Posted on 08/10/2014 12:46:23 AM PDT by Smokin' Joe
I have spent a little time compiling links to threads about the Ebola outbreak in the interest of having all the links in one thread for future reference.
Please add links to new threads and articles of interest as the situation develops.
Thank You all for you participation.
At the peak of illness, an Ebola patient can have 10 billion viral particles in one-fifth of a teaspoon of blood.
That compares with 50,000 to 100,000 particles in an untreated H.I.V. patient,
and five million to 20 million in someone with untreated hepatitis C.
By DENISE GRADYOCT. 13, 2014
Federal health officials have offered repeated assurances that most American hospitals can safely treat Ebola, but Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, which had years of preparation for just such a crisis, found out how hard that is while it cared for three Ebola patients.
As doctors and nurses there worked to keep desperately ill patients alive in August, the county threatened to disconnect Emory from sewer lines if Ebola wastes went down the drain. The company that hauled medical trash to the incinerator refused to take anything used on an Ebola patient unless it was sterilized first. Couriers would not drive the patients’ blood samples a few blocks away for testing at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And pizza places would not deliver to staff members in any part of the hospital.
“It doesn’t matter how much you plan,” Dr. Bruce Ribner, an infectious disease specialist who directed the patients’ care, said in an interview. “You’re going to be wrong half the time.”
Emory solved its problems, but the challenges it faced could overwhelm a hospital with fewer resources. At Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, mistakes in treating a patient from Liberia — a delay in diagnosing the disease, and its spread to a health worker who had apparently taken all precautions — have raised questions about the general level of preparedness in hospitals around the country. Medical experts have begun to suggest that it might be better to transfer patients to designated centers with special expertise in treating Ebola.
Federal health officials are also beginning to consider that idea, though they emphasize that every hospital has to be able to diagnose the disease.
During a news conference this month, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said: “Essentially, any hospital in the country can safely take care of Ebola. You need a private room with a private bathroom, and rigorous, meticulous training and materials to make sure that care is done safely so caregivers aren’t at risk.”
But on Sunday, after it was confirmed that a nurse in Dallas had been infected with Ebola, Dr. Frieden said his agency would consider whether patients should be transferred to specialty centers.
“We’re looking at different options for what will be the safest way to care for patients,” he said in an interview on Monday. But he declined to explain what those options were.
There are four biocontainment units around the country that have been equipped to isolate patients with dangerous infectious diseases: at Emory; the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.; Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha; and St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula, Mont. But other large how
“I think the larger regional hospitals are where the care of these patients is going to have to be focused,” Dr. Ribner said, adding that there is a long tradition in medicine of transferring critically ill patients from smaller hospitals to larger ones better equipped to care for them.
One reason for referring Ebola patients is that they are so ill.
“Usually, an individual is not sick for three to five days after the onset of symptoms, which will fool you,” Dr. Ribner said. “You say, ‘Oh, you’re not going to be that sick.’ Then, around Day 5 to 7, they really crash. Their blood pressure goes down, they become stuporous to unresponsive, and they start to have renal and liver failure. This correlates with the enormous viral load, which is just attacking every organ in the body.”
Ebola patients lose enormous amounts of fluid from diarrhea and vomiting, as much as five to 10 quarts a day during the worst phase of the illness, which lasts about a week. Doctors struggle to rehydrate them, replace lost electrolytes and treat bleeding problems. Some patients need dialysis and ventilators.
A concern for health workers is that as patients grow sicker, the levels of virus in their blood rise and they become more and more contagious. The researchers at Emory tested patients and found high levels of the virus in their body fluids and even on their skin.
At the peak of illness, an Ebola patient can have 10 billion viral particles in one-fifth of a teaspoon of blood. That compares with 50,000 to 100,000 particles in an untreated H.I.V. patient, and five million to 20 million in someone with untreated hepatitis C.
“That helped us to understand why, if this is only spread by body fluids, why it is more contagious than hepatitis A, B and C, and H.I.V.,” Dr. Ribner said. “It’s just that there’s so much more virus in the fluids they put out.”
The high risk of infection means that health workers need extensive training on using protective gear and on removing contaminated garments without infecting themselves. Emory follows a rigid procedure that requires everyone “donning and doffing” gear to be watched to ensure that no mistakes are made.
“You can’t just assume that if one of these patients shows up you can sort of wing it,” Dr. Ribner said. “You have to pay attention to your training and planning before the first patient shows up.”
Stephen S. Morse, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, said, “I don’t think every hospital has the facilities or the wherewithal, or for that matter the desire, to care for Ebola patients.”
Dr. Morse said it would make sense to transfer patients to the hospitals with specialized isolation units, or to designate certain regional hospitals as Ebola centers. But, he added, “you obviously have to have a safe way of transporting them to a center.”
Dr. William Schaffner, an expert on infectious disease at Vanderbilt University, said that a referral system for Ebola cases was worth discussing. He added that the subject came up repeatedly in conversations among doctors at a national meeting of infectious disease specialists last week.
An additional advantage of such a system, he said, is that specialized hospitals and academic medical centers have more experience than local ones in obtaining and using experimental treatments that might benefit Ebola patients.
Dr. Ribner said he expected to see more Ebola cases as the United States sent military personnel to West Africa.
“We are putting 3,000 to 4,000 Department of Defense personnel out in the field,” he said. “In addition, we are putting 1,000 to 2,000 beds out there for patients, and that means many hundreds of additional health care workers there. I think it would be silly to think that some of them are not going to get infected, and if they get infected they are most likely coming back to the U.S., and some of them are going to work their way to Emory University Hospital.”
High levels of an organism which only takes 1-10 viral particles to infect someone--on their skin So, what happens earlier on when they start to run a fever and sweat? Maybe not as high a viral load, but something, certainly--and with an ID50 of 1-10 viral particles, how much does it take?
At the peak of illness, an Ebola patient can have 10 billion viral particles in one-fifth of a teaspoon of blood.
As I have said before, we know how much will infect someone, (the obvious routes of transmission) but what we really don't know is how little it takes to get infected.
I reckon we're going to find out...
Joe, I don ‘t have anything to add here. I just wanted to say thank you so much for maintaining this thread. I have this thread always up on my internet tabs. It would be very difficult to sift through articles related to Ebola without it.
Thanks so much for all you do.
On behalf of the army of FReepers who ferret out the articles from around the world, You’re Welcome. They do the heavy lifting, not me.
I wish I could say that your theory is way too far fetched to be in the “tin-foil hat” zone, but unfortunately your theory does make a lot of sense...
The CDC: No fever = No Ebola.
I hope this doesn’t bite them- and by extension us- in the butt.
Smokin Joe wrote:
The researchers at Emory tested patients and found high levels of the virus in their body fluids and even on their skin.
_____
Hence the “Don’t touch” policy in the Ebola Centers.
When I first read this, I cried.
That is a subscription website - can you share part of the article.
Face Palm...
http://fox8.com/2014/10/14/nurses-at-texas-hospital-there-were-no-protocols-about-ebola/
OCTOBER 14, 2014
“The guidelines were constantly changing” and “there were no protocols” at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas as the hospital treated a patient with Ebola, the president of National Nurses United told reporters Tuesday.
Protective gear nurses wore at first left their necks exposed, union co-president Deborah Burger said, citing information she said came from nurses at the hospital.
Union officials declined to specify how many nurses they had spoken with. They said they would not identify the nurses or elaborate on how the nurses learned of the details they are alleging in order to protect them from possible retaliation. The nurses at the hospital are not members of a union, officials said.
In response to the allegations, a spokesman said patient and employee safety is the hospital’s top priority.
“We take compliance very seriously. We have numerous measures in place to provide a safe working environment, including mandatory annual training and a 24-7 hotline and other mechanisms that allow for anonymous reporting,” hospital spokesman Wendell Watson said. “Our nursing staff is committed to providing quality, compassionate (care), as we have always known, and as the world has seen firsthand in recent days. We will continue to review and respond to any concerns raised by our nurses and all employees.”
Here are some of the other allegations the nurses made, according to the union:
– On the day that Thomas Eric Duncan was admitted to the hospital, he was “left for several hours, not in isolation, in an area where other patients were present.” Up to seven other patients were present in that area, the nurses said, according to the union.
– A nursing supervisor faced resistance from hospital authorities when the supervisor demanded that Duncan be moved to an isolation unit, the nurses said, according to the union.
– After expressing concerns that their necks were exposed even as they wore protective gear, the nurses were told to wrap their necks with medical tape, the union says. “They were told to use medical tape and had to use four to five pieces of medical tape wound around their neck. The nurses have expressed a lot of concern about how difficult it is to remove the tape from their neck,” Burger said.
– “Nurses have substantial concern that these conditions may lead to infection of other nurses and patients,” Burger said.
– At one point during Duncan’s care, “there was no one to pick up hazardous waste as it piled to the ceiling.”
– “In the end the nurses strongly feel unsupported, unprepared, lied to and deserted,” Burger said.
It is?
I must have bypassed it through Google. I did a search for this article because it really touched me. (No pun intended.)
Google the first following paragraph and you will be able to read the whole thing through the search engine.
****
“Don’t touch anything,” the nurse told me.
She was sitting in the entrance of St. Mary’s Hospital in northern Uganda, wearing latex gloves, a face mask and a surgical apron.
“You’ll be OK as long as you don’t touch something that has the virus living on it,” she said confidently.
I looked at the chair where she directed me to sit. I looked at the handles on the doors. I looked at the pen she used to take notes.
Did you happen to catch any of the Ebola Forum at John Hopkins University today?
Michael Osterholm was part of this, and I have to say that his presentation was very good. He said something that he was “given permission” to share from probably one of the most prominent virologists (his description) that gave me serious chills. It was about how this particular Ebola strain is different than anything he has ever seen and the possible implications.
http://www.jhsph.edu/events/2014/ebola-forum/webcast.html
Go to the 02:50:00 mark and watch from there. He first talks about fever or no fever in Ebola patients. The remark about what the virologist discovered in Guinea is around 02:55:00-02:57:00.
After his presentation there is a Q&A panel, of which he takes part.
Dear Lord.
It really will be a miracle if no one else is infected.
I wonder about those other patients that were around Duncan before he was moved to isolation. Wasn’t he vomiting?
And taping their exposed necks? Thanks CDC for your wonderful Level 2 guidelines. UGH.
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