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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.
That's just so wrong.
Pray tell, what jurisdiction does CDC or NIH have to be "all over" anything? None whatsoever. NIH is a research establishment. CDC is essentially a federal health department that has jurisdiction nowhere (maybe in DC?). There are no standardized facilities that you refer to. A research lab is not a clinical facility. Just because a lab is set up to handle highly infectious diseases doesn't make it a place where you can treat people.
The experts in this area are doing just fine, working with shit that makes Ebola look like a seasonal allergy, at facilities that are set up for that. Those people are usually not MDs, there's zero reason for them to be MDs. They're biologists of various sorts.
Demonstrably, no infectious disease experts were in charge at the facility/facilities where the health workers got infected. So your point that experts are unreliable is entirely moot. There were no experts in charge to start with.
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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.
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.
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