Re-Thinking Ebola Now That It's in Dallas (My Backyard)
(1) It turns out that the man diagnosed with Ebola, had just weeks before getting on the flight for the United States been helping a pregnant neighbor, who was dying of Ebola in trying to get medical care. They drove around Monrovia in a taxi cab, with him and several other friends carrying the sick woman bodily in and out of hospitals and clinics. None could take her because they were full. She died the next day. The friends died several days later from exposure to her. I don't mean to sound unsympathetic, but did it never cross this man's mind that he might delay his trip to the United States until the Ebola crisis had subsided? Wait a minute. Perhaps this man and his family in the U.S. knew that he had contracted Ebola and staying in Liberia was a sure death sentence. Did the family members whom he had come to visit give no thought to their own children or their children's classmates, in terms of possibly conveying a deadly and contagious disease?
(2) As for the nurse(s) at Presbyterian Hospital who sent home a feverish man, who informed them that he had just left Liberia in the midst of a deadly Ebola epidemic, now that terrifies me. He may have infected family members and neighbors during that period. By the time the seriously ill man returned to the hospital in an ambulance, three days later he was so sick, that he was in a highly contagious condition. All this speculation is now giving me some troubling symptoms, although it's not so much a headache as a heart ache.
(3) The experts insist that the United States has a top notch medical system that can handle the Ebola virus. So. . . we have nothing to worry about. Yes, America has one of the best medical systems in the world. But it is also run by humans. And we all know what that means.
Nonetheless, President Obama has made the right decision about sending soldiers to Liberia to help control the virus there. The reason is this. All the panic talk about mutating viruses sounds real. But in the field of epidemiology, this really is a number's game. According to World Health Organization officials:
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If each sick person infects no more than one person, the size of the epidemic would remain stable or start to fall. But if each Ebola victim, on average, infects more than one person, the epidemic will grow. And that’s what’s happening now. Every 10 Ebola victims are together responsible for more than 10 new cases, the WHO expert panel finds. So the outbreak just keeps growing. The only way to shrink the size of the sick population, the panel concludes, is to keep each sick person from infecting more than one other person. And that’s what health officials mean when they say Ebola has to be “controlled.” . . .
Ebola spreads when a healthy person becomes exposed to fluids (such as urine, blood or saliva) from an infected person. If a sick individual lives in a large urban city — especially a slum — and can’t get to a hospital, the chance that he or she will infect another person is high.
Earlier outbreaks tended to occur in small rural or forested communities. There, the disease quickly died out because the sick people couldn’t reach many others to infect them. But in West Africa, Ebola has spread to huge cities, including the capitals of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. Moving a sick person to clinics risks infecting a taxi or truck driver and his vehicle. Even disposing of the dead poses heavy infection risks to hospital workers, families and burial crews.
The American troops in helping to build clinics and contain this disease can help bring this epidemic to an end and save us all from a global catastrophe.
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