Posted on 10/01/2014 7:45:43 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
A man who flew from Liberia to Dallas has become the first Ebola case to be diagnosed within the U.S., the CDC reported Tuesday, and he is currently in isolation at Dallas's Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital.
Americans have been warned not to travel to Liberia, Guinea, or Sierra Leone, but they obviously canand do.
So how are countries keeping suspected Ebola patients (well, most of them, anyway) contained within their borders?
Thermometers, mostly.
People are screened for elevated temperatures before they're allowed to board planes departing from the countries where Ebola is raging. Fever is one of the earliest symptoms of Ebola, but people can be infected for between two and 21 days without showing signs of illness.
The Washington Post's Todd Frankel described having an infrared thermometer gun pointed at his head in the Freetown, Sierra Leone airport, along with hundreds of other passengers. In some countries, individuals whose temperatures seem high later undergo a blood test for the virus.
But these temperature checks aren't always effective. In the Dallas case, the man left Liberia on September 19, had his temperature checked at the airport, and arrived in America on September 20. He only developed symptoms on the 24th, however, and he was isolated four days later. Patients are only contagious when they're symptomatic, so there's no risk the people on the flight with the man caught Ebola. There is, however, a four-day window in which he might have infected others in the U.S.
In July, an Ebola-infected man flew from Liberia to Nigeria, even though airport screenings were already in place, and he infected healthcare workers in Lagos. And of course, fevers are usually caused by flu and other illnesses that aren't Ebola.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Hopefully they won't have to be put to widespread use in USA.
Please...if you experience fever and start bleeding from your eyes, seek immediate counsel with your congresscritter.
A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
Share it with your representative or senator.
but that was profiling...profiling is for the little people...apparently not the others...
Is a fever considered "symptomatic"? Can a fever develop in a 24 hour period? There is no way they can positively claim he was not contagious.
I said it yesterday and I will say it again... this is a job for James O’Keefe. He can dress up like Osama Bin Laden, be sweating, vomiting, with open oozing sores... and they will let him on the plane.
The elections won’t be cancelled. They will just make you terrified of leaving your home. Absentee ballots are much easier to didpose of.
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