News you can use: Ebola edition
I’m still not panicking but, since one of the latest to come down with the disease, was apparently on a plane the day before going to the hospital, my “meh, it’s not a problem” has turned to a raised eyebrow. I mean, who knows where all those people’s final destination was. And I really got a bit more concerned when Dear Reader cancelled a fundraiser over Ebola. If he cancels golf, I’ll panic.
But here’s some protective gear you may want to have just in case.
Also, how to avoid getting Ebola.
October 15th, 2014 at 9:00 pm
“…who knows where all those people’s final destination was”
Valid question. And that’s just the one they acknowledge. How many others made it through that oh-so rigorous “screening” process?
October 15th, 2014 at 9:05 pm
I don’t know about you, but after I get off a 2+ hour flight, the first thing I like to do is use the men’s room. We know already know the Ebola virus can be transmitted via bodily fluids (e.g. urine and feces). This begs the question, how good is this nurse’s hygiene practices?
October 15th, 2014 at 11:37 pm
Since the incompetent (or perpetrator/conspirator) now owns it lock, stock and barrel, I will forever refer to the highly contagious foreign deadly disease as “Obola”.
What an “October Surprise”, eh?
October 16th, 2014 at 8:00 am
She may have infected a couple of those TSA reprobates, which means they could be infecting everyone they molest subsequently. Wouldn’t that be just peachy keen?
October 16th, 2014 at 11:05 am
I will offer one observation to calm your concerns, and a second to inflame them.
The good news is that Ebola appears to be only lightly contagious in the early stages, and it only becomes really dangerous when the patient is near death. None of the people who lived with our Patient Zero have come down with the illness, none of their neighbors, none of the people sitting next to him for two hours in the emergency room. Enough time has passed for any such infections to be obvious.
I’d bet good money that our infected nurse infected no one on that aircraft.
The bad news? Imagine a case like this in India or Egypt, where latex gloves are about as fancy as things get in all but the best hospitals, and where garbage disposal too often involves human beings picking through the scraps looking for items to resell. What do you suppose the odds are – especially given that the hazard will exist, and probably increase, until the day an effective vaccine is developed and made widely available?
Can you imagine an outbreak in Central America? Can you imagine a border control policy that didn’t look like act IV of a zombie movie in response?
Ebola in the US is a concern. Ebola spreading to other nations is a catastrophe.
October 16th, 2014 at 3:13 pm
Oh sure…you all MOCKED the curmudgeonly antisocial, coots that prefer their arm chairs to “being seen” working “on line” at the latest social protest event.
You thought “You damn kids keep off my lawn” was just being mean?
How do you say that in Central/South American dialects of Spanish and Portuguese? (The “universal language warning” of a racking shotgun MAY be a bit much here)
October 16th, 2014 at 3:55 pm
I have been shorting airlines stock for the last 3 weeks.
Business is great.
October 16th, 2014 at 4:26 pm
I’m with Mike.
You get a nice outbreak in, say, Mexico, and it’s Katy Bar the Door.
October 17th, 2014 at 1:08 am
To be fair, viral hemorrhagic fevers do occur in many areas of the world. Ebola is a particularly nasty one with nothing but palliative treatment. Marburg is also nasty. Lassa is less deadly. Those are from Africa but South America has their own versions. Some may have come up across the border
On the upside, it seems to be that Ebola requires the person to be in the bleeding/vomiting stage to be really transmissible given who has been infected and who hasn’t. But 16 Doctors without Borders physicians have caught the virus and of those 9 have died. So it is cold comfort to those who give aid to the patients.
I go with the nursing student who saved 3 of the 4 members of her family by herself. She did PPE religiously and avoided the virus. Using trash bags. But double bagging her feet, her hair, wearing rain gear and double gloves. 1:10 and 1:100 bleach is your friend as well as soap and water. With meticulous decom as you doff your gear.
If you really want to be prepared, go get the WHO/CDC ‘Infection Control
for Viral Haemorrhagic Fevers in the African Health Care Setting’
December 1998
The recommendations in that pamphlet are more stringent than what CDC is recommending in a US healthcare environment. Apparently, US hospitals are magical and don’t need to be so religious in their barrier nursing.
October 17th, 2014 at 11:12 am
The CDC is lying through their teeth, probably out of some misguided attempt to “prevent a panic.” Jay G pointed out this morning where the director of the CDC said both that you “cannot get (Ebola) through casual contact like sitting next to someone on a bus,” and that if you are sick and you may have Ebola you shouldn’t get on a bus because “You might become ill, and you might have a problem that exposes someone around you”, in the same press conference.
I’m still getting emails from my states EMS office saying “Ebola is not known to spread through casual contact” at the same time as we’re seeing stories about nurses in full PPE getting it. We’re being told that standard droplet isolation precautions are sufficient and any hospital can handle these patients, while the people telling us that are using moon suits and negative pressure rooms.
Typical government incompetence, and unless we’re lucky it’s going to kill people wholesale.