital infection control team and been more hands-on with the hospital from day one about exactly how this should be managed.”
Inept and incompetent and I'm sorry but a mia culpa isn't going to cut it.
You do realize that this basically translates to "Yeah, we should have known those Texan hicks couldn't handle a case of the flu, let alone Ebola."
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
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...
We really didn't have the bandwidth to stream a CDC teleconference to all the hospitals in America but twitch.tv can stream a Starcraft championship to 200,000 people around the world in HD? Uh ok.
But you have to understand, how could the hospital make any money if they didn't send dozens of people into the patients room to all charge for 5 minutes of time (rounded up to the nearest whole day)? Look at any of the articles about "surprise hospital charges" to see that this is a real thing. So of course there are more infected staff per patient, the patient probably had 20-30 different people in their room on any given day.
Contrast this with the 5% - 20% of people in the US who get the flu every year and the 200,000 who are hospitalized with flu-related complications.
I don't understand this "Oh, if you are scared of ebola, why aren't you scared of [insert other ailment that kills $bignum people each year]?" logic. Everyone knows that heart disease and cancer and falling off a ladder kill more Americans than ebola right now. So what?
Right now, ebola is not a serious threat to western countries because: 1. It is not airborne (if someone sneezes across the room, you're not gonna get ebola from it), 2. it is not communicable except when the infected is suffering from symptoms, and the symptoms are so severe that the infected person will land in a hospital very quickly, away from the general populace, and 3. we (supposedly) have protocols in place to prevent an infected person from infecting others once he his hospitalized. Obviously, #3 needs some refinement, but I think we'll see that soon.
The reason that ebola is so scary is that if it mutates to become airborne, it is going to become really, really hard to control. As in, you could get ebola just as easily as you could get the flu. And it's currently spreading like wildfire in West Africa, and in that environment, the virus could make that mutation! That is why we need to get really serious about ebola, really quickly. Not because of what ebola is right now, but because of how deadly it might become.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Re: Diagnosing a rare disease with non-specific symptoms
Except for that one very specific symptom of traveling to Western Africa! That should be a bright red flag!
Except for that one very specific symptom of traveling to Western Africa! ... for now.
FTFY
We're working really hard to make sure that Ebola isn't the racist disease it is now. You see, being insensitive to one's place of birth is RACIST. Even the relatives of the dead guy are claiming RACISM at the Dallas hospital is why he died. So, we're focusing on useless measures just so we remain PC.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I don't know about that. Everyone in the West is constantly brainwashed into the idea that they can get this stuff for free and that they should get it for free and that it should be some kind of "right" like the right to a trial by jury.
People are used to not directly paying for this stuff. Americans are certainly inclined to devalue any free product or service. People in general seem to devalue everyone else's profession and get huffy when you actually expect them to pay.
Paying $100 for a nail spa: no problem.
Paying $50 for a doctors visit: Oh the humanity.
Doctors and nurses need to stop being lumped in with free government cheese before there is any hope that the general public will cherish them.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I mean, special permission flights for health workers, aid, etc could be set up for private charter flights as needed, but why are we allowing people from the infected countries to freely come and go in the US?
We're clearly not THAT ready in the US to handle this disease and it seems common sense to isolate that part of the world from general travel till things get under control.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Actually, that's common advice good for flu as well (flu season's coming!).
Anyhow, the issue is that taking off PPE is actually the hardest part of the job - do it wrong and you've just nullified the entire reason for using PPE to begin with. It's a very careful dance of managing contaminated and non-contaminated surfaces, and screw it up and you're hosed.
(E.g., when removing gloves, the gloved hand should pinch the palm of the glove of the other hand (contaminated-contaminated contact) then use that as leverage to remove the glove. But now to remove the other glove, the exposed hand (which cannot touch anything contaminated! not even to run it against something!) must dig under the cuff the glove where it's uncontaminated and remove the glove that way. yeah, do you decontaminate your hands again to be sure, but still).
Now you have two uncontaminated hands, and need to remove your goggles and mask and hood by doing it from the back (less contamination, hopefully), and removing your suit requires touching the inside of the suit and pulling it off - you can't undo the zipper (contaminated).
Just one mis-step and you're hosed.
Its not the 50 dollar DR visit. Its the 2000 ambulance ride and the 15 dollar a pill asprin. I'll stop bitching about the price when they start charging fair prices. Capiche?
They have passports correct? Well you should be able to easily see they have recently come from West Africa. If they don't have a passport WTH are you doing letting them in?