Jerseygirl

A doctor on TV said the virus can live up to 6 days outside the body...depending on the conditions.

Michael

Also someone on TV said they are worried that Ebola will become an airborne virus but I've never heard anyone expressing the same fear about the AIDS virus.

kimilseung

Oddly, these seem to be the same people who deny evolution.

kimilseung

There seems to be a suspected case in Massachusetts. Although it might be flu judging by the symptoms, but he was in Liberia, so they are following an "abundance of caution"

Michael

Passenger With Flu-Like Symptoms Causes Ebola Scare At LAX « CBS Los Angeles

“It has turned out that there had been some miscommunication. This person had been to the continent of Africa but not near West Africa. As a matter of a fact, it was South Africa.”

We need better educated people to know the difference between South Africa and West Africa.

scrubbedexpat091

Based on what I have read seems Ebola is present in a larger variety of bodily fluids then HIV is and more likely for a healthcare worker or caregiver to come into contact with infected fluids, bedding, clothing, medical devices etc then with someone with HIV.

Plus HIV doesn't generally infect and kill it's host within a couple weeks.

HIV is generally not believed for example to be present in large enough quantities to infect or not present at all in urine, sweat, and saliva, but ebola is present in these bodily fluids.

I am not sure I believe its airborne as it seems it would be infecting more people on a larger scale if it were. Look how many the Spanish flu outbreak killed vs Ebola.

Mrs Danvers

I suppose what has been bothering me is the spokespeople of the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital and the CDC along with news reporting.

Firstly we were meant to believe that patient zero told the triage nurse that he had just come from Liberia "but that wasn't fully communicated with all members the health care team" thus blaming the triage nurse. Then they tried to blame it on a computer glitch. Then it comes out that the doctor also knew, wrote in the notes that patient zero didn't have fever or chills despite sporting a 103 f temp.

Now this nurse has caught the disease due to "a breach of protocol" suggesting that the second Ebola victim brought it all on herself. CNN, the Daily Mail et al report this on the web next to stock photos of people in full disease control impenetrable space suits. People wearing these are hosed off with bleach solution for 30 minutes or so. Except that isn't what the nurses are wearing.

They are wearing "protective gloves, gown and masks" as indicated in this Daily Mail article.

Patient zero was also intubated and dialysed prior to his death which could have increased the risk as bodily fluids that wouldn't normally could have gone airborne during these procedures.

The suggestion that health care workers are contracting the virus whilst wearing the full protective clothing is misleading.

I don't trust any information coming from this hospital.

Yorkieabroad

There was an interesting interview (think on the beeb?) a couple of days back with a guy who runs a company that manufactures the protective suits.

He reckoned they had had orders for 50,000 suits in the last month. Obviously there will be a time lag in filling that order, as they don't keep that sort of inventory on hand, but he was also saying there would be a time lag between manufacture and them going in to use while the operatives were being trained in how to don/use/remove them. They run a 3 day training course, including time in a room akin to a sauna to replicate conditions in the field. He was saying that he wouldn't expect anyone in Africa to be in the suits for any more than an hour without risking serious dehyrdration/heat stroke problems. At the end of that hour, the fingers of the gloves would be expected to be totally full of liquid (sweat) and that taking the suits off is quite tricky/perilous due to the slipperiness of a sweat soaked body inside. One of the difficulties they need to overcome is that a natural reaction from the wearers is to wipe their faces as soon as they get their hands free, with a high risk of contamination if they have unwittingly touched the outside of the suit as they remove it. All interesting stuff.

Mrs Danvers

Yes it is and if you'll notice, the hospitals in Atlanta and Nebraska that were fully equipped for ebola that took the health care workers that were infected in West Africa didn't have any protocol breaches. This was, I suspect because the doctors and nurses in those hospitals had access to the right personal protective equipment.

Also ebola does induce projectile vomiting which the usual gowns gloves and masks wouldn't protect the health care worker against. It's all basically a waxy paper shield.

I

scrubbedexpat091

I really don't think ebola patients should be treated in a normal hospital if there are only a small number of patients, fly them to one of the specialized hospitals that are trained and equipped for this sort of thing.

This Texas hospitals really botched things though, we have a nearly weekly potential case somewhere in Canada and so far none have been positive, but pretty much anyone who has been to an affected area and coming in with symptoms appear to be isolated and tested for ebola right away.

sir_eccles

Outside of movies, the likelihood it suddenly becomes airborne is pretty low. It just doesn't work like that.

FlaviusAetius

[QUOTE We need better educated people to know the difference between South Africa and West Africa.[/QUOTE]

And where are you going to find them?

What is frightening is this Dr. Friedman, spokesman for the CDC, who nightly comes on the air and insults everyone's intelligence. It is most likely that neither he, nor anyone else in government, has the faintest clue how to prevent Ebola from getting a foothold in this country, absent a stringent travel ban from the Ebola hotspots - with tracing to ensure that people traveling from those countries (not the aid doctors we send or the military we have sent) cannot enter here via Brussels or some other connecting point. That is the one step they are refusing to take - perhaps because it would appear not to be politically correct. Expect people here to start paying with their lives on that altar.

Nurse Pham's experience shows that treating Ebola patients probably cannot be made safe and that if you get it they will blame you for your misfortune. I would not be surprised to see nurses start refusing to treat them. Who here would risk their lives to do her job on the next confirmed case?

RoadWarriorFromLP

The travel bans would backfire. That's just security theater in action: something that sounds like a good idea to laymen who know nothing, but makes little sense in the real world.

The way to deal with this is to get aid in country ASAP. It's not as if there are large numbers of them holding US-bound airline tickets, anyway. But what you shouldn't want are West Africans who try to get around the travel ban by traveling elsewhere within Africa, where they can spread the disease even further.

In any case, there are zero direct flights between the US and Liberia. How exactly would you propose to reduce that to a figure less than zero?

Pulaski

Well that's not happening, not even close. From what I have seen the numbers are still growing rapidly, and the pledged support is going to take until the end of November to deliver, but would be inadequate even if delivered instantly given the numbers of cases today.

The figures show that 5% of fatalities are medical workers, so unless you find a larger number of trained doctors and nurses willing to play Russian roulette with a disease with a 60-70% mortality rate, the bigger issue is going to be finding enough people to deliver hands-on aid.

For these reasons I predict it is going to get worse, a lot worse, and spread to most other countries in Africa, and will likely lead to some sort of coordinated restriction on flights from any country in Africa.

scrubbedexpat091

I am actually surprised it hasn't spread further within Africa already.


We apparently have another person in Ontario who is in isolation pending a test for Ebola, results in tomorrow. They ruled out Ebola in a patient in Ottawa though, so that is good.

Hospitals here seem to be doing a better job then Texas has and quickly isolating people, but the nurses union is concerned they don't have adequate equipment.

I know we have at least 1 person from this town who has gone over to help in Africa with Ebola patients, I just hope when he/she comes back, they don't bring Ebola with them.