Ebola has reached Texas

[Kahaih]

Sorry I can't give the source, but this should be floating around elsewhere by now;

Amber Vinson, 29, a nurse at the Dallas hospital where an Ebola patient died, was identified Wednesday as the second health care worker at the hospital to contract the deadly disease.

"She flew into Cleveland to prepare for her wedding. She came in to visit her mother and her mother’s fiance," said Toinette Parrilla, director of Cleveland Department of Public Health.

Vinson stayed at her relatives' home while visiting Ohio and those relatives are employees of Kent State University, the school said in a statement.
. . . .

Vinson arrived in Cleveland on Friday, Oct. 10, and returned to Dallas on the evening of Monday, Oct. 13. She was diagnosed with a fever, which is considered to be the first symptom of the disease, on Tuesday Oct. 14. She was tested and her diagnosis was confirmed late Tuesday.

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention addressed the fact that while she was not ordered into protective custody by the time she traveled, he did suggest that it was a mistake for her to do so.

"Because at that point she was in a group of individuals known to have exposure to Ebola, she should not have traveled on a commercial airline," CDC Director Tom Frieden said Wednesday.

. . .

Nice.

 

[Kulindahr]

^^ if not for ebola for the hantavirus

That, too. Makes me think of a summer in Colorado, when the state disease people took out full-page ads in all the rural and small newspapers warning everyone that bubonic was sweeping through the rodent population, and urging everyone who went out and about to carry a firearm and shoot any small critter that looked like it had fleas. The warning where I was said to shoot and leave them unless where other people might come by, and then either spray the corpse for fleas or call the health people to come handle it.

Until they announced the danger was past, I was deprived of rabbit for lunch, though we went out shooting often, examining critters with high-power scopes and binoculars. The carrion birds liked us, I guess.

 

[Kulindahr]

Sorry I can't give the source, but this should be floating around elsewhere by now;



Nice.

Ack.

I took note when a talking head from some medical center pointed out that even though people aren't contagious until symptomatic, many people are so accustomed to just ignoring a small fever that they can go several days without realizing they are symptomatic, and thus spread the disease without even thinking.

 

[T-Rexx]

Sorry I can't give the source, but this should be floating around elsewhere by now;

Amber Vinson, 29, a nurse at the Dallas hospital where an Ebola patient died, was identified Wednesday as the second health care worker at the hospital to contract the deadly disease.

Nice.

To appreciate how remarkable is the fact that two health care workers have now become infected in a modern American hospital, consider that Nigeria quashed an outbreak of 19 people in that country simply by hospitalizing cases and implementing standard isolation procedures. I'm not talking Biosafety Level 4 containment here. I mean standard isolation procedures that all hospitals everywhere implement on a fairly routine basis.

This is third world medicine. But, apparently, it's a stretch for Texas Health Presbyterian.

[And yes, I know that the early cases in Nigeria were also hospital caregivers. But, that happened because the initial case was not suspected as Ebola until after the exposures occurred. (That patient insisted that he had not been exposed to Ebola. Duncan was known to be infected and was in isolation when the transfer of virus occurred). The Nigerian outbreak was not a failure of containment.]

Virtually every previous outbreak of Ebola in known history has been contained with routine isolation procedures in a third world setting. Nigeria contained their outbreak during the current crisis with routine isolation procedures. Texas Health Presbyterian, a major urban hospital in the USA with vast resources and supervision by infectious disease experts, nevertheless somehow could not get this right.

This is an embarrassment.

This hospital sent home a patient with a high fever, whose family was warning that he might have Ebola. They then reassured us that it happened because they were incompetent and not because they were racist or greedy. Then, after they finally admitted the patient days later, they exposed their own staff to infection as a result of their inability to implement routine isolation procedures, common around the world.

Geez Louise.

 

[Kulindahr]

Politicizing it and lobbing grenades over the fence is just convenient opportunism. Texas has a huge population, great wealth, and rivals the two coasts for power. That rankles the arrogant on both coasts, so Texas gets the pot-shots of the resentful. Suggesting that somehow Texas has uninsured people and that the Republican majority is responsible for Ebola is ridiculous. I was just in New Jersey and New York, and they both abounded with poor people who obviously had inadequate access to health care. Snobbery is snobbery.

The difference being that politicians in New York and New Jersey generally want to provide those people with care, while the Republicans take great delight in keeping it hard to get.

 

[Kulindahr]

Hospitals the breadth of the land do not send people home from their ERs who have 103°F temperatures, and then lie about it.

In the ER here, if you come in with a high fever you're automatically sent to a different area, away from others, while waiting. That in itself is a good precaution.

 

[borg69unimatrix]

These folks who are finding they're getting ill before going to get help. They're urinating and defecating at least once or more a day, and this goes into the rat infested public sewers.

Will this mean we shall see ebola emerging in isolation in parts where these critters carry them?

According to the CDC, there's no evidence that rats can carry the virus. If you read carefully, though, there's also no evidence they can't.

So, why don't we know this??!?!?!?!?

I heard that in Africa Ebola is carried by bats. Rats make sense.

 

[Kulindahr]

I heard that in Africa Ebola is carried by bats. Rats make sense.

We know it is carried by mammals, since it came from (probably) monkeys. Given that, ANY mammal has to be suspect.

 

[borg69unimatrix]

It's always those damn monkeys.

 

[Kulindahr]

I hadn't realized rats are carriers before your comment. Interesting.

For ebola, we don't know if they are -- but it should be checked out.

That's silly. As much as I disagree with political efforts to inhibit decent health care, casting the opponents of the care as gleeful malevolent misanthropes isn't a fair depiction. They can legitimately see different priorities without being some evil force. I have lots of Republican friends but none of which would cackle at the demise of the poor. That's cartoonish, and not the reality I know.

The voice of the GOP both online and from candidates is social Darwinism, and the tone is positively thrilled about letting poor people suffer without insurance. It may be cartoonish, but that's because the public tone of the GOP is cartoonish.

The study of ebola goes back for four decades. It seems very likely that a rat connection would have already been uncovered, as there is doubtless much study of the feces due to the hantavirus problem. It will be good to see if anything comes of this current outbreak in terms of more learning about vectors.

Remember that evolution doesn't stand still while we stufy.

That's a leap too deductive. Viruses aren't that ubiquitously viable. They're highly adaptive along narrow vectors. Just because any possibility exists doesn't mean anything in particular except that testing should be done across the board to see what species succumb, which might be carriers, and which might be untenable for the virus. Of course, if we take the extreme that no animal should be subjected as some of the animal terrorist groups advocate, we wouldn't get to know that.

As deadly as it is, all animals which commonly hang out with humans should all be checked. It can't be terribly expensive, so why haven't we done it?

 

[bankside]

That's silly. As much as I disagree with political efforts to inhibit decent health care, casting the opponents of the care as gleeful malevolent misanthropes isn't a fair depiction. They can legitimately see different priorities without being some evil force. I have lots of Republican friends but none of which would cackle at the demise of the poor. That's cartoonish, and not the reality I know.

I don't think this sentence can stand in the abstract; one must ask what those different priorities are before deciding whether it is legitimate.

 

[bankside]

It can stand in the abstract as easily as Kuli's assertion that Republicans gleefully made the unsubstantiated statements. He generalized Republicans, not nutcase wackos that call into talk radio and such, which is more likely.

Specific claims can be answered with specific rebuttals, otherwise, not so much so.

My point remains that the views of the role of government can differ without demonizing the opposition. Hoover could legitimately believe that government should not have intervened in the Great Depression. It merely means that he may have been sincerely wrong, not inherently evil.

Americans loathed the notion of entering into a second European Deathfest in WWII, as they clearly remembered the imperial and futile clusterfuck that was WWI. Their hesitancy cost many lives and much hardship as Britain held out until such time as the Japanese could no longer tolerate American intervention in China and the Southern Pacific region. Did that make Americans evil for their view? No. It was a rational view but one not shared by conquered Europeans.

The temptation to make the opposition all villains is as wrong on the Left as it is on the Right. Both are overt demagoguery, and nothing more.

Okay, here's a specific claim: ensuring a basic level of medical care for all citizens is a social, legal, political, and moral obligation in any civilized society that scarcely requires any further justification. Moreover it seems so fundamental to a civilized society that it is out of all context to be placed in juxtaposition to "different priorities" without at least specifying what those priorities are, so that we might appreciate why they could possibly be so important as to trump health care.

 

[chrisrobin]

Where's Gov. Ricky on this?

 

[bankside]

So...i notice there are no "different priorities" there.

 

[kallipolis]

This is an educational article citing success stopping the spread of Ebola in one region of Sierra Leone:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...of-the-country-remains-untouched-9797137.html

I quote:

Koinadugu's success has been the result of concerted, early efforts to staunch the spread of the disease, and most of the planning has fallen to one man

 

[Vannie]

I joke a lot,but as bit of a germ a phobe like Howie Mandel,I take all this stuff pretty seriously(Especially having studied foodborne illnesses extensively.)All this talk of Ebola and the Enterovirus,as well as the Flu season coming has got me was washing my hands every five minutes.A stewardess tried to hug me recently,to thank me for a catering order that turned out well,and I told her that 'I' might have a cold coming on,so don't hug me. Human error will never be eliminated.

 

[Vitamin]

This is an educational article citing success stopping the spread of Ebola in one region of Sierra Leone:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...of-the-country-remains-untouched-9797137.html

I quote:

And just today it's already obsolete:

UPDATE: On 16 October 2014, a day after this article was published, Koinadugu registered its first two cases of Ebola.

 

[kallipolis]

One case, among thousands in the rest of Sierra Leone, speaks well of the efforts made thus far in that region....impressive.

 

[Kulindahr]

I don't think we know what studies have been done, by us, by the Africans, or others.

If they'd found rats were a vector, that information would be on the CDC website. It isn't.

 

[jdcnow]

Well, the hits just keep on coming...

Dallas-Fort Worth's WFAA-TV Channel 8 now reports that a Texas Health Presbyterian Dallas lab supervisor who may have handled an Ebola-positive lab specimen... Well apparently, that lab supervisor is now on vacation. On a Carnival cruise ship somewhere in the Caribbean!