BREAKING NEWS: Five passengers on Logan flight taken to area hospitals
I'm not loving it at all.
"Boston patient deemed unlikely to have Ebola virus; Man was a recent visitor to Liberia" by Jeremy C. Fox and M.G. Lee | Globe Correspondents October 12, 2014
BRAINTREE — Massachusetts had its first Ebola scare Sunday as dozens of workers and patients were quarantined for hours at a Braintree medical facility, but by late evening fears that a man had been infected with the deadly virus appeared unfounded.
I'm starting to wonder whether the bad movie was more mental programming and preparation.
Doctors at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston concluded that the man, who recently visited Liberia and was complaining of a headache and body aches, “does not appear to meet CDC criteria to be considered someone at high risk for Ebola, and the likelihood of Ebola virus disease is extremely low,” according to a statement from the hospital.
Officials did not elaborate on the criteria. Hospital officials said the patient will remain in isolation as monitoring continues.
The man, whom officials have not identified, was taken by ambulance to Beth Israel from Braintree’s Harvard Vanguard office, where his symptoms and travel history had prompted clinic staffers to muster a hazardous materials team, alarming patients as unofficial word of an Ebola case spread. People were prevented from entering and leaving the facility for several hours.
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“There are no confirmed cases of Ebola in Massachusetts,” health officials assured in a statement.
That doesn't mean they are not here.
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Sunday’s scare began with he appearance of a hazmat team alarmed patients and workers in the Braintree medical offices.
Denise DiMarzio, who is seven months pregnant, was in a waiting room with her mother, Maureen, for a lunchtime appointment when they noticed people in the building wearing hazmat gear, they said.
Staff at the medical office took patients into examining rooms and explained that there was an emergency, they said, but did not explain the nature of the situation, which alarmed Denise DiMarzio, 35.
“I was like, ‘I’m kind of afraid for my health. Is it something that I could catch or my baby could [contract]?’. . . And they couldn’t answer us,” she said.
Denise DiMarzio, a nurse from Rockland, said the thought of crossing paths with a man possibly infected with Ebola was frightening. “I know it’s not airborne, but the fact that it’s bodily fluids — I mean I don’t know if he was coughing and had secretions on his hands and he was in the same waiting room as I was. It makes me a little bit nervous,” she said.
Maureen DiMarzio, of Weymouth, said that after her daughter went into the examining room, she went outside to her car and spoke with a woman who said, “Did you just come out of there? There’s someone in there with Ebola.”
Maureen DiMarzio said she then called her daughter and told her to leave the building immediately and not touch anything, and she advised others not to go inside. Denise DiMarzio left the building, but police would not allow the women to leave the parking lot until 4:30 p.m.
If it is not transmitted by air.... ?????
Denise DiMarzio said she believed police held the people who had been inside because they did not know if they would require decontamination.
Outside the Harvard Vanguard offices Sunday afternoon, police cruisers, fire trucks, and ambulances lined Grossman Drive, and the parking lot was cordoned off by yellow police tape. “Ebola protocol is in place,” said Joe Zanca of the Braintree Fire Department. “We don’t know if he actually has Ebola.”
Public safety officials clustered near the parking lot entry, where an ambulance sat. Five minutes before 4 p.m., the ambulance left the facility, headed south on Grossman Drive.
Brewster Ambulance Service said in a statement that it received a call from the Harvard Vanguard facility about 1:20 p.m. Sunday and dispatched a response team of two ambulances.
The team arrived to find the man waiting in his vehicle, as he had been instructed to do, and put him into an ambulance with its interior sealed with impermeable plastic sheeting, according to the statement. That ambulance will be decontaminated before it is returned to service, the statement said.
You wanna ride in that one?
At about 5 p.m. a tow truck removed the man’s black Toyota 4Runner SUV, with orange biohazard warning stickers on each of its windows, from the Harvard Vanguard parking lot.
?????
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Meanwhile, down in Dallas:
"Dallas hospital worker contracts Ebola virus" by Manny Fernandez | New York Times October 13, 2014
DALLAS — A nurse here became the first person to contract Ebola within the United States, prompting local, state, and federal officials who had settled into a choreographed response to scramble Sunday to solve the mystery of how she became infected despite wearing protective gear and to monitor additional places and people possibly at risk.
The news further stoked fears of health care workers across the country, many of whom have grown increasingly anxious about having to handle Ebola cases.
Can't say as I blame them.
The confirmation Sunday of the second Ebola case in Dallas — four days after the death Wednesday of the first patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, 42, a Liberian national who arrived in this country in September — opened a new and more frightening chapter in the unfolding public health drama.
Related: Duncan's Last Days
While the new Ebola patient was not publicly identified, officials said that she is a nurse who had helped treat Duncan at a hospital here and that she may have violated safety protocols.
Yeah, blame the victim.
It was the first confirmed instance of Ebola being transmitted in this country. Officials expanded the pool of people they had been monitoring, because the nurse had not been among the 48 health care workers, relatives of Duncan, and others whom they were evaluating daily.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that health officials look more closely at the protective gear that nurses, doctors, and hospital assistants use when treating Ebola patients. It also, for the first time, was considering whether to transfer patients with the virus to hospitals with special containment units and experience in treating the disease. The Dallas hospital at the center of the two Ebola cases — Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, which sent Duncan home on Sept. 25 under the mistaken belief he had a sinus infection, only to have him return Sept. 28 when his condition worsened — was facing renewed scrutiny over whether it had properly trained its workers.
The CDC said it would conduct a nationwide training conference call Tuesday for thousands of workers to ensure they would be fully prepared to treat a patient with Ebola.
“The care of Ebola patients can be done safely, but it’s hard to do it safely,” Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the CDC, told reporters Sunday. “Even a single, inadvertent, innocent slip can result in contamination.”
In my print copy he says Ebola will soon start popping up everywhere.
The stricken nurse reported a low-grade fever overnight Friday, officials said. It appeared that she drove herself to the emergency room of Presbyterian Hospital, where she worked, and was admitted and put in isolation 90 minutes later, the officials said.
She had extensive contact with Duncan on multiple occasions after his second visit and admission to the hospital on Sept. 28, Frieden said.
The nurse had been monitoring herself for symptoms of Ebola, under a regimen prescribed by the CDC. Health officials will now investigate who had been in contact with Duncan after he was admitted to the hospital and while he was in isolation, Frieden said.
Before her trip to the emergency room, officials said, the nurse had not been at work for two days. A preliminary blood test was done at the state public health lab in Austin and the positive result was received late Saturday evening, officials said. Late Sunday afternoon, the CDC confirmed that she had Ebola after completing its own tests.
The woman was in stable condition on Sunday. Dr. Daniel Varga, chief clinical officer of Texas Health Resources, which oversees Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, told reporters on Sunday the worker had worn protective gear when coming in contact with Duncan, although he did not detail the type of contact.
“This individual was following full CDC precautions,” Varga said, adding, “Gown, glove, mask. and shield.” Asked how concerned he was that the worker tested positive despite the precautions, he replied, “We’re very concerned.”
Despite Varga’s reassurances about CDC precautions having been followed, Frieden said it appeared the woman had breached safety protocol, possibly when removing the protective gear. Speaking on the CBS program “Face the Nation” and later at a news conference, he said that questioning of the worker had not identified precisely how a breach occurred.
Frieden said everyone who treated Duncan was now considered to be potentially exposed and other cases of Ebola were possible.
“We’re deeply concerned about this new development,” he said on the talk show.
The CDC has said that for health workers in the United States, gloves, gowns, masks, and face shields or goggles would be protection enough. But many health workers across the country, seeing images of people in Africa completely encased in full-body, hazardous-material suits, have requested similar protection.
That's one reason I'm not buying the government assurances.
On Sunday, National Nurses United, the country’s largest union and professional association of nurses, continued to sound the alarm and call for hazardous material suits at all hospitals.
“I’m angry about this,” said RoseAnn DeMoro, the executive director. “We want the first line of defense to be the most prepared. Our hospitals are resisting us. The CDC doesn’t say that we need hazmat suits. If this doesn’t change dramatically, we will picket every hospital in this country if we have to.”
President Obama on Sunday directed the C.D.C. to expedite its investigation into how the health care worker contracted the deadly virus. Obama also directed federal officials to make sure that hospitals and health workers across the nation “are prepared to follow protocols should they encounter an Ebola patient.
They did and still got sick.
In Dallas on Sunday, officials were trying to persuade residents to remain calm, and reminded them that their risk of exposure was low.
Now go tour and shop!
“You cannot contract Ebola other than from the bodily fluids of a symptomatic Ebola victim,” said County Judge Clay Jenkins, Dallas County’s chief executive, who himself has had close contact with those who lived with Mr. Duncan. “You cannot contract Ebola by walking by people on the street or by being around contacts who are not symptomatic.”
For some reason the Bruce Ribner that appeared in print has vanished as well as the health care worker's dog and its health status.
While there have been other patients with Ebola treated in the United States in recent weeks, the nurse is only the second person — after Duncan — whose condition was diagnosed in the United States. All of the other patients — including medical personnel, relief workers, and activists — received a diagnosis while working in West Africa near Ebola victims and were brought to this country for treatment.
Four hospitals in the United States — Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., and St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula, Mont. — have high-containment units for isolating patients with dangerous infectious diseases, and medical teams at those facilities have conducted extensive training and drills for dealing with pathogens like Ebola.
Hmmmmmm!
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"Dallas Ebola case focuses new attention on safety procedures" by Marilynn Marchione | Associated Press October 13, 2014
NEW YORK — How it happened is the key question as federal health officials investigate the case of a Dallas health worker who treated an Ebola patient and ended up with the disease herself.
The health worker wore protective gear while having extensive contact with Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who died Wednesday of Ebola at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital.
Officials said she has not been able to pinpoint any breach in infection control protocols, although there apparently was a breach, they say.
But it was her fault, not the government!
Experience shows that health workers can safely care for Ebola patients, ‘‘but we also know that it’s hard and that even a single breach can result in contamination,’’ Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Sunday on CBS’s ‘‘Face the Nation.’’
The situation also raises fresh concerns about whether any US hospital can safely handle Ebola patients.
The exact gear used by health workers can vary. A suit for handling hazardous materials usually includes a gown, two sets of gloves, a face mask, and an eye shield. There are strict protocols for how to use it correctly.
‘‘When you put on your garb and you take off your garb, it’s a buddy system,’’ with another health worker watching to make sure it’s done right, said Dr. Dennis Maki, University of Wisconsin-Madison infectious-disease specialist and former head of hospital infection control.
In trying to determine how the infection might have occurred, officials are focusing on two areas: how the garb was removed, and the intensive medical procedures Duncan received, which included kidney dialysis and a breathing machine.
Both involve inserting tubes — into blood vessels or an airway. That raises the risk a health worker will have contact with the patient’s bodily fluids, which is how Ebola spreads.
‘‘Removing the equipment can really be the highest risk. You have to be extremely careful and have somebody watching you to make sure you remember all the steps,’’ said Dr. Eileen Farnon, a Temple University doctor who formerly worked at the CDC and led teams investigating past Ebola outbreaks in Africa.
‘‘After every step you usually would do hand hygiene,’’ washing your hands with antiseptic or being sprayed with a chlorine spray, she said.
What did her partner see?
Some of the garb the health worker takes off might brush against a surface and contaminate it.
New data suggest that even tiny droplets of a patient’s body fluids can contain the virus, Maki said.
In addition to more training, the CDC recommends that hospitals minimize the number of people caring for an Ebola patient, perform only procedures essential to support the patient’s care, and name a full-time infection control supervisor while any Ebola patient is being cared for.
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Also see: The New Ebola Scare: Again, Are We Being Played As Suckers?
The amount of agenda-pushing propaganda pre$$ coverage would seem to indicate it in some form, fear or foul.
