Posted on 10/01/2014 12:11:31 PM PDT by Red Badger
"We will stop Ebola in its tracks in the U.S.,” Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says confidently, over and over. But how can we be sure?
Many Americans are mistrustful. “Sorry I am not confident in their confidence that it won't spread... that is what they told us when they brought the 3 infected folks here... it will spread it is just a matter of how fast,” Wendy Head-Chapman writes on NBC News Health's Facebook page. “Government can’t be trusted,” chimes in Janet Calderone McElroy.
But the CDC knows it does not pay to lie to people about disease, says Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Health Security, a think-tank dedicated to health threats.
“They know it would be a terrible mistake for the institution, a terrible strategy, and they just won’t do it,” Inglesby told NBC News. “People are learning what is known by the CDC when the CDC learns it.”
It is difficult to reconcile the image of Ebola spreading out of control in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea with the message that a patient sick with Ebola is unlikely to cause an outbreak in the United States. It’s made more than 6,500 people sick so far — probably far more — and killed 50 to 70 percent of them. Even the World Health Organization says it’s going to worsen exponentially.
But experts both in and out of the CDC say they know plenty about Ebola, how it spreads and what the danger to the general public is. Most outbreaks in Africa have been quickly contained. This one turned into an epidemic because of a terrible combination of factors — countries devastated by years of civil war, a complete lack of public health infrastructure and a public that had never heard of Ebola and had no idea how it spread.
People are dying in the streets, patients are turned away from overflowing hospitals to take their own chances, caregivers must tend to loved ones without any protections, sometimes even without running water and soap.
None of those things happens in the United States, with its modern, if imperfect, public health system.
Hospitals are alert to the risk of someone coming in with many different infectious diseases, not just Ebola but also tuberculosis, influenza, measles. They know to quickly isolate or at least segregate patients who are coughing, sneezing, vomiting or who have diarrhea. Health care workers examining such patients wear gloves, masks and often gowns.
Hospitals have disinfectants to clean up anything that might get contaminated and health workers know the drill for what to do if they do come into contact with someone who might have infected them. With Ebola, they know to watch for fever and to isolate themselves if they do start showing similar symptoms.
U.S. hospitals have successfully dealt with imported infectious diseases, including Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and several patients with Lassa fever, which is another dangerous viral hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola. And even if hospitals do mess up — outbreaks of Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) or Clostridium difficile (C. diff) are examples — Ebola is much easier to kill than these bacteria.
Dr. David Heymann of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and a leading world expert on disease outbreaks, agrees. “U.S. hospitals have good infection control measures in place, which involve isolating fevers of unknown origin, and using good clinical practices. It is also fairly easy and straightforward for U.S. authorities to trace any contact the patient may have had, and to put contacts under fever surveillance,” he said.
“So as long as these systems are maintained, we don't need to worry about a major Ebola outbreak occurring in the US. The same activities that will contain Ebola in the US will also stop the outbreaks in Africa if applied effectively.”
CDC has a track record of handling disease imports and actual pandemic without lying, Inglesby points out.
“The team they have there is a group of veteran public health professionals that have been doing this for a long time, working on SARS and bird flu and 2009 H1N1 (influenza) and MERS. There isn’t any evidence from any of those outbreaks in the past that CDC would sit on something to prevent people from panicking,” Inglesby said.
Frieden correctly predicted that someone would show up at a U.S. hospital with Ebola, and he's been quick to say that it's very possible the Dallas patient will have infected someone else.
When H5N1 bird flu first became a big threat in 2003, government health agencies did a full-court press on learning how best to communicate threats to the public. One overlying message was that lying always backfires.
“There is a body of research that says the more the public knows, the more it does something that is rational,” Inglesby said.
“In the late 1990s and moving up to 2001 there were a lot of government agencies where you would hear leaders say things like ‘the public must be handled like this,’ like it was a group that must be controlled,” Inglesby said. “But now we know that people can handle information. They need to know true information, and you need to tell them what you don’t know. If you give the public that information, they act like adults.”
I’ve learned NOT to trust the CDC.
They shot themselves in the foot when they came out to speak to their fellow americans on the case in Dallas, and then refused to tell us if he was an American citizen or not, when there was zero reason to hide that from the very audience whose business it was.
When they did that, they showed themselves as not being “us”, but as representatives of something outside of us, the people, and casually concealing something that there was not even a reason to conceal.
The CDC and our govt. are taking NO ACTION whatsoever to protect us from infected people entering our country. They are either grossly incompetent or they are literally trying to cause an outbreak here.
Every time one of these infected people travels on an airplane there is a good chance that they are infecting multiple people on that plane! Simply disallowing travelers from Africa until the threat dies down is an obvious solution. The UK is doing it, why can’t we?
Trust? Humm, given this has become a political agency, my sense is one should trust the CDC on this issue as much as they trust Obola himself. Me, not one bit.
Judging from the problems of (lack of) infection control and the rate of nosocomial infections in hospitals I’m not sure I share the good doctor’s confidence.
Especially since it’s run by a Bloomberg nanny stater.....
...”What is the source of this information”....
That’s why I asked ...another poster mentioned this...but I’ve just now been seeing if there’s anything out there to confirm that....IMO the poster likely saw when one of the early Ebola patients had arrived in Boston...awhile back...that’s all I’ve seen.
So I’m finding zip zero on that note.
Plus, who is screening the hordes of illegal immigrants for symptoms? Hmm?
Pardon Señor but did you bring any fruits or vegetables with you as you paddled across the Rio Grande in Señor Coyote’s raft to make your undocumented entry into the Estados Unidos?
It has descended into farce.
Agree completely. I listened to the press conference in traffic yesterday and kept asking the same question. Is this an American? There were clear attempts to dodge any press questions concerning the patient so I had my answer.
My local news gal kept using the term “after coming home from visiting Liberia” and I was yelling at the radio that she didn’t KNOW that!
Should we be thinking of it coming in the air tonight, tomorrow, tomorrow night, the next day, the next night or should we believe it can be stopped? I really do not know. BOO, Everyone! Just remember, ‘Don’t Worry’ and this is not the first time we have ever met.
Anyone watched “The Strain”? You can’t trust the government man!
I would feel much safer if Dr. Tom Inglesby ("director of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Health Security, a think-tank dedicated to health threats") was in charge of the CDC. The CDC runs an 'us vs them' mentality - elite liberals vs citizens...
I’m heading to Mother Abigail’s.
I love The Strain. Absolutely must see TV!
Yeah, I love it too. It’s my guilty pleasure. At least these vampires, or “drinkers of men” are nasty and evil, like vampires are supposed to be!
Got a link?
I hadn't heard that. There was a potential second case, but not in Boston.
Thompson: Associate of Dallas Ebola patient under close monitoring ( second case )
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