Spain and Ebola: Discuss

[sneuman]

Originally Posted by SmartMove

I borrowed this from Pat Bagley of the Salt Lake Tribune. He titled this 'FoxNews explains Ebola while at the same time sucking your brain out through your ear and eye holes'

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Awesome!


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[atoll]

Originally Posted by SmartMove

I borrowed this from Pat Bagley of the Salt Lake Tribune. He titled this 'FoxNews explains Ebola while at the same time sucking your brain out through your ear and eye holes'

Attachment 89728



Sent from my iPad using Cruisers Sailing Forum

jees! that almost made me forget about isreal and palestine

[atoll]

WHO warns 10,000 new cases of Ebola a week are possible | World news | The Guardian

WHO warns 10,000 new cases of Ebola a week are possible

UN agency says fatality rate at 70% and that ‘a lot more people will die’ unless world steps up its response to crisis

[Delancey]

looks eerily familiar, wonder what it's going to look like in two months?

[hellosailor]

"There are many factors involved, not least that original Ebola would suddenly disappear as quickly as it appeared."
A pipe dream. Might as well wish for roaches and rats to disappear and cotton candy to fall from the skies.

"seems like the best policy for suspected cases might be for them to stay at home,and have a fully suited up doctor/team visit,"
No no no. CDC has already run through that scenario. You need proper containment and disposal equipment at each location for the linens, sheets, empty IV bags, gowns, from each patient. Easier to put the patients into one place with some common means of processing waste (which ultimately is incinerated) and have the infectious waste carried around as little as possible.

"The hospital in question is (or was) an excellent facility. Those who think this was some backwater clinic are wrong. The assumption that the same thing can't happen in any large hospital is also probably wrong. "
Most hospitals are truly filthy places. Even if they wash the floors every day, they rarely disinfect vent systems. They rarely have negative air pressure, even in intensive care rooms. Anyone who knows how to perform a "white glove check" in a barracks, could flunk out any hospital in the US, any day or night. Sanitation costs money and every hospital complains that "housekeeping costs too much." Every one of them. Look at the specs for deaths and damage from hospital-acquired infections, they speak for themselves.
The "UV robot" (more of a UV bomb, really) has been proven to be very effective. Not perfect, but very effective. Industry response? Right, that's housekeeping. It costs too much. [sic]
Ebola has been categorized as a BSL4 contagion for 40+ years now. But the field workers are using BSL2, or at best, BSL3, practices to deal with it. That's the textbook definiton of suicidal. BSL4 practices are damned expensive, inconvenient, and difficult to maintain in the field.

So while the world ignores the long-set standards required to deal with Ebola, and while the world ignores the larger issues of either creating a mass vaccine and using it--perhaps forcibly--the disease will continue to win.

A Journal of the Plague Year, War of the Worlds, Andromeda Strain...

Repeat after me: "Housekeeping is too expensive."

Kinda says it all, doesn't it?

[DeepFrz]

The WHO says that we will pass 9,000 Ebola cases this week. They also say the death rate is 70%. That means we will pass approx. 6,300 deaths by the end of this week. On Friday it was reported that we surpassed 4,000 deaths. We have seen over 450 deaths in the past 3 or 4 days (by my count). It difficult to be precise as reporting days may not be actual count days but one thing is for sure, the death toll is rising at a horrific rate.

[atoll]

Originally Posted by DeepFrz

The WHO says that we will pass 9,000 Ebola cases this week. They also say the death rate is 70%. That means we will pass approx. 6,300 deaths by the end of this week. On Friday it was reported that we surpassed 4,000 deaths. We have seen over 450 deaths in the past 3 or 4 days (by my count). It difficult to be precise as reporting days may not be actual count days but one thing is for sure, the death toll is rising at a horrific rate.

I think the word "exponential" might better describe the true extent of the spread of the epidemic soon to be pandemic

[BandB]

Originally Posted by atoll

I think the word "exponential" might better describe the true extent of the spread of the epidemic soon to be pandemic

If anyone isn't scared by this, I can't imagine how. There's not likely to be some magical drug to cure all those with it in time, even though there might be one to vaccinate for the future. Unchecked this could be another Bubonic Plague sized pandemic. The solutions available today are quite distasteful but might be necessary. This is certainly worse and more threatening than say Leprosy and look at the measures that were taken for it.

We're more a world society so diseases tend not to stay in a small area of the world without some extreme and unusual measures being taken. When younger we use to do some of the math gyrations of taking a dollar and doubling it on day one and then doubling each days new number each day. That's the way this virus spreads.

We don't even know how to dispose of what is removed from a home of a patient. The crew in Dallas thought they had made arrangements with a site in Louisiana and they've now reversed their decision. This is just the ashes from burned clothes and items. For the dog, we've taken an entire facility and then we've gotten Hazmat barrels to collect the dog's waste. We know dog's waste of a dog exposed can carry the virus. We know deceased bodies can still carry and spread the virus.

Honestly today we don't know the risks and perhaps tracking a small group of people exposed in Dallas will tell us more. We certainly know a nurse who we thought was protected caught it. Was it a breach of protocol or something we didn't know? I've talked to medical professionals about the protocol of decontamination. They say that it's extremely difficult not to breach protocol and at least one in ten will regardless of how hard they try.

In our lifetimes we haven't faced anything like this. Think H1N1 and the way it spread. But it only killed a small percentage and primarily of high risk groups of immune suppressed, elderly, and young children. So a small percentage of a small percentage. This virus plays no favorites and kills 70% of 100% of those who get it according to estimates.

With one patient the hospital in Dallas was overwhelmed. So far the cost in Dallas has already exceeded a million dollars.

One small ray of hope. Nigeria took strong and swift action and it led to deaths of doctors and nurses but they clamped down strongly on patients and those exposed to limit the spread. They may have shown it is possible with quick, focused intervention. The first case in Dallas that didn't happen. The quarantine wasn't issued immediately for the home or family. Most have probably read about the NBC employees who voluntary quarantine was tried on and they decided going for pastry and coffee was more important than risk to their fellow man. Nigeria monitored 900 people for 21 days, with health updates twice a day. Somehow they limited their deaths to a small number while the epidemic grew rapidly for their neighbors. I never thought they'd be the country I'd be pointing to as an example, but perhaps there are things to be learned there.

The one thing shown is that each case and each person exposed has to be taken very seriously and assumptions as to safety or thinking someone is low risk are just something we can't make. The term "emergency state" comes to mind and we're not in one yet. However, we really need to treat each case with that mindset. That includes extraordinarily strong measures like quarantine which we think of as compromising rights. But the threat does require such actions.

[Delancey]

Wow! What a monumental fail from the top down in Dallas as is being revealed in light of a second health care work getting sick-

“They kept adding more protective equipment as the patient [Duncan] deteriorated. They had masks first, then face shields, then the positive-pressure respirator. They added a second pair of gloves,” said Pierre Rollin, a CDC epidemiologist.

Nurses ultimately used four or five rows of medical tape to cover their skin at the neck and secure suits with loose openings while the patient suffered projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea.

Among the nurses’ allegations was that the Ebola patient’s lab samples were allowed to travel through the hospital’s pneumatic tubes, opening the possibility of contaminating the specimen delivery system. The nurses also alleged that hazardous waste was allowed to pile up to the ceiling.

The nurses' also allege that Duncan was kept in a non-isolated area of the emergency department for several hours, potentially exposing up to seven other patients to Ebola.

Nurses’ Union: Ebola Patient Left In Open Area Of ER For Hours « CBS Houston

Dallas hospital learned its Ebola protocols while struggling to save mortally ill patient - The Washington Post


“I wish we had put a team like this on the ground the day the first patient was diagnosed,” he said. “That might have prevented this infection.” CDC Director Thomas Freiden

[DeepFrz]

I guess the CDC was correct. A failure to follow protocol.

[SaltyMonkey]

And it gets worse:

Ebola Patient Traveled By Air Day Before Symptoms Surfaced « CBS Dallas / Fort Worth

Chaos theory anyone?

[sneuman]

A new poll suggests that the people most obsessed by Ebola coverage actually understand the least about the disease and how it's spread.

Ebola poll: N.J. residents fear an outbreak in U.S., but aren't well-informed about disease | NJ.com

From reading this thread, I'd have to agree.

[Delancey]

Well, we don't want to be those people. Let's learn something.

According to the WHO, so far in the West Africa outbreak 13% of those infected don't have a fever.

Ebola research: Fever not a surefire sign of infection - LA Times

But how can that be? Isn't the CDC telling us that unless someone has a fever, they're not contagious? Did the 2nd nurse get on an airplane even though she wasn't feeling well because the CDC told her if she didn't have a fever, she wasn't sick?

If she didn't have a fever and wasn't infectious why is the CDC now asking 132 people who were on that flight to contact them?

[SaltyMonkey]

I fear sneuman has been drinking brackish Severn River water and is delusional this morning.

Me thinks, this is merely the tip of the ice burger and there are many many more cases out there than anyone knows about. Nature finds a way and will be damned to dogmatic logic mindsets.

Just watch and see.

Only the monkey knows...

[BandB]

The protocol wasn't in place. It really seems it is being developed on the fly, even today. The director of the CDC continues to make statements asserting things that just aren't known to be true. Read a Dallas newspaper and you'll see local officials have done the same. Anyone who thought no other cases would develop from this as being very naive.

From the nurses statement:

“There was no advanced preparedness on what to do with the patient. There was no protocol. There was no system. The nurses were asked to call the infectious disease department” if they had questions, but that department didn’t have answers either, the statement said. So nurses were essentially left to figure things out on their own as they dealt with “copious amounts” of highly contagious bodily fluids from the dying Duncan while wearing gloves with no wrist tapes, flimsy gowns that did not cover their necks, and no surgical booties, it alleged. “Hospital officials allowed nurses who interacted with Mr. Duncan to then continue normal patient-care duties,” potentially exposing others, the statement said.

We kept hearing and reading about all the ways it couldn't be spread and when exactly it could be spread. The CDC now admits they didn't send an adequate team in. Neither they nor the hospital took this as seriously or focused as intently as they needed to. The response has been very inconsistent. The decontamination of the residence after the fact has been approached more seriously than the handling of tubes of blood in the hospital.

This total reliance on "fever" was taken way too far. Fever may be an indicator. But to say, "no symptoms yet, no danger" or "no fever yet, no danger" is absurdly wrong. We don't react to our body immediately. We're sick always for some time before we respond or realize it. Maybe an hour, maybe a day.

The hospital wasn't prepared. The CDC wasn't prepared and I don't believe they are yet. That is so unacceptable and reeks of incompetence. They had plenty of time as it was obvious this would happen, it was coming. Not having a cure I fully understand, but not having a plan in place is a huge failure.

What a tragedy of errors so far on the part of all involved. There are a lot of scared people, for good reason. I talked yesterday to a doctor in the Dallas area. The doctors and nurses from the hospital don't paint a pretty picture.

So two tragic parts to this:

1-We weren't prepared.

2-We've been lied to. Maybe not intentionally, but just the same. Lot's of false reassurances and lot's of propaganda about our preparedness.

And for those in other countries, don't bet on your preparation or safety being any different.