Posted on 10/19/2014 6:34:51 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
A cruise ship plowed through the waters of a Texas port on Sunday with precious cargo on board -- the end of a small Ebola scare. A passenger had been loosely linked to the only patient to die from the disease in the United States, but health authorities cleared her after an odyssey at sea.
After voluntarily isolating herself in her cabin, she remained symptom-free and her lab tests looked good, the Galveston County Health Authority said. She and a travel partner were allowed to disembark.
The drama goes back to her work as a lab supervisor at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, the center of a maelstrom of Ebola fears in the United States. It's where Liberian patient Thomas Eric Duncan was misdiagnosed and later died, and where two nurses became the first people to contract Ebola in America.
Hospital apologizes
And on Sunday, with the eyes of the nation upon it, the hospital took out a full-page newspaper ad, once again offering an apology.
We slipped up; we're deeply sorry; we'll do better. That could serve as a summary of the open letter from Texas Health Resources CEO Barclay Berdan in the Sunday editions of the Dallas Morning News and Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
And pay damages?
Fortunately I had heard Richard Burton's reading from the novel Under The Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. Nice to learn of another culture's view of death and the departed. A celebration no less.
I will stick to my row of plastic pumpkins lit up at night and a few store bought Halloween gargoyles.(Laughs)
You're right. That hospital was horribly incompetent, from the time they turned away a patient reporting recent arrival from Liberia, through the time when he was cared for without the proper PPE being used until the disease was verified two days later.
How do you know that the outside of the vial was not contaminated?
In my experience working as a researcher and having frequent visits to various hospital diagnostic labs, I have *never* seen a case where a sample was handed over to someone with bare hands without any consideration that the sample might have pathogen on it. You don't have to be concerned about Ebola to want to avoid a host of bloodborne pathogens that could be in patient samples--hepatitis being the major concern, but there are others. When I used to go to the hospital diagnostic lab to pick up samples, or when a gynecologist would bring patient samples to the research lab, they were *always* sealed in a plastic bag. And I would handle them with gloves on.
If someone is NOT taking standard infection control measures, there is a BIG problem. It is not the CDC's problem--this one goes to the hospital accreditation authority (someone told me it's not JCAHO any more), in not inspecting the hospitals in such a way as to verify that they are ready and able to handle exotic infectious disease cases. You shouldn't have to know what the disease is before taking precautions against it. You should be taking the most stringent precautions *until* you know what the disease is, then downgrade the precautions if the disease diagnosis warrants it.
The hospital messed up, big time. And, like always, when someone messes up because they weren't following established procedures and protocols that work when used, the procedures and protocols will be made more onerous and strict, creating more of a burden on those who must work under those standards without having a significant effect on people who don't bother sticking to the standards.
Sorry for the tirade, but this is really a sore spot for me.
Better to over react and live to tell the tale.. Uhhhh
Than tempt fate and what may blow your way.
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