Ebola health fiasco

This guy was on a plane, was sent home from the hospital, vomited in the ambulance - if you have listened to yesterday's podcast, you will realise how potentially disastrous this is.

A fiasco doesn't even begin to describe it.

Health fiasco: Ebola patient was vomiting in ambulance, five children exposed from 4 different schools, took at least 3 flights

the Extinction Protocol,

30 September, 2014

September 2014 – DALLAS, TX – Five students, who attended four different Dallas schools, are being monitored this week after possibly being in close contact with the Ebola patient over the weekend. 

At a news conference at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, the state’s governor Rick Perry said parents were concerned but he allayed fears of contagion. 

Officials said they are monitoring up to another dozen people who may have come into contact with the man. Thomas Eric Duncan is thought to have contracted the virus in Liberia. The Liberian national came to the U.S. nearly two weeks ago to visit relatives and he is the first man to be diagnosed with Ebola while in the US. Mr. Duncan is now in a serious condition, a spokeswoman for the hospital said. 

A nurse had asked him on his first visit to the hospital when he felt ill if he had been in an area affected by the Ebola outbreak. He told them he had been to Liberia but the “information was not fully communicated throughout the whole team,” according to hospital officials. 

Mr. Duncan was then sent home with antibiotics – a decision hospital bosses have described as a matter of “regret” – but he was admitted when he returned two days later. 

Mr. Duncan’s family are among up to 18 people being monitored after exposure to the man along with the ambulance crew who transported him to hospital. According to The New York Times, Mr. Duncan worked moving cargo for Fedex in the Liberian capital Monrovia but had recently quit his job and gotten a visa to come to the U.S. where his son reportedly lives. 

The Times also revealed that Mr. Duncan may have contracted Ebola while helping carry his landlord’s seriously ill, pregnant daughter to hospital. The woman, named by The Times as 19-year-old Marthalene Williams was taken to a hospital on September 15, but turned away because there was no room to treat her. 

She died the following day.

Hundreds of passengers were exposed to Mr. Duncan after it was revealed today that the traveler took at least three flights to get from Liberia to Dallas – because there is no direct flight from Belgium to Texas. The other flight that Mr. Duncan boarded is currently unknown and no details are being released. United Airlines has said it thinks Mr. Duncan flew from Brussels to Washington Dulles on Flight 951 before he traveled from Washington Dulles to Dallas Fort-Worth on Flight 822. 

A team of CDC ‘disease detectives’ arrived in Dallas on Wednesday and were going door-to-door to find out who may have come in contact with the man while he was contagious with Ebola. Residents living in the same apartment block that is ‘ground zero’ for the Ebola outbreak in Dallas today spoke of their fears. 

Despite reassurances from health chiefs that the deadly virus has been contained many residents are fearful that they might have been infected. Dallas County Health Department was forced to deny that a second male patient was being closely monitored today after media reports. 

On September 28, Mr. Duncan was rushed to hospital in an ambulance while vomiting and was quarantined. The ambulance crew who transported Mr. Duncan all tested negative for Ebola on Wednesday but have been placed in ‘reverse isolation’ at their homes for the next 21 days as a precaution. 

Other local residents were concerned that the complex had not been placed into quarantine. 

Mother Toni Gomez, who lives opposite the complex, said: ‘Yes, I am scared. Who wants to live next to somewhere where there is such a horrible virus? I think the place should at least be sealed off and no one allowed to go in and out.’

Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian national who had traveled to the U.S. from Liberia on September 20 to visit family, has been quarantined at a Dallas hospital for Ebola. –Daily Mail

Allaying fears that Mr. Duncan might have infected others, Mr. Perry said his state had the medical infrastructure to prevent an outbreak. “There are few places in the world better equipped to meet the challenge that is posed in this case.” 

More than 3,000 people have already died of Ebola in West Africa and a small number of U.S. aid workers have recovered after being flown to the US. Meanwhile, in Liberia a government spokesman said the man showed no symptoms or fever as he was screened before departing the country. 

“What this incident demonstrates is the clear international dimension of this Ebola crisis,” Lewis Brown, the country’s information minister, said in a statement. “For months, the Liberian government has been stressing that this disease is not simply a Liberian or West African problem.” 

Binyah Kesselly, chairman of the board of the Liberia Airport Authority, said they had screened 10,000 passengers since July, but it would be “nearly impossible” to identify a person as infected with the Ebola virus if they were not showing symptoms. 

CDC Director Thomas Frieden confirmed the Ebola case on Tuesday, saying the unnamed patient left Liberia on 19 September and arrived in the US the next day to visit relatives, without displaying any symptoms of the virus. 

Symptoms became apparent in the patient on 24 September, and on 28 September he was admitted to a Texas hospital and put in isolation. The disease, which is not contagious until symptoms appear, is spread via close contact with bodily fluids. 

Health officials are working to identify all people who came into contact with Mr. Duncan and they will then be monitored for 21 days to see if an Ebola-related fever develops.

 –BBC, Daily Mail

Ebola nightmare: ‘five infected every hour’ in Sierra Leone – ‘terrifying new rate’ of acceleration

the Extinction Protocol,

30 September, 2014

October 2014 –SIERRA LEONE - A leading charity has warned that a rate of five new Ebola cases an hour in Sierra Leone means healthcare demands are far outstripping supply. Save the Children said there were 765 new cases of Ebola reported in the West African state last week, while there are only 327 beds in the country.  Experts and politicians are set to meet in London to debate a global response to the crisis. It is the world’s worst outbreak of the virus, killing 3,338 people so far. There have been 7,178 confirmed cases, with Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea suffering the most. The number of people infected and dying from the disease is being vastly underreported. Save the Children says Ebola is spreading across Sierra Leone at a “terrifying rate,” with the number of new cases being recorded doubling every few weeks. It said that even as health authorities got on top of the outbreak in one area, it spread to another. The scale of the disease is also “massively unreported” according to the charity, because “untold numbers of children are dying anonymously at home or in the streets.” Earlier this month, Britain said it would build facilities for 700 new beds in Sierra Leone but the first of these will not be ready for weeks, and the rest may take months.

But Save the Children said that unless the international community radically stepped up its response, people would continue to die at home and risk infecting their family and the local community. “We are facing the frightening prospect of an epidemic which is spreading like wildfire across Sierra Leone, with the number of new cases doubling every three weeks,” said Rob MacGillivray, the charity’s country director in Sierra Leone. Safety trials for two experimental vaccines are under way in the UK and US, the WHO said on Wednesday, and will be expanded to 10 sites in Africa, Europe and North America in the coming weeks. It said it expected to begin small-scale use of the experimental vaccines in West Africa early next year. The Ebola Donors Conference in London on Thursday is being hosted by the UK and Sierra Leone governments. Its main agenda is to discuss what the global community can do to provide an effective international response to the epidemic. It will be chaired by UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, who said he hoped it would “raise even greater awareness of the disease and what is needed to contain it, encourage ambitious pledges and show our solidarity with Sierra Leone and the region.”

However, the BBC’s Mark Doyle says Sierra Leone’s President Ernest Bai Koroma is unlikely to be able to attend. According to reports from the country’s capital Freetown, the British plane sent to Freetown to collect him has developed a technical fault. –BBC

Child with Enterovirus 68 dies in Rhode Island – 4 more deaths possibly linked to outbreak

the Extinction Protocol,

30 September, 2014

September 2014 – RHODE ISLAND – A child infected with enterovirus 68 has died, the Rhode Island Department of Health said today, marking the first publicly announced enterovirus 68 death since the outbreak began this summer. After the Rhode Island announcement, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that three patients who died later tested positive for the virus that’s infecting children across the country. It is not clear what role the virus played in these deaths, but the CDC said state and local health officials are investigating. The 10-year-old girl from Cumberland, Rhode Island, died last week of a rare combination of bacterial and viral infections, the department said, explaining that she died of Staphylococcus aureus sepsis “associated with” enterovirus 68. “We are all heartbroken to hear about the death of one of Rhode Island’s children,” state Health Department Director Dr. Michael Fine said in a statement. “Many of us will have EV-D68 [enterovirus 68]. Most of us will have very mild symptoms and all but very few will recover quickly and completely.” Enterovirus 68, which is suspected of sickening children in 46 states, starts out like the common cold but can quickly turn serious and send children to the hospital with breathing problems.

And on Monday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced it was investigating whether the virus led to temporary limb paralysis in nine children in Colorado. It is related to the polio virus. The girl’s illness began with cold-like symptoms and shortness of breath, Fine said during a press conference today. Her parents called 911 last week, but after she arrived at the hospital her condition “deteriorated very quickly. Things became dire,” Fine said. She died of Staphylococcus aureus sepsis, which he said was “associated with” her enterovirus 68 infection. Staphylococcus aureus is a bacteria that lives in about 30 percent of people’s noses and usually doesn’t cause any problems, according to the CDC. It can be serious or fatal when it results in sepsis, which is body-wide inflammation that results from an infection, according to the CDC. Sepsis can cause blood flow problems, which leads to organ failure. –ABC News

Four deaths linked to EV-D68 virus: Samples collected from four patients who recently died have tested positive for enterovirus D68, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It is unclear what role the virus played in their deaths. Enteroviruses are very common, especially in the late summer and early fall. The CDC estimates 10 to 15 million infections occur in the United States each year. So even though the samples from these four patients tested positive, the virus could have nothing to do with their deaths. One of the patients, a child with a staph infection and enterovirus D68, was from Rhode Island, the state’s health department announced Wednesday. The child died last week. Infection by both staph bacteria and an enterovirus is a “rare combination,” health officials say, that can cause very severe illnesses in children and adults. “Only a very small portion of people who contract EV-D68 will experience problems beyond a runny nose and a low grade fever,” the Rhode Island Department of Health said in a statement. “Most viruses produce mild illnesses from which people are able to recover.”

This year, enterovirus D68 has been sending more children than usual to the hospital with severe respiratory illnesses. It seems to be most affecting children with a history of asthma or breathing problems. As of Wednesday, the CDC had confirmed 472 cases in 41 states. The virus may also be linked to a small number of cases of a mysterious neurologic illness seen in Colorado, Boston and Michigan. Doctors in Colorado spotted it first — a group of 10 children hospitalized with limb weakness, cranial nerve dysfunction and abnormalities in their spinal gray matter. Doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital have since identified four patients with the same symptoms. And a child in Washtenaw County, Michigan, also developed partial paralysis in the lower limbs after being hospitalized with the virus, the Michigan Department of Community Health said Wednesday. –CNN