Ebola, like many other diseases, has a variability in presentation.
Fever, vomiting and diarrhea are known symptoms. Not all patients get all of these symptoms. Fever may be quite mild.
With the first lab accident case in the UK, early on in the course of the disease the patient’s fever was 37.4C (99.3F) - quite mild, and within the range of normal temperature variation for health individuals. He had no headache, no vomiting, and no myalgia.
By the time he was admitted to hospital his fever was up to 38C (100.4F). Still no vomiting. He complained of loss of appetite, physical exhaustion, and central abdominal pain. The case study report (pdf link) notes, “(h)e was alert and did not seem to be particularly ill.”
By the next morning his temperature was normal and he was free from symptoms. Later that night his fever was back up to 39C (102.2F) and he had loss of appetite.
And so on… variability of fever is [not uncommon in Ebola Virus Disease](file:///C:/Users/D/Downloads/20110101-ebola-KORTEPETER-TableauClinique.pdf). The patient suffered vomiting and diarrhea on only 3 days of his 15 day hospitalization. The first four days of his hospitalization he was actually constipated.
If the treating physicians did not know that the patient had sustained a needlestick injury while working with a virus (later determined to be ebola) then his early symptoms would not be particularly alarming.
4 minute interview with Dr. Arthur Caplan that really explains why Ebola is “out of control” in some African countries and and how this doesn’t mean it’s going to spread here.
I realize you won’t listen to it if you are already convinced that Donald Trump is right about the subject of the OP.
Well, then, since he wasn’t spewing bodily fluids he was unlikely to spread contagion, wasn’t he? Since we’re told it’s the bodily fluids that spread this infection.
The most dangerous ebola patients are those vomiting/shitting/bleeding profusely, which is sort of hard to miss. If a person has a mild manifestation of ebola there are a lot fewer infected bodily fluids involved. In which case, normal procedures - gloves, perhaps a mask - should suffice for not spreading the disease.
We did help them. The medicine was sent over there. The CDC isn’t bringing people over here to cure them, they’re sending 50 more people to the affected areas. That’s the proper protocol. The idea that we’re sending doctors over there with a hand full of needles to share in unhygienic conditions is financial nonsense. It’s 9000 miles round trip from ATL the Eastern shore of Africa. The CDC sends what looks like a Falcon-20 to pick people up. That’s going to rent for something like $12 a mile. They spent over $200,000 to pick up 2 people. That’s an awful lot of equipment that could have been shipped over.
Sometimes it’s not about finances. In this case, it was the right thing to do, ethically and morally. They risked their lives to bring modern medicine to this outbreak to the extent possible. We can offer them advanced medical care that increases their chances of survival with very minimal risk to the treating clinicians. All of the clinicians at Emory volunteered for this duty because they feel it is the right thing to do as a public health professional.
Treating these two Americans at home doesn’t in any way diminish the US effort abroad. They are two completely separate decisions.
Lets look at the ethical, moral and financial aspect of it.
I say this because bricks and mortar hospitals have traditionally been very deadly locations for the patients within. It’s not news that they harbor extremely dangerous organisms and many people die from the infections they got from hospitals. And it’s not a small number. 48,000 people in the United States alone in 2010.
Transportation on aircraft is no picnic for people who are sick. They fly at 35,000 feet and are pressurized to 8,000 feet. it’s stressful on the body as is traveling to/from the plane.
The ethics of moving someone in this case is not as black and white as people imagine. Now add the financial component. It does matter when providing care. If the CDC is moving assets to the area then there is a financially crossover of funds, equipment, and experience.
The biggest advantage to coming to the US is probably diagnostic equipment and/or a broader range of expertise outside of the disease. As I understand it, we can’t defeat the virus. It’s more a function of managing problems with major organs.
You can’t compare infections as if they are all the same. The typical hospital-acquired infections (C. diff., influenza, norovirus, staphylococcus) are very different from Ebola in very critical ways. Among other things, each one of those has asymptomatic carriers that are just as infectious as symptomatic patients. That isn’t the case with Ebola. They are also far more common, which makes them harder to control. In addition, most of those bugs are resistant to one or more common disinfectants, which is not the case for Ebola.
That’s why they received the experimental drug before they were moved. They were both clinically stable when they were flown to Atlanta. Neither Brantly nor Writebol was stable enough to move prior to the drug treatment. If the drug hadn’t worked, the decision may have been different.
Supportive care isn’t basic or trivial, as you apparently imagine it to be. A modern hospital with highly trained infectious disease specialists will provide better supportive care than a hospital in Liberia. If nothing else, the power doesn’t go off (and there are backup generators in case it does), the water is clean, and supplies are plentiful.
We know already know from the behaviour in the benghazi threads that no information or facts will make a difference. The fear and the hatred of the things foreign and considered threats in his view exceed any logic or any reason.
Maybe it is reassuring this is egaltiarian and he is ready for no reason to condemn even white fellow citizens to die for the fear without reason.
FWIW – two Spanish catholic missionaries who caught Ebola in the area have been repatriated and are being taken to a hospital in Madrid as I write this. It would seem that there has been no particular reaction on the part of the Spanish population; basically it’s been “I imagine the sanitary authorities know what they are doing”.
As far as I can judge by what I can see here, of course (I am right now having a vacation in Spain with my family).
Ebola won’t become a threat to the general public from their presence in our facility, but the insight we gain by caring for them will prepare us to better treat emergent diseases that may confront the United States in the future.
***We can either let our actions be guided by misunderstandings, fear and self-interest, or we can lead by knowledge, science and compassion. We can fear, or we can care.
Today, Miguel Pajares, the ebola-infected Spanish priest who was repatriated to Madrid from Liberia has died of the illness. He was 75; possibly his advanced age had a negative effect in the final outcome. He was the first victim of this outbreak to die outside of Africa.
He had been kept in the 6th floor of hospital “Carlos III” of Madrid since his arrival into the country on August 8, and apparently was treated with the experimental drug ZMapp (two courses of the serum were sent to West Africa to treat a doctor and nurse infected by Ebola there – however, it appears that the makers of the drug said they had no more. I guess they will ramp up production fast).
It has been decided that it was ethical to give this drug to Ebola patients even though it had not been subjected to clinical tests.
Besides, it gives the DoD a ready supply of the known-quantity virus in case they want to, you know, figure a wy to use it make their job of killing people easier.
Give it up - if you don’t believe there are people busy trying to turn this nightmare into a weapon, you are delusional.
If you survive past 14 days (starting from the point symptoms developed) then your likelihood of survival goes way up.
For example, in the 1995 outbreak of EBOV in Kikwit, only one patient died after making to that 14 day point. There were 250 deaths in that outbreak out of 315 total cases (79% fatality rate).
If you mean “people” as in terrorist groups and rogue states, sure. But nearly 170 countries have banned the production of biological weapons for the last 40 years. If you are implying that the United States is engaging in a secret biological weapons program, that is quite simply a conspiracy theory.
Eh, as mentioned before, if all they wanted was access to the virus, there are already ways of getting it that doesn’t involve bringing the infected people. The viruses are already in the US (and Europe). Various labs throughout the world (including, yes, labs associated with the armed forces) conduct research on Ebola and related diseases.