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NY Doctor Recently Back From West Africa Tests Positive For Ebola
An anonymous reader writes An emergency room doctor who recently returned to the city after treating Ebola patients in West Africa has tested positive for the virus, Mayor Bill de Blasio said. It's the first case in the city and the fourth in the nation. From the article: "The doctor, identified as Craig Spencer, 33, came back from treating Ebola patients in Guinea about 10 days ago, and developed a fever, nausea, pain and fatigue Wednesday night. The physician, employed at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, has been in isolation at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan since Thursday morning, the official said."
I saw the news about the poor doctor in NYC. Yikes, before I draw any conclusions, do we have any pieces by Bennett Haselton on the Ebola outbreak or diseases in general? I'd like to see what his insight is first. He's a frequent contributor.
Kent Brockman: Professor, without knowing precisely what the danger is, would you say it's time for our viewers to crack each other's heads open and feast on the goo inside?
Professor: Yes I would, Kent.
My friend works at Bellevue, my other friend took the 1 train (train the doctor took to go bowling last night while experiencing "sick symptoms") the same night he did and I take the 1 train every day to and friend work.
There are people who live and are stuck in Africa who have a millions times more the reason to be concerned than I am, I understand this.
What I don't agree with are the people who are using things like Malaria and HIV statistics to try and show how the media is playing up this issue.
Both are less serious and more controllable diseases with much bigger sample sizes. As/if more Ebola cases arise, the contractions will increase exponentially and they'll stop comparing this to "more serious diseases".
What I don't understand is why they are letting doctors who work on Ebola patients back into teh country without being screened?
There are people arguing to shut down all travel from West Africa, even if that's too much in your opinion, at least screen these doctors.
Customs: What was your reason for leaving the country?
Doctor: I was treating patients with Ebola.
Customs: Due to national security, we can not let you into the country until you've been tested and cleared.
Doctor: But I have plans to go bowling in Brooklyn in about week!
Customs: You're retarded.
Chances are, the conversation wouldn't happen like that and the doctor would be understanding of the situation.
So why aren't we just doing that to begin with?
Yeah, doctors are idiots! Why the heck did he even go to Guinea in the first place? What was he thinking!? What a moron! If I ever get ebola, I won't want any doctors like him treating me! They are idiots!
Join the IParty!
Or maybe the limited resources in the area of the outbreak make it impossible to be 100% perfect in your procedures and you do the best you can in a difficult situation.
The answer to stemming the tide of people taking Ebola elsewhere is to get it under control in Liberia/Sierra Leone/Ghana so there's no Ebola to take elsewhere. Until we do that the danger to other countries will continue regardless of what you do.
Another thing, it's starting to look like if you discover and start treating it early and aggressively that you have a good chance of surviving Ebola. If L/SL/G had as good a medical system as the US I suspect the survival rate would be much better.
There is a huge difference between being in a room with someone with early stages of ebola for a few minutes and working in a hospital. Here are some factors when working in a hospital with ebola patients;
1. Much longer contact periods. Many health workers in Africa work 18 hour days.
2. Much closer contact. Health workers touch ebola patients much more often than the general public.
3. Contact later in the disease progression. Ebola is transmitted by bodily fluids. As the disease progresses more bodily fluids are secreted, it is a hemorrhagic disease, and more pathogen is present in the excretions.
If one works long hours and their suit is covered in ebola laden fluids it is quite probable that a small mistake can cause infection. Even the fatigue factor may cause errors in protocol.
If you bothered to RTFA (I know, the horror), you'd have seen that he was not symptomatic during his subway rides. Ebola is not contagious when it is asymptomatic. As soon as he began feeling ill, he isolated himself. When the symptoms worsened beyond that of a common cold, he contacted the authorities. The probability of him having infected anyone is close to nil.
They were following CDC guidelines which apparently were contradictory and incomplete.
Basically what everyone is realizing is that the CDC is fucking clueless and everyone has to just use their own best judgement on the matter.
Beyond which... basic quarantine procedures would deal with this problem.
Nigeria is doing that and they're basically free from infection despite being right next to effected countries.
The US used to have such policies in the old days. Ellis Island had extensive quarantine facilities for example.
In this case we have a full blown Ebola outbreak and the fucking retarded administration wants to keep open transport because they're afraid it would look like discrimination. Let me be clear, if the damn outbreak were in the middle of Sweden, I'd still want quarantine procedures. This has nothing at all to do with race but rather everything to do with a very scary virus that isn't playing around.
Now am I actually worried about a mass outbreak in the US? No. I find that unlikely. However, this virus has a 50-70% mortality rate and there is no vaccine.
This is not something you take lightly. You pay this sort of virus the respect it deserves and enact BASIC quarantine procedures. Rudimentary.
Nothing fancy. You come back from one of these countries, your passport gets checked, they see the stamp, they have a blood sample taken or whatever is needed. Then depending on the relevance, you might need to wait for that to come back clean.
Sound inconvenient? It is a fucking plague. Tough shit.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
*sigh*
The guy in Texas who had Ebola transmitted it to exactly two people, both of which were caring for him while sick. He didn't transmit it to ANY of his family members. I'd say that's a good indicator that the virus really is very hard to catch.
As far as your "idiot" theory goes, smart people screw up, and constant vigilance is hard, especially in an environment like in west Africa. At the moment, you're thinking with the fear generating part of your brain, not the thinking part of your brain. That's very bad, and causes more harm than good. Health officials are telling you it's hard to get because it IS hard to get. The average number of people that Ebola is transmitted to is about 2. That's a very low number. AIDS, which is also hard to catch is transmitted to an average of 4 people. Measles, which is very contagious is 18.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/healt...
So please stop with the conspiracy theory. It's a disease, not a government secret. You can't keep a tight lid the real facts about a disease that people study and publish papers about in medical journals.
Also, consider there's thousands of health care workers in west Africa. There's been a handful of American healthcare workers who've caught the disease, but MANY OTHERS who haven't.
AccountKiller
functional institutions, and a democratic government that answers to the people.
Are they accepting US immigrants?
I didn't mean to troll. I meant to point out the absurdity of calling the doctor who knowingly risked his life to help Ebola patients a fsking idiot. By extension, any doctor who would get in a room with an Ebola patient is an idiot. Where would that leave us? Without competent doctors to treat us if we get a communicable disease. Regardless of whether he took the subway or went bowling when he got back, that man is a hero, equivalent to the 9/11 firefighters. He does not deserve to be called an idiot, and people who call him that deserve to be mocked, at minimum. But I guess mocking is trolling.
Join the IParty!
They are screening and putting every returning health care professional on a health watch. The issue is that the incubation period for ebola can be up to 21 days. The doctor in question arrived at John F. Kennedy Airport on October 17 with no symptoms. Symptoms did not show up until this morning when the doctor followed protocol and was hospitalized. The virus may not even have shown up in his blood on October 17. Remember that infection tests look for antibodies not the virus itself. If the virus had not attacked yet there would be no anybodies.
No. They are afraid of lowering their literacy rate.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
IMHO your "opinion" is very very humble indeed and belongs in the category of "uneducated careless speculation with a sensationalist bent".
It may have escaped your notice, but doctors who help out in West-African hospitals come into close contact with a constant stream of very ill people who are in the stadium where they really are contagious, every day for months at a stretch.
Their protective clothing prevents transmission in the vast majority (say 99,9%) of cases (something you can tell by the fact that we still have doctors left treating Ebola patients). The real danger comes when you take off your protective suit. That has to be done carefully so as not to touch the splatters of blood, muckus, tears, sweat etcetera that very ill patients secrete and if possible it has to be decontaminated first.
Now I'm sure your "humble" and uneducated opinion never has been schooled in elementary probability so you wouldn't understand things like P(contagion_after_100_days) = 1 - [P(no_contagion_after_1_day)]^100, but try it this way.
Playing the lottery every day makes it unlikely that you won't win a single prize.
And so it is with medical personnel who treat Ebola patient for months. They run a risk.
So it's no conspiracy (I can feel your incredulity and disappointment) and no case of "fsking idiots" (a term which I'd like to reserve for you personally).
It's easy to shout your (thoroughly humble) head off about stuff you don't understand, but it's not helping anybody and it stands in the way of a rational attitude towards Ebola.
P.S. there is absolutely nothing "insightful" about your post. On the other hand it's revealing. Revealing of a mindset that couples a penchant for conspiracy theories with a complete lack of understanding of risk and a disdain for plain ordinary everyday scientific commonsense that seems to have whizzed over your (so very humble) head.
3. Flush anybody questionable with 2-5 days of IV vitamin C 80,000 mg tid, 50,000 iu vitamin D3 per day, selenium and zinc. These kill viruses.
Hahaha. :D
Ezekiel 23:20
However, this virus has a 50-70% mortality rate and there is no vaccine.
Does that mean it has a 30% - 50% immortality rate? Hmm....
Has anyone who flew on an airliner with someone who subsequently came down with Ebola gotten sick from it yet? Not that I've heard of but it's possible I suppose. The two people who got sick from Thomas Eric Duncan were directly involved with caring for him at the hospital and obviously didn't follow the procedures well enough to keep from getting infected. But now that the 21 day period has passed none of the people he was living with in Dallas got infected. That has to say something about how hard it is to get infected. It looks to me like Obama is following sound scientific advise and it's working so far. It's possible there may be some others who get it but we know how to control it and with our medical system I just don't see Ebola as a significant threat to the US.
Technically, yes. As doctors define direct exposure that's true. However, doctors and normal people don't define it the same way. If I have Ebola and get bodily fluids on a doorknob, then you come along an hour later, touch the doorknob and then rub your eyes... you can become infected. That fits the CDC's definition of "direct exposure", because you've been directly exposed to my bodily fluids.
So don't get complacent thinking as long as you don't actually touch an infected person you can't become infected.
Some types of mutation are fantastically unlikely - by one account, Ebola would have to mutate into a form that only weighs about 20% or even 10% of what it now does, change from a long, twisted rod to something more like a sphere, and switch the conditions it actually grows under from inside the bloodstream to in the alveolar structures of the lungs to become the sort of threat some people are worried about. There are big differences between viruses frequently mutating and that mutation leading to fast evolutionary selection, but I've tried to explain that on Slashdot too many times to keep hammering at that particular type of ignorance - some people just need to sit down and read a whole good college textbook on Evolution. It may be somewhat reasonable to worry that some mutation in the direction of drug resistance is likely, especially if we don't get this strain under control quickly, but some people are basically describing having a smallish frilled lizard sneak into the country on a piece of driftwood, and six months later, it's stomping buildings flat and breathing radioactive plasma on Mothra, and those same people are too busy spreading rumors to learn anything at all. As they panic at the drop of a hat, people who are actual experts (and not just armchair biology hackers like me) are getting very afraid to say anything at all, because when they give an honest answer that sholdn't cause panic, and might even be a bit reassuring, they expect to be misquoted as saying Ebola will make the Nemesis black hole wander into the inner solar system early and reverse all our magnetic poles, and Raptor riding Jesus will come back and eat our heads, so panic now and avoid the rush!!!
Who is John Cabal?
You can find more about what Nigeria has done here:
http://www.latimes.com/world/a...
Nothing they did was especially innovative. Their response was textbook. You quarantine anyone infected, you question anyone infected about everyone they've come in contact with, you investigate all of those people, and you do not take the virus lightly.
None of this is new. It is basic.
The people saying we can't have screening or quarantine procedures for political reasons don't seem to grasp that viruses don't care about your politics. It is like when Achilles says to Hector "there are no pacts between lions and men"...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The virus will show no pity, no hesitation, and no remorse. It exists to eat and spread.
Just as we have procedures for dealing with forest fires or other natural phenomenon. You don't let politics dictate how you deal with them. There is a correct way and an incorrect way. If you choose the incorrect path because it is politically more correct, then that natural phenomenon will exploit your arrogance and do what it does.
Again, I'm not worried about an outbreak in the US. I am however concerned about the glaring and obvious incompetence of the government. I am routinely shocked by how stupid they are on so many issues.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Chances are, the conversation wouldn't happen like that
Mainly because the USA has signed treaties that make it illegal to refuse entry to a citizen.
That, and when you make a self-report of risk be a metric for spreading the risk, you increase the risk and the amount of lying. But you don't help anyone. So your plan fails for many reasons.
Wait a minute. The USA ignores treaties left and right and constantly bombs and invades countries because they want to leave the US-dollar as reserve currency. They torture and hold people without trial. They pay millions to destabilize Syria, Ukraine and dozens of other countries.
But they can't refuse entry because of some treaty with Libera?
Since when did the USA care about any treaty?
Yep, that's all true, but there are other options, possibly no less scary.
This virus is well established in humans now in this outbreak, whereas before it was mostly a zoonosis (caught from animals). Mutations will now be being selected by their efficacy in prospering in us, not in the original host(s).
Some scientists believe this is already happening, we know it is mutating and there is evidence that it is mutating to become more infectious, to us: http://www.businessinsider.in/...
If it is true that viral loads are coming up earlier and higher than before, then it could be shedding before symptoms. Wouldn't be entirely surprising - containing it through hazmat-after-symptoms will probably select for strains that infect before symptoms. That would screw up all our containment measures rather well. Even if it just accelerates symptoms it could get a lot harder to contain - if first symptoms are a fever _and_ the infected is monitoring and gets themselves straight into care, further infection can be limited, but if first symptoms are fever and projectile vomiting you have much more of a problem.
All that said, scariest thing to me is that this is an African zoonosis that hasn't been out of Africa before except in the lab. We have no idea what hosts it may find in the non-African animal population, should it get the opportunity. If it finds an easy first-world reservoir host (maybe it likes our bats, or our foxes, or our rats) then it will become endemic, rapidly. Endemic ebola (in the absence of vaccine or cure) will be a game changer for 1st world medicine - think about every fever case to be isolated and treated using hazmat until tested negative (probably twice X days apart). Africa's health system, such as it is, is already feeling that pain - Ebola may well kill (already) more people via malaria than it does directly: http://www.reuters.com/article...
Except that's what doctors and other healthcare workers do every day. They put their lives in danger by treating people with diseases that, if they aren't careful, they could catch. Firefighters also knowingly risk their lives to save people. They will go running into a burning building just to try to pull someone out.
Risking your life to try to save someone else - when you are a trained professional - isn't idiot-territory. These aren't random people jumping into a raging river to save a drowning victim who wind up also drowning. These are people who take all available precautions, realize there is still a danger, and still try to save lives. These people are heroes.
Now if some news reports are right and the doctor interacted with people after showing symptoms, I'd agree that THAT was an idiot move.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.