Six hospitalized in Spain as Ebola scare hits Europe

MADRID - Spain's government urged calm on Wednesday over the case of a nurse who caught Ebola in a Madrid hospital as the World Health Organization warned other isolated infections in Europe were "unavoidable".

Apart from the infected nurse -- the first person to contract the disease outside Africa -- doctors in Madrid have isolated five other people and are monitoring dozens more.

Bring Out Your Dead

Post to me or FReep mail to be on/off the Bring Out Your Dead ping list.

The purpose of the “Bring Out Your Dead” ping list (formerly the “Ebola” ping list) is very early warning of emerging pandemics, as such it has a high false positive rate.

So far the false positive rate is 100%.

At some point we may well have a high mortality pandemic, and likely as not the “Bring Out Your Dead” threads will miss the beginning entirely.

*sigh* Such is life, and death...

No, I think the problem isn’t a lack of information about Ebola, but the fact that most medical establishments around the world are government agencies of some sort. Bureaucracies do not handle emergencies well; they don’t respond quickly enough and information isn’t made available in a timely fashion to the people actually doing the medical care. It is also the case with Ebola that the people handling the most contagious materials pertaining to infected patients - ie. nursing assistants - are the LEAST TRAINED.

On top of all these factors there is also the unfortunate medical prejudice of doubting patients’ narratives. Ebola has spread in Spain, not only because of improper protocol, but also because the nurse could not get her doctors to believe her symptoms were serious until she was very ill. Likewise, Mr. Duncan was turned away from the Dallas hospital in the early stages of his disease because computerized medical records were not integrated so that the doctor giving the diagnosis did not know he was recently from West Africa. Obviously the nurse doing the initial screening didn’t think it was worth mentioning to the attending physician either.

Ebola is not a disease that allows even the smallest mistake in protocol and there have already been so many errors in treating this second wave of patients that I think we are going to see quite a few people die because of it. In that regard, Mr. Duncan might have done the US medical establishment a favor by showing how poorly prepared they are to deal with a true epidemic (not a falsely trumped up one like swine flu).

. . . the World Health Organization warned other isolated infections in Europe were "unavoidable".

"Isolated"? When a woman is infected while treating a patient, and several others are infected while treating her, most people would not call that chain of connected events "isolated".

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