Doctors without Borders says this outbreak is out of control. Two Americans that caught it in spite of their hazmat suits and other precautions will be in Atlanta within the next few days. The man is a doctor that caught Ebola and the woman was a volunteer that sprayed down and decontaminated the Doctors in their hazmat suits as they came out of the contaminated areas.
If the suits and other procedures aren’t 100% effective what makes Emory University think they’ll keep this contained?
Is this reckless behavior or is it a good idea? Would it be better to construct a Ebola treatment and research facility out in the desert hundreds of miles from any population centers?
Would you want to die across the globe in a godforsaken foreign land of an exotic illness? Away from all family and friends. They are us citizens. They were there helping other sick humans. They deserve to come home. Not be abandoned because they are aick and it’s scary.
More on the doctor. He was the director of facility. Wasn’t he the person that setup all the quarantine and containment procedures?
I can’t help but wonder if these scientists and doctors are a little too over confidant in their ability to contain this. Researching a specimen in a bio lab is dangerous enough. Imagine patients equally dangerous that require routine nursing care.
Although I understand why they’re doing it, I’m going to go with reckless. I’m willing to trust that the isolation chamber they have will contain the disease, but I think the real danger lies in getting the patients from the airport to the chamber. Somewhere in my head I’m watching this in a movie theater, rolling my eyes at how this would never happen in real life . . .
Of course, if I was a family member of one of the patients, my views would be different. They’re US citizens, they’ve been incredibly selfless and brave, and what’s happening to them because of their generosity is unspeakably awful. It’s a tough, tough choice, one I’m happy I’m not actually making. So I’m putting down “Not Sure.”
I’m happy to be corrected but my understanding is that this virus is like Hep c or Aids in that you actually need to have fluid transfer. You shouldn’t be able to get it by just breathing the same air, you need to ingest contaminated bodily fluid.
What makes that tricky is the virus makes people bleed profusely and with blood spitting everywhere you only need to get a bit into an open wound or ingest it and you’re futterly ucked.
Is that the case or does this stuff leak straight through hazmat suits into your bloodstream?
Doctors Without Borders seems to be on the front lines in this fight. I underlined an interesting statement. They use the word reduce instead of eliminate.
It’s my understanding that they believe both patients caught the disease from an infected co-worker who was working in the decontamination area. In other words, they were infected while they were not in their suits in an area that was “safe”.
That said, medical personnel are higher risk, and I have not been able to find full reasons for all of those deaths. Stress, poor conditions, accidental needle sticks, exposure out of the clinic setting are all speculated.
The hope is that better conditions here would vastly cut down risk to staff and improve survival rates.
I also believe that the CDC and medical staff here would like to improve their understanding of how to treat this type of virus. It’s a smaller world than it used to be. Better (the thinking may go) do this on our terms than find out the hard way that it’s already here. (And have you read Clancy? Or the news lately? It’s enough to make a person paranoid)
I recall the military had a hospital ship off the coast of Iraq during the war. That seems ideal if they updated it with the newest bio containment gear.
They’ve said used needles are a Ebola transmitter. Imagine all the addicts in Atlanta. A lot of them share needles. Ebola would rip through that group like wildfire. They in turn would expose anyone they came into contact with.
I live just a few miles from Emory (and from the CDC, natch), so if I’m wrong I guess I’ll be among the first to know it, but I voted “yes”. Ebola is some scary shit, but it’s not actually the Andromeda strain, or the zombie plague. From various news stories, they’re not just sticking these patients in coach on a Delta flight with maybe a surgical mask on them. They’re being flown back on specially-chartered flights, with presumably proper precautions, and at any rate, if something does go wrong it will be the crews on those planes who will be at risk (and I’m sure they know what they’re getting into). The virus isn’t going to commandeer the planes and force the pilots to crash-land in the middle of a populated area, then come rushing out of the wreckage while laughing maniacally. It’s a really horrible virus, but it’s just a virus. As horrible as it is, it’s not nearly as contagious as the common cold.
I would say the danger isn’t an event like this, where we know exactly what’s coming into this country, under the most carefully controlled and planned-for conditions; it’s some Passenger X who gets on his nonstop flight from wherever to Hartsfield-Jackson (because of course everybody flies into Atlanta sooner or later, even if it’s just to change planes), even though, sure, he’s feeling a little under the weather, but it’s probably nothing, and he really needs to make it to [insert name of big city here] in time for that wedding/conference/kid’s birthday…
All the more reason–in addition to humanitarian concerns–to get these poor people to where they can be helped, and also to where this hideous disease can be properly studied. The treatment facilities these patients are being taken to are apparently state-of-the-art, world class, and specially designed to handle scary shit like this. And of course the CDC is just around the corner, and they’re certainly the people I want to be right on top of all this.
(Now watch one of the planes crash a block from my house. Into a tanker truck full of hazardous chemicals, or possibly radioactive waste, so that the virus “mutates”. In a week I’ll be shambling around, bleeding from the eyes, and moaning for brains…delicious braaains.)
They are being moved to a high-security, high-containment unit commissioned by the DoD and CDC for exactly this purpose. The rooms are under negative pressure. There is an entrance directly into the sealed unit, so no one has to go through the main hospital. There are lab facilities on site so no samples will go to the main hospital lab. It is very much a self-contained hospital within a hospital. It is also within walking distance of CDC. The patients will not fly into the Atlanta airport. They are being med-evaced directly to Emory.
Is it a risk? Sure, especially for the transport crew and the clinical staff caring for these people. The risk to the general population, even the general population at Emory hospital is very, very minimal.
Aceplace57, your concerns about reused needles are completely out of proportion to the risk. Even in the general hospital, needles are disposed of in tamper-resistant containers in the biohazard waste stream, meaning they are incinerated. In the containment unit, the waste won’t even enter the general hospital waste stream. When people talk about drug users reusing needles, they aren’t talking about needles from hospitals. They are talking about needles from other users.
“When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.”
― Will Rogers
Not causing more deaths is more important than dying surrounded by your friends and family. It sucks, but it’s incredibly foolish to make the same mistakes that got us into this mess.
I voted “not sure” but I lean towards bringing them here if it’s done properly (and it will be). ddsun makes a persuasive argument about bringing patients here on our terms in order to study them as opposed to waiting until we have to study someone off the street.
This is a disease that needs to be studied and understood under controlled conditions so as to hopefully avoid having to study it under uncontrolled conditions.
My first thought was sure, of course bring them here. Smart people will be in charge of this, it’ll be fine. Then I started to laugh at myself and how trusting and naive I am. We fuck up all the time.
But I guess I still don’t want these people abandoned. So I’ll just hope they all take extreme caution.
Ebola is a very nasty virus but its not as risky as news reports would have us believe. In third world populations it gets transmitted through unsanitary habits and lack of knowledge. Even so Ebola outbreaks are rare and usually die out.
There are five variants and I think this one is Ebola Zaire, which is dangerous but not the worst. Marburg disease (a cousin) is worse.
In a first world nation Ebola would have difficulty being transmitted - not impossible, but once detected would be contained.
The other thing is Ebola has been known about and studied since 1976 so its not as if doctors and scientists are dealing with a brand new infection.
I am not worried. Our healthcare system deals with things far easier to spread. I think there is a small chance that some health care workers may be infected, but basically zero of it becoming a threat to the general population.