Screening for Ebola...

[Foxbat]

A bit of good news.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-29685127

 

[Karn Maeshalanadae]

Good news indeed.


Ebola is one of the deadliest diseases our species has ever faced. Last night I said I'm not worried about it, and honestly, I am not. It would be foolish in the extreme to say the virus itself isn't a threat when the opportunity to get infected is present, but to be honest, I don't think that opportunity will come about for most of this country.


That being said, mistakes have been made, serious ones. The first of which was allowing Duncan on the plane out of Liberia. The second of which was Duncan not being immediately hospitalized when symptoms started appearing.


And mistakes even on the national level. Dr. Gupta gave a demonstration of CDC regulation in donning and removal of hazmat suits using some form of sticky liquid-I believe it was chocolate sauce, I can't remember exactly which-to represent Ebola contamination-and wound up getting that "contamination" upon himself, if I remember correctly, three times, one of which was along his head/neck area, where men shave in the morning.


But at the same time, since this disease if left unchecked would have the potential to collapse society, it IS being checked. Experiments in treatment and vaccination, review of all medical protocols in eliminating exposure risk...I don't think it'll have a big foothold here in the United States or Europe.


And there is the pre-bedtime babbling for the night. Hehe. I really shouldn't be allowed to post after 10 p.m. PST.

 

[Brian G Turner]

IMO it's backwards to refuse to quarantine health workers exposed to ebola, and allow them to wander freely - until they show symptoms:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-29858689

Such an attitude seems overly complacent, rather than reasonable? Especially when we're talking about a virus that has no known cure, and has such a high kill rate?

 

[thaddeus6th]

I agree. I'm also perplexed by the nurse and others who seem to view it as unfair. It's three weeks of confinement, but not imprisonment, to try and limit an extremely dangerous disease.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I'm on the other side of the argument on this one - we need health workers out there. It's hard to catch and only in the symptom-showing stage. Provided the health worker is prepared to follow some guidelines - temperature checking before going out, maybe limiting travel and attendance at large scale events, then I don't see what is to be gained by keeping them in a house for three weeks other than scaremongering and putting off others who might have been brave enough to volunterre.

 

[thaddeus6th]

It minimises the risk of contagion in places that (in the West) often have high population densities. Given how many flights criss-cross countries and continents, if it got a foothold in the US, Europe, India or China then we could be in serious trouble.

Of course, Nigeria managed to eliminate ebola, so an infection doesn't equal a full-blown (national) epidemic, but better safe than sorry when dealing with something that has an over 70% kill rate.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I'm not saying there should be no checks (nor are the health workers in question, as far as I can see), but just as a blanket 'go anywhere you want, take ten flights' approach raises risk (more in terms of the logistics of finding everyone in potential contact than in terms of the disease spreading - Thomas Duncan infected the nurses, not the general public who came into random contact with him - this is a difficult disease to catch until it's very end stages) a 'don't leave your house for three weeks' approach is too narrow. It's about finding a sensible balance - eg if you had no temperature and chose to go for dinner at your friends, where is the risk in that? It's so mimimal that any risk assessment would deem it low enough to take (even with calculating the high death rate in).

I think the governments need to apply a risk rating sensibly to all this and stop knee jerking, because that knee jerking is in danger of leaving us more exposed if trained people won't go to the infected countries.