Ebola in the USA

[soxsoxsoxsox]

Ebola reaching its peak right as flu season is rolling around is going to cause of lot of meltdowns.

 

[knightni]

Looks like the deputy doesn't have Ebola after all.

 

http://www.wfaa.com/story/news/health/2014...eputy/16984093/

 

He overreacted along with everyone else.

[Balta1701]

And while viruses are known for mutating, he says, Ebola itself is very unlikely to change so much that it could go from being fluid-borne to airborne.

 

“That’s just fear,” Mr. Zimmer says.

 

“That’s like saying you’re afraid of wolves, and you’re really worried that one day wolves are going to be born with wings and they’re going to fly around and attack people, and that they’ll be able to fly from Montana to New York.

 

“That’s just not a realistic worry. Evolution doesn’t work that way.”

Link

[Texsox]

Ebola reaching its peak right as flu season is rolling around is going to cause of lot of meltdowns.

 

My daughter was really sick with vomiting, fever, chills, and all that. Yeah, we both starting thinking about who she has been around and where they have been. Her boyfriend works for a giant international company with projects all over the globe. He was sick earlier in the week. She had been in Dallas the previous week. Paranoid? Maybe.

[BigHurt3515]

Another One

 

Looks like one of the health workers tested positive

[Balta1701]

Another One

 

Looks like one of the health workers tested positive

Hospital stated it was due to a violation of treatment protocol without saying what the violation was.

 

This hospital isn't covering themselves in dignity.

[greg775]

Hospital stated it was due to a violation of treatment protocol without saying what the violation was.

 

This hospital isn't covering themselves in dignity.

 

This article really states how serious this is. They quarantined the woman's pet and have put fliers on the doors of a lot of people's apartments in a four-block radius. There just has to be a good chance some more who were in contact with the hospital worker come down with symptoms.

[Kyyle23]

Hospital stated it was due to a violation of treatment protocol without saying what the violation was.

 

This hospital isn't covering themselves in dignity.

 

No, this hospital really has had epic failures at multiple levels. I think their protocols are going to be rewritten from square one

[BigHurt3515]

It has to be very likely that she thought she was fine for the past week+ and someone else was in contact with her. This could end up spreading quicker then we thought

[Balta1701]

It has to be very likely that she thought she was fine for the past week+ and someone else was in contact with her. This could end up spreading quicker then we thought

Again to repeat, Ebola is not transmitted when people are asymptomatic. She presumably just began showing symptoms recently and assuming that this hospital is now actually following procedures, quarantine will be effective.

 

Standard medical quarantine techniques will have an easy job with this virus. It is not easily transmitted. Do things right and every outbreak will burn itself out rapidly.

[Texsox]

If only doing everything correctly was that simple.

[Balta1701]

Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, said that a decade of stagnant spending has "slowed down" research on all items, including vaccinations for infectious diseases. As a result, he said, the international community has been left playing catch-up on a potentially avoidable humanitarian catastrophe.

 

"NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It's not like we suddenly woke up and thought, 'Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here,'" Collins told The Huffington Post on Friday. "Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would've gone through clinical trials and would have been ready."

 

It's not just the production of a vaccine that has been hampered by money shortfalls. Collins also said that some therapeutics to fight Ebola "were on a slower track than would've been ideal, or that would have happened if we had been on a stable research support trajectory."

Just so you know.

[greg775]

TMZ caught the NBC employee who was quarantined out shopping. So you could see how selfish stupid people could help spread this rather quickly.

[Y2HH]

In the wake of pretty epic failures of that hospital (medical professionals), and people brazenly ignoring protocols, quarantine, etc., it may be time to instate some temporary drastic measures to curb what will become mass hysteria in the coming weeks of flu season, and instate these protocols before this thing falls off the rails. The last thing we need right now are full ER's because someone has the sniffles, because they read something about Ebola, etc, but it's exactly where we are headed.

 

For example, I know someone working at the hospital by O'Hare that has been designated "the hospital where Ebola patients/threats will be transported too", and everything is confusion, nobody at the hospital knows what to do if/when it happens, nor do they have the equipment on hand to tackle the situation. They don't have the clean/hazmat suits because they're on backorder (lol), among many other issues of personnel and complete lack of training.

 

While I'd urge people to stay calm and understand exactly what Ebola is and how it sperads, there are already plenty of reasons to be on alert at this point, and IMO, the medical professionals of the US have dropped the ball thus far.

Edited October 14, 2014 by Y2HH

[greg775]

In the wake of pretty epic failures of that hospital (medical professionals), and people brazenly ignoring protocols, quarantine, etc., it may be time to instate some temporary drastic measures to curb what will become mass hysteria in the coming weeks of flu season, and instate these protocols before this thing falls off the rails. The last thing we need right now are full ER's because someone has the sniffles, because they read something about Ebola, etc, but it's exactly where we are headed.

 

For example, I know someone working at the hospital by O'Hare that has been designated "the hospital where Ebola patients/threats will be transported too", and everything is confusion, nobody at the hospital knows what to do if/when it happens, nor do they have the equipment on hand to tackle the situation. They don't have the clean/hazmat suits because they're on backorder (lol), among many other issues of personnel and complete lack of training.

 

While I'd urge people to stay calm and understand exactly what Ebola is and how it sperads, there are already plenty of reasons to be on alert at this point, and IMO, the medical professionals of the US have dropped the ball thus far.

 

Great post.

One thing is for sure. This story is developing, far from finished.

[Balta1701]

In the wake of pretty epic failures of that hospital (medical professionals), and people brazenly ignoring protocols, quarantine, etc., it may be time to instate some temporary drastic measures to curb what will become mass hysteria in the coming weeks of flu season, and instate these protocols before this thing falls off the rails. The last thing we need right now are full ER's because someone has the sniffles, because they read something about Ebola, etc, but it's exactly where we are headed.

 

For example, I know someone working at the hospital by O'Hare that has been designated "the hospital where Ebola patients/threats will be transported too", and everything is confusion, nobody at the hospital knows what to do if/when it happens, nor do they have the equipment on hand to tackle the situation. They don't have the clean/hazmat suits because they're on backorder (lol), among many other issues of personnel and complete lack of training.

 

While I'd urge people to stay calm and understand exactly what Ebola is and how it sperads, there are already plenty of reasons to be on alert at this point, and IMO, the medical professionals of the US have dropped the ball thus far.

Just to point out...the CDC is not the point person on those decisions. They can advise but they aren't in control, those decisions are only made by state and local level health departments. They're the ones who have direct control over those decisions, the federal government as it stands now is not built to be able to do that.

[knightni]

TMZ caught the NBC employee who was quarantined out shopping. So you could see how selfish stupid people could help spread this rather quickly.

I wonder why it was a "voluntary quarantine."

 

You'd think that they'd take it more seriously at this point.

[Chisoxfn]

Just to point out...the CDC is not the point person on those decisions. They can advise but they aren't in control, those decisions are only made by state and local level health departments. They're the ones who have direct control over those decisions, the federal government as it stands now is not built to be able to do that.

I realize CDC can't control a lot but you act like everything is hunky dory when a lot of this is up to unique individual locations / locals and that is extremely difficult to control / manage. The real saving grace we seem to have is the current fact pattern that in general, the virus is not extremely contagious. However, what we should be doing, which is easier to control, is to control protocols of people coming into the country from regions with high risk of ebola. That is much easier to control / manage then all of these individual facilities who may / may not ultimately be prepared.

 

CDC can post and do all it wants, it may not matter at the end of the day. And if we can't be prepared to handle this, I don't even want to think how unprepared we are as a country for something much more contagious and/or unexpected.

[Balta1701]

I realize CDC can't control a lot but you act like everything is hunky dory when a lot of this is up to unique individual locations / locals and that is extremely difficult to control / manage. The real saving grace we seem to have is the current fact pattern that in general, the virus is not extremely contagious. However, what we should be doing, which is easier to control, is to control protocols of people coming into the country from regions with high risk of ebola. That is much easier to control / manage then all of these individual facilities who may / may not ultimately be prepared.

 

CDC can post and do all it wants, it may not matter at the end of the day. And if we can't be prepared to handle this, I don't even want to think how unprepared we are as a country for something much more contagious and/or unexpected.

Just to point out...this is the "local control/central government is bad/small government conservative" telling me how bad things are because things are left up to individual locations.

 

Are there no small government conservatives in an outbreak?

 

 

 

And on your latter point, that you don't want to think about how unprepared we are as a country for something worse...well, both the CDC and the NIH have been statutorily directed to spend their money on things other than public health preparedness.

 

The CDC's budget for public health preparedness has been cut by over a billion dollars per year since 2002, money directly out of funding the ability of public health centers to purchase those things. The CDC's total budget is lower in total dollars than it was in 2006. Meanwhile, the NIH's research budget has, like almost all federal science funding, been flat since about 2003 with the exception of the ARRA in 2010, and in real dollars is actually down about 10% since then. Hence why the NIH's head said that we would very likely have a functioning vaccine for this virus if not for the budget situation for the last 10 years.

 

You want to prepare. Fine. Scientists would love to. We have more of them sitting around doing odd jobs than we have money to pay for.

[Y2HH]

Just to point out...this is the "local control/central government is bad/small government conservative" telling me how bad things are because things are left up to individual locations.

 

Are there no small government conservatives in an outbreak?

 

 

 

And on your latter point, that you don't want to think about how unprepared we are as a country for something worse...well, both the CDC and the NIH have been statutorily directed to spend their money on things other than public health preparedness.

 

The CDC's budget for public health preparedness has been cut by over a billion dollars per year since 2002, money directly out of funding the ability of public health centers to purchase those things. The CDC's total budget is lower in total dollars than it was in 2006. Meanwhile, the NIH's research budget has, like almost all federal science funding, been flat since about 2003 with the exception of the ARRA in 2010, and in real dollars is actually down about 10% since then. Hence why the NIH's head said that we would very likely have a functioning vaccine for this virus if not for the budget situation for the last 10 years.

 

You want to prepare. Fine. Scientists would love to. We have more of them sitting around doing odd jobs than we have money to pay for.

 

There are instances where local control is a good idea and instances where it isn't. Can't we stop the partisan bulls*** for one minute and have a discussion that can acknowledge that there are pros and cons to every problem we face? You of all people know better as a scientist.

[Balta1701]

There are instances where local control is a good idea and instances where it isn't. Can't we stop the partisan bulls*** for one minute and have a discussion that can acknowledge that there are pros and cons to every problem we face? You of all people know better as a scientist.

And you know darn well what the reaction would be to enforcing mandates from the federal government that hospitals spend their money to stock up on emergency outbreak response equipment that isn't likely to be used in any given year or to enforcing federal mandates that hospitals practice and double-check and evaluate their anti-contamination and cleaning procedures.

[Y2HH]

And you know darn well what the reaction would be to enforcing mandates from the federal government that hospitals spend their money to stock up on emergency outbreak response equipment that isn't likely to be used in any given year or to enforcing federal mandates that hospitals practice and double-check and evaluate their anti-contamination and cleaning procedures.

 

And now a second worker in that hospital has been diagnosed with Ebola. This is either spreading easier than they said it could be, or precautions just weren't taken at that facility. In either case it's now reached the point someone of power needs to step in there and take some forceful/drastic measures. I have a feeling that won't be the last diagnosis.

Edited October 15, 2014 by Y2HH

[Balta1701]

And now a second worker in that hospital has been diagnosed with Ebola. This is either spreading easier than they said it could be, or precautions just weren't taken at that facility. In either case it's now reached the point someone of power needs to step in there and take some forceful/drastic measures. I have a feeling that won't be the last diagnosis.

Take a second and actually think.

 

How many people were in contact with Mr. Duncan before he got to the hospital? Remember all the family and children that were quarantined and the closed schools for decontamination? 0 cases out of them so far and by statements today they've "passed the point of greatest risk". People who were living with him so far are uncontaminated.

[ChiSox_Sonix]

Take a second and actually think.

 

How many people were in contact with Mr. Duncan before he got to the hospital? Remember all the family and children that were quarantined and the closed schools for decontamination? 0 cases out of them so far and by statements today they've "passed the point of greatest risk". People who were living with him so far are uncontaminated.

 

Why are you trying so hard to defend the hospital? It's pretty obvious precautions and procedures were not followed as they should have been. There are statements from workers backing that up that they were given changing and conflicting orders during this mess.

[Balta1701]

Why are you trying so hard to defend the hospital? It's pretty obvious precautions and procedures were not followed as they should have been. There are statements from workers backing that up that they were given changing and conflicting orders during this mess.

I'm not defending the hospital one bit. I've been saying they f***ed up from basically the beginning. Where did you get that?

 

I'm saying "it's not spreading in any unusual way and there's no reason for this silly panic".