Dallas Hot Zone

You know last week Sarah Palin was quoted as saying that President Obama should "invade Ebola"   At first I thought this was a joke...I was giving her the benefit of the doubt that even she is not that stupid...but it turns out she did say that...She was however mispronouncing the name of some country and momentarily got it confused with the disease...

See, this is why education is important!

Sarah Palin not withstanding...Ebola...The Ebola Virus seems to be the hot story of the year and seems to be scare worthy...

Political leaders warned yesterday that there could be more cases of Ebola in Dallas in coming days, as this city continues to feel the consequences of a local hospital’s problem-plagued effort to treat the first case of the disease diagnosed in the U.S.

The Texas Department of State Health Services said Wednesday that a second health-care worker had contracted the disease from Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian man found to have Ebola at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas on Sept. 30. The nurse, Amber Joy Vinson, was among those who treated Mr. Duncan before he died Oct. 8.

 

At a news conference Wednesday morning, Dallas leaders sought to play down public fears about the spread of Ebola in the nation’s ninth-largest city, noting that all transmissions of the disease so far have been limited to health-care workers at the one hospital. But they acknowledged that more cases were now likely.

 

“It may get worse before it gets better, but it will get better,” Mayor Mike Rawlings said.

 

Another nurse who treated Mr. Duncan, Nina Pham, 26 years old, was also infected while caring for Mr. Duncan and is now being treated at the hospital, which said Wednesday that she was in good condition. Health officials and the hospital haven’t determined how she became infected, and have said she was wearing a mask, gown, shield and gloves when treating Mr. Duncan.

 

But the second case reinforced concerns about the safeguards the hospital had used to shield workers from potential infection as it treated a late-stage Ebola patient in an isolation ward, uncharted territory for a general American hospital. Seventy-five additional health-care workers who helped treat Mr. Duncan are now actively being monitored for potential Ebola symptoms.

 

A federal health-care agency said Wednesday it was reviewing allegations raised by a nurses union that the Dallas hospital mishandled Mr. Duncan’s case, putting patients and health-care workers at risk.

 

David Wright, deputy regional administrator for the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in Dallas, said it was “closely evaluating and reviewing” the allegations made by National Nurses United on behalf of what it said were an unnamed number of nurses at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas.

 

The union, which doesn’t represent nurses at the hospital, released a statement Tuesday evening it said was made by the group of nurses, which described an atmosphere of chaos and changing safety guidelines among hospital staff as they treated Mr. Duncan.

The statement said Mr. Duncan was initially left for several hours in an area where other patients were present when he was first admitted to the hospital, even though he was a suspected Ebola case. Nurses also claimed that some nurses had to interact with him with insufficient protective gear, during a period when he had “copious amounts of diarrhea and vomiting,” and that hospital officials allowed nurses who treated Mr. Duncan to subsequently tend to other patients, the statement said.

 

“There was no event preparedness on what to do with the patient. There was no protocol. There was no system,” said Deborah Burger, co-president of National Nurses United. “The nurses were asked to call the infectious disease department.

 

"The infectious disease department did not have clear policies to provide either.”

Daniel Varga, chief clinical officer for the hospital’s parent company, Texas Health Resources, said in a news conference Wednesday morning that he couldn’t discuss the various claims made about what occurred during Mr. Duncan’s treatment. But he acknowledged that “it is clear that there was an exposure, sometime, somewhere.”

 

By dawn yesterday, in a scene now familiar to Dallas citizens, police and other officials were walking the neighborhood of the latest health-care worker to contract Ebola, preparing to decontaminate her apartment and letting neighbors know that someone living near them had tested positive for the virus.

Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, the county’s top elected official, pleaded Wednesday for people to support the hospital’s health-care workers, who are now anxious about the possibility that they too will contract Ebola.

 

“Like Nina Pham, this is a heroic person,” Judge Jenkins said of Ms. Vinson, adding, “I hope this community will rally around the human beings that are suffering.”

 

I hate to agree with Sarah Palin on anything...but maybe it's time the government mobilized and invaded EBOLA!