News about the second nurse to contract Ebola, from the local Dallas/Ft. Worth station:
… CBS News Medical Correspondent Dr. John LaPook reports that Vinson called the CDC several times before boarding the plane concerned about her fever.
“This nurse, Nurse Vinson, did in fact call the CDC several times before taking that flight and said she has a temperature, a fever of 99.5, and the person at the CDC looked at a chart and because her temperature wasn’t 100.4 or higher she didn’t officially fall into the category of high risk.”…
“Those who have exposures to Ebola, she should not have traveled on a commercial airline,” said Dr. Frieden. “The CDC guidance in this setting outlines the need for controlled movement. That can include a charter plane; that can include a car; but it does not include public transport. We will from this moment forward ensure that no other individual who is being monitored for exposure undergoes travel in any way other than controlled movement.”
Frieden specifically noted that the remaining 75 healthcare workers who treated Thomas Duncan at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital will not be allowed to fly. The CDC will work with local and state officials to accomplish this…
Cleveland’s Public Health Director, Toinette Parrilla, said Vinson was visiting in preparation for her wedding. While there, she visited her mother and her fiance…
Hindsight being as always 20/20, how hard would it have been to reimburse the cost of Vinson’s (probably non-refundable) ticket, and set her up with Skype to discuss wedding details with her mom and fiance? She figured her personal costs against what the appointed authorities told her about the risks, and it turned out to be a bad gamble. Now “we” are going to pay a great deal of money to contact-trace, decontaminate, probably isolate more people and certainly waste a vast amount of time reassuring the ‘worried well’ that having once flown on a Frontier Air plane in 2004 is not a serious risk factor.
John Sopel at the BBC has a good op-ed on “The Ebola Fumble in Dallas“:
… This is a crude, and damning, statistic but so far Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) has treated thousands of people in West Africa with Ebola, and has seen 16 medical workers contract the disease. This hospital in Dallas has treated just one patient, and has two sick healthcare staff…
The Independent has a article showing that confining an Ebola outbreak can be done:
Nigeria will be officially declared Ebola-free in less than a week after containing the disease that has killed more than 4,000 people.
Eight of the 20 people infected in the country died and there have been no new cases confirmed since 8 September.
It means it is less than a week short of the 42-day period needed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to confirm Nigeria has quashed its Ebola outbreak…
The outbreak started in July, when a Liberian-American development consultant, Patrick Sawyer, collapsed in the arrivals hall of Lagos airport…
The conditions seemed ripe for it to spread through the densely-populated city of 21 million people and beyond, through the workers travelling in and out of Lagos every day and international travellers flying from its airport around the world.
Knowing the potential of Mr Sawyer’s symptoms, staff at the clinic caring for him refused to let him leave despite alleged pressure from the Liberian ambassador.
Staff at the First Consultants Medical Centre paid a high price for their courage – 11 workers and their family members contracted Ebola and four died….
An emergency presidential decree enabled officials to access mobile phone records and use law enforcement agencies where necessary to track down people at risk.
Almost 900 people – 362 in Lagos and 529 in Port Harcourt – were traced and monitored for symptoms for 21 days to ensure they had not contracted Ebola.
Every one of those people had to provide health authorities with updates about their health twice a day, often through methods like text messaging.
Anyone who didn’t feel well or failed to respond was checked on, either through a neighbourhood network or health workers…
Nigeria’s Port Health Services worked with airlines to ensure outbreak notifications were made and the Ministry of Health activated an Ebola Incident Management Centre to lead the national response.
The Lagos state government, federal institutions, the private sector and global non-governmental organisations were all drawn in to control the outbreak and the operation seems to have been a success…
And, yes, any feints towards such BIG GUBMINT OVERREACH DIKTATER OBOLA FEMA CAMP efforts would’ve been cried down in Dallas, although the screaming across the interwebs would’ve been mostly a stalking horse for the real problem: All that preventive action costs money, and requires large-scale public service coordination, two things to which our modern Robber Barons and their Kochsucking enablers are deathly allergic.
For your further edification (triangulating the medical/social distance between Nigeria & the USA), the NYTimes has an excellent article on how “Spain Exposes Holes in Plans to Treat Ebola“:
The scene conveyed a First World precision: A 75-year-old Spanish priest, stricken with Ebola in Liberia, arrived in Madrid on a special military jet. A helicopter buzzed overhead as ambulances transported him for treatment. Expressing confidence in the preparations, a Spanish health official said the risk of the virus’s spreading was “virtually nil.”
There was just one problem: The city’s infectious disease center had been mostly dismantled as part of a government cost-cutting plan, and a temporary Ebola ward would have to be hurriedly constructed.
After the priest died on Aug. 12, the unit was closed again, and the same exercise repeated when a second Ebola-infected priest was airlifted from West Africa in September. He died two days later, and last week an auxiliary nurse who changed his diaper and helped clean his bed was found to have the disease…
A team of European Union investigators has found fault in the layout of the Ebola ward, while Ms. Romero’s co-workers have said they were forced to remove their gear in a very small space, with limited room to maneuver, even as temperatures rose quickly inside the suit…
Recriminations in Spain, like those in the United States, have been loud and swift, with blame aimed variously at cost cuts, inadequate training and safety protocols, government officials, and the nurse herself…
Beyond the uncertainty over how the infection occurred, much of the public confusion, and anger, is focused on the seemingly loose monitoring of Ms. Romero for more than a week after the death of the second priest. Even as she called in complaining of a low-grade fever and of feeling queasy, she was never told to return to Carlos III…
Javier RodrÃguez, Madrid’s regional health minister, initially blamed Ms. Romero for her infection, saying she also may have lied to doctors, remarks that drew angry criticism. He also later seemed to mock the importance of training workers to remove their protective suits…
Unquestionably, the Ebola crisis has exposed the deep divide between health workers and Madrid’s government. In December 2012, Madrid officials announced a broad plan to cut costs by restructuring the public health system, privatizing some hospitals and closing two others, including Carlos III…
I remember some newsmedia-comment chatter about how ‘she wasn’t even a *real* nurse, just a glorified janitor from a tenement in the slums, so nobody important cared if she got sick’. There is a very old Spanish proverb: “God punishes all knaves and fools — but the fools, first.” Pretty clear Ms. Romero (like Ms. Pham and Ms. Vinson, in Dallas) got to serve as our unwitting ‘fools’…