Hard to trust ‘ experts’ on Ebola
It seems like only days ago the experts were assuring us that there was no cause for worry after Ebola had arrived in our country. Now in a span of just four days, two nurses in Dallas who treated that first Ebola patient have themselves come down with the deadly disease.
There’s still no reason to expect an epidemic, no cause for panic. But once again the experts have proved to be far from infallible in asserting that the nation’s medical facilities were well- prepared to cope with Ebola. The most visible authority figure offering assurances was Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Frieden then: “We will stop it in its tracks, because we’ve got infection control in hospitals and public health that tracks and isolates people if they get symptoms.”
Frieden now: “Stopping Ebola is hard.” . . . “We have to rethink the way we address Ebola infection control.”
Amonth ago, President Barack Obama declared, “In the unlikely event that someone with Ebola does reach our shores, we’ve taken new measures so that we’re prepared here at home.” On Wednesday, Obama canceled political fund- raising travel to convene an emergency cabinet meeting to cope with the country’s public health challenge.
One question facing Obama is whether the nation still has confidence in Frieden to lead the effort to contain the Ebola outbreak.
The infection control about which Frieden once boasted clearly broke down at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas. At this writing, no one knows how the system failed, how the two nurses were infected with the virus. Maybe it happened when they were taking off protective gowns, gloves and face shields after caring for Thomas Duncan, the Liberian man who brought the deadly virus to the United States. A nurses’ union claims the protective clothing was inadequate. Also troubling is that one of the nurses traveled on a commercial airliner the day before she was diagnosed with Ebola.
The inescapable conclusion is that most of the nation’s hospitals— even those recognized for quality care like Texas Presbyterian— are apparently not ready to, at a moment’s notice, implement the complicated protocols
It seems clear that one priority should be preventing another case from reaching America.
needed to treat someone with a highly contagious, deadly virus.
Frieden says the CDC will dispatch a team of Ebola experts to any hospital where a case is diagnosed, something it did for Dallas only in recent days. Others have suggested that patients be transferred to four hospitals with expertise to treat such a serious ailment— as was done with one of the Dallas nurses. That begs the question of whether personnel at hospitals across the country can be equipped with protective gear and trained in the right Ebola protocols.
Those proposals sound fine. But it seems clear that one priority should be preventing another case from reaching America. The federal government has put in place special screening at five of the nation’s airports that receive 95 percent of travelers from West Africa, the Ebola epicenter. But we know that Duncan lied about his contact with a sick woman in Liberia to get into America. And the World Health Organization warns that by early December up to 10,000 people may be coming down with Ebola each week.
I think many Americans will say screening is not enough. Many would say it’s time to ban travelers from West Africa. At the very least, anyone coming from that region should be put in quarantine for 21 days, the incubation period for the virus.
Some experts say a travel ban or quarantine would be too extreme. But experts aren’t always right.