Posted on 10/13/2014 6:32:53 AM PDT by shortstop
Sloppy gets people killed.
We’re learning that in Dallas.
In the nation that invented modern health care, we’re learning that our own carelessness and incompetence is losing us its benefits.
If you aren’t conscientious, if you don’t pay attention to detail, if you grow lazy and haphazard in the doing of your daily duty, it doesn’t take long for you and your society to slip back into the gutter.
The Secret Service has shown us that.
So has Texas Health Presbyterian.
We killed the African guy, and now we’re about to kill one of our own.
Basic incompetence is proving to be the best friend ebola ever had.
Over the weekend we learned that, braggadocios press conferences notwithstanding, we mishandled the treatment of the Liberian man who died of ebola last week and a health-care worker is now sick with ebola herself as a consequence.
The key to fighting ebola is diagnose and isolate. It’s very simple. And we blew it. When a man came sick to the emergency room, he was misdiagnosed. When he was finally admitted to the hospital, we failed to effectively isolate.
Now an American woman, a health care worker who looked after the African man, has caught the disease. Our much-vaunted modern medicine fell flat on its face by virtue of an inability to follow the simplest of procedures.
Nigeria has perfected diagnosing and isolating, and has snuffed out ebola within its borders. In the United States, we talk a good game, we’ve got a splashy end-zone dance, but we’re seeing ebola spread.
Not because of foreign infusion, but because of domestic confusion.
We failed to diagnose the man who had travelled here from Liberia, and though he was very ill, we delayed him effective treatment for two days. By that time, he was acutely ill and his body was shutting down. It is no stretch to presume that the delay contributed to his death, possibly significantly.
That’s one.
While the man was being cared for, in an environment of hyper vigilance, when everybody knew all the marbles were on the table, when this modern plague was widely feared for its transmissibility, we screwed up.
The principles of isolation haven’t changed, and they aren’t wrong. If you follow them, you will be safe. If you don’t, you won’t. Somehow, we didn’t, and a woman is ill today.
Two fails, with the possibility of two deaths.
Plus however many others may have caught the disease from either patient.
All because we’re sloppy.
And maybe that’s as dangerous a plague as anything driven by a virus.
Because ebola can kill our body, but carelessness can kill our soul.
The national soul, the traditional can-do American spirit that saw conscientiousness and exactness as virtues. We used to pay attention to detail, and get our mission accomplished, and take personal responsibility for doing our duty.
We used to get it right.
It was the American way.
But increasingly we are a nation of slackers, a tribe of entitled mouth breathers who have dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. We don’t stand on our own two feet very well, and we don’t often have the sense of pride and honor, to say nothing of the self-respect, that used to be the hallmarks of our culture.
The downward spiral of our society is beginning to show.
It may seem that a couple of mistakes at a Texas hospital make for poor harbingers of the national heart. What do those flubs really say about us?
Well, perhaps nothing. Especially if they are in isolation. But we know they’re not.
And if you can’t get up for game day, then you can’t get up. And if the American health care system has thus far screwed the pooch in Dallas – arguably killing one and endangering another – then how can we trust it?
If the arrival of ebola in the United States fails to elicit the “right stuff,” then what will?
If the American health care system can’t take care of itself, how can we trust it to take care of us?
A psycho walked through five layers of protection at the White House, including overcoming direct confrontation by two agents unwilling or unable to act. An ebola patient walks through the door with classic symptoms and suggests a diagnosis himself, and we get it wrong.
Then we can’t even make a hazmat work.
Maybe I’m making too much of this.
But it used to be you could count on Americans to get it right.
Now, more often than not, you can count on Americans to get it wrong.
We used to do the impossible, now we can’t even do the ordinary.
Ebola probably won’t kill us.
But carelessness and incompetence might.
I wouldn’t rush into blaming the health care worker for sloppiness. The authorities are throwing her under the bus mighty quick, and it may be that the protocols are more to blame.
The best way to isolate the virus is to sit next to a patient on the bus.
The smartest man in America told me that.
Uh-huh. See #4
My thought is that the protocols might be okay initially, but become inadequate by time that the virus has transformed the victim into a large leaky bag of virons and water.
The number of US facilities capable of handling such infected patients is very limited. (There are 19 level four biocontainment beds in four hospitals in the US for 317,000,000 people.)
What, me worry?
Was the author there? Can he confirm that procedures were not followed?
I guess it is nice to have an eye witness to the victims “carelessness” and that can confirm that she failed to follow procedure. Take it from Bob, he was apparently there.
Nah, the procedures pushed by the CDC just could not have been inadequate, unpossible! Why would the political appointee running the CDC want to do something political??
Good thing the CDC didn’t just blame the victim to cover their own butts! Then change their stance.
Now the CDC says all caregivers are considered at-risk to contract ebola.
Someone said: This whiner needs some facts rather than blaming the nurse.
The nurse DID follow protocol!
The protocol was inadequate!
THPH is NOT a CDC certified Level 4 Biosafety Unit. Frieden can claim, after spending billions on Level 4 units, that any ol’ podunk hospital can handle Ebola but it’s those pesky proper facilities, equipment and trained staff that he is failing to address.
Level 4 Isolation Unit Beds
2? - Emory, Atlanta
3 - The Care and Isolation Unit in Missoula, Montana, opened in 2005 by the National Institutes of Health to serve lab workers at Rocky Mountain Laboratories, hasn’t yet served an infectious disease patient, only a handful with tuberculosis or contagious bacterial infections. The rooms look like everyday hospital rooms—white, sterile, a TV and window for entertainment. That’s because St. Patrick Hospital retrofitted three of its ICU rooms to make the unit.
10 – Omaha, Nebraska Medical Center run twice yearly drills with decontamination at their hospital’s 10-bed biocontainment unit. Opened in 2005. Has never had an infectious disease patient. Prior to Dr. Sacra in Sept., the unit had only briefly housed one patient with malaria five years ago. Malaria does not require quarantine.
7 - NIH opened a seven-bed Special Clinical Studies Unit at the Clinical Research Center in Bethesda to replace it. Its four patient rooms (two doubles and a single). Bethesda unit has only served a patient with a drug-resistant bacterial illness. “It can handle the highest level of respiratory virus, but Ebola isn’t even spread that way,” said Richard Davey, deputy clinical director of NIH’s Division of Clinical Research.
? - US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) – Ft. Detrick, Maryland.
This is inaccurate. There is some value in the article, but the details are wrong in significant ways. We did not kill the liar from Liberia. We have no effective treatment available for patient treatment beyond fluids, and admitting him earlier would have helped with isolation and reduced the risk to the community, but it would not have made a significant difference in his chances for survival.
The suggestion that donning and correctly removing personal protective equipment is "very simple . . . the simplest of procedures" is absurd. I have worn that equipment (for real, for some consulting work), and it is not a simple procedure. It's hard to do at all and even harder to do perfectly, and pretending it is simple prevents planners from seeing that their protocols have problems when dealing with real-world physicians and nurses in most hospitals.
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