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How Nigeria Stopped Ebola
HughPickens.com writes Pamela Engel writes that Americans need only look to Nigeria to calm their fears about an Ebola outbreak in the US. Nigeria is much closer to the West Africa outbreak than the US is, yet even after Ebola entered the country in the most terrifying way possible — via a visibly sick passenger on a commercial flight — officials successfully shut down the disease and prevented widespread transmission. If there are still no new cases on October 20, the World Health Organization will officially declare the country "Ebola-free." Here's how Nigeria did it.
The first person to bring Ebola to Nigeria was Patrick Sawyer, who left a hospital in Liberia against the wishes of the medical staff and flew to Nigeria. Once Sawyer arrived, it became obvious that he was ill when he passed out in the Lagos airport, and he was taken to a hospital in the densely packed city of 20 million. Once the country's first Ebola case was confirmed, Port Health Services in Nigeria started a process called contact tracing to limit the spread of the disease and created an emergency operations center to coordinate and oversee the national response. Health officials used a variety of resources, including phone records and flight manifests, to track down nearly 900 people who might have been exposed to the virus via Sawyer or the people he infected. As soon as people developed symptoms suggestive of Ebola, they were isolated in Ebola treatment facilities. Without waiting to see whether a "suspected" case tested positive, Nigeria's contact tracing team tracked down everyone who had had contact with that patient since the onset of symptoms making a staggering 18,500 face-to-face visits.
The US has many of these same procedures in place for containing Ebola, making the risk of an outbreak here very low. Contact tracing is exactly what is happening in Dallas right now; if any one of Thomas Eric Duncan's contacts shows symptoms, that person will be immediately isolated and tested. "That experience shows us that even in the case in Nigeria, when we found out later in the timeline that this patient had Ebola, that Nigeria was able to identify contacts, institute strict infection control procedures and basically bring their outbreak to a close," says Dr. Tom Inglesby. "They did a good job in and of themselves. They worked closely with the U.S. CDC. If we can succeed in Nigeria I do believe we will stop it here."
The first person to bring Ebola to Nigeria was Patrick Sawyer, who left a hospital in Liberia against the wishes of the medical staff and flew to Nigeria. Once Sawyer arrived, it became obvious that he was ill when he passed out in the Lagos airport, and he was taken to a hospital in the densely packed city of 20 million. Once the country's first Ebola case was confirmed, Port Health Services in Nigeria started a process called contact tracing to limit the spread of the disease and created an emergency operations center to coordinate and oversee the national response. Health officials used a variety of resources, including phone records and flight manifests, to track down nearly 900 people who might have been exposed to the virus via Sawyer or the people he infected. As soon as people developed symptoms suggestive of Ebola, they were isolated in Ebola treatment facilities. Without waiting to see whether a "suspected" case tested positive, Nigeria's contact tracing team tracked down everyone who had had contact with that patient since the onset of symptoms making a staggering 18,500 face-to-face visits.
The US has many of these same procedures in place for containing Ebola, making the risk of an outbreak here very low. Contact tracing is exactly what is happening in Dallas right now; if any one of Thomas Eric Duncan's contacts shows symptoms, that person will be immediately isolated and tested. "That experience shows us that even in the case in Nigeria, when we found out later in the timeline that this patient had Ebola, that Nigeria was able to identify contacts, institute strict infection control procedures and basically bring their outbreak to a close," says Dr. Tom Inglesby. "They did a good job in and of themselves. They worked closely with the U.S. CDC. If we can succeed in Nigeria I do believe we will stop it here."
It only takes one stupid uncooperative idiot ( maybe from a certain news station) to spread the disease.
And I wouldn't compare USA (or for that matter EU ) citizens to Nigerian citizens, Nigeria is known for it scare tactics, I don't see our governments try the same tactics without getting trouble back.
Let alone that no lower class person will stay home from their job for 3 weeks without pay, they will lose their job and get evicted.
Or is the government finally going to pay for those kind of expenses?
No, the US is hoping that it will be able to handle the situation as well as Nigeria did.
So far it isn't.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Yeah, good luck with that. The last thing I saw on TV was people from her plane made hops to at least four states.
The President should have just ordered people with passports and travel stamps from these countries to not be allowed to enter the US.
A travel ban would kill more people than Ebola ever would.
Due to western workers refusing to travel to certain countries in Africa because of Ebola, the Cocoa crop has already been threatened:
http://www.reuters.com/article...
There are also travel bans between those countries. Because of that, the migrant workers that harvest them will have no work for the year. No income. Many will starve to death. MORE than would have been killed by Ebola. As bad as dieing from Ebola is, Starvation is worse.
Panic will always kill more people than the disease. Think critically before you demand action. The cable news networks are reveling in the profit they are making off of your panic.
on a side note Nigeria also banned flights to/from these hotspots - Arik Air (Nigeria), Gambia Bird and Kenya Airways have suspended services to Liberia and Sierra Leone. source: https://www.internationalsos.com/ebola/index.cfm?content_id=435&language_id=ENG
The hospital also waited until they got a positive Ebola test result back before taking any safety precautions. Staff were exposed for something like two days and administration resisted isolating the patient. The sample was sent through the normal channels for testing which potentially contaminated their tube system. High-risk individuals who treated Duncan were not placed in quarantine and they allowed something like 70 different people to come into contact with him. Then there's the issue of them initially prescribing antibiotics for a viral infection.
> It isn't that strange. Because if you did listen to the news or watch television, then no, you didn't know about the 'threat', because what has been repeated time after time is 'there is no threat, relax, we can deal with this, we're prepared'.
No, it is strange. The "there is no threat, relax" message is not actually said in those words, (but close enough), is addressed to the non-medical public, and the motive to reduce panic in the populace is a correct one. The "we're prepared" part means that "we" medical staff, supposedly INCLUDING nurses in Texas, have an ounce of intelligence and training, and are in fact prepared. If the first nurse in Texas had bothered to be aware, training or not, of the outbreak in Africa, and made sure the Doctor was informed of the patient self-reporting that he had been to Liberia, none of this would have happened on US soil. What kind of idiot doesn't realize that it's CRITICAL to pass on this information repeatedly until it is acknowledged? I could see that, with no nurse training whatsoever.
Now we are one or two steps perilously closer to that critical mass where you can't track down everyone that all the people had contact with, as mentioned by in earlier comment.