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| Ebola Nurse Kaci Hickox abc.go.com |
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Two weeks ago Nurse Kaci Hickox was prancing around Maine, giving interviews to the national media in which she decried quarantining herself as a violation of her civil rights. Fortunately this woman who had just returned from West Africa where she was treating Ebola patients did not have the disease.
Today, the Centers for Disease Control have just announced the tragic death of Dr.Martin Salia at a hospital in Nebraska. He was a surgeon who had been treating patients in Sierra Leone. Because his first two tests for Ebola came back negative, he was already in critical condition and suffering from kidney failure by the time he was admitted to the U.S. hospital. What would have happened had this surgeon launched the same kind of media blitz as Ms. Hickox, refusing to be quarantined, insisting that he did not have the fatal disease because of negative test results? America might now be juggling dozens of new cases with people having been infected by this man.
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| Surgeon Martin Salia Ebola Victim |
It is apparent that Ms Hickox lacks an understanding of epidemiology, the centrality of quarantines in epidemic control and a concern for others, prerequisites for those in the health care profession. Had she not been suffering from a fever upon arriving in the U.S., the issue of involuntarily quarantining her never would have come up. Her nursing license should be revoked and maybe she can find a job at Disney World playing the role of a nobly entitled but aggrieved fairy tale princess.
