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To: exDemMom

sure does. Your hero is a fictional character and the advice you give may work inside a lab, I don’t know. But it isn’t worth much in a patient care environment. Its not so hard to say we just don’t know a lot of things about how Ebola behaves in the hospital health care environment, or in the wild in a modern highly mobile civilization.


128 posted on 10/26/2014 10:29:36 PM PDT by Mom MD
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To: Mom MD
But it isn’t worth much in a patient care environment. Its not so hard to say we just don’t know a lot of things about how Ebola behaves in the hospital health care environment, or in the wild in a modern highly mobile civilization.

No offence, but have you ever worked in a research lab or even been inside one? I can think of a whole host of dangers that exist in the research laboratory that you will never see in a patient care environment. One of the worst students I had was a physician--not just because teaching some level of arrogance seems to be part of clinician training, but because it was really hard, thanks to her medical training, to get her to understand how careful she needed to be to work in a lab.

You seem to think that a lab is a benign environment. The truth is, labs are dangerous--and not just because of the pathogens and toxins we work with, but also because of the equipment and chemicals. People get seriously injured and killed in labs fairly frequently (google "laboratory deaths"). Chemicals and equipment explode. Animals bite (and they have razor sharp teeth). Most of the procedures required to analyze pathogens generate aerosols. Some chemicals are deadly if you get them on your skin, others if you breathe them. And so on. I'm pretty sure I could discuss a different laboratory danger every day for the next year and not run out of topics.

Everything I have said about Ebola mostly pertains to the laboratory and healthcare settings. I actually do not consider Ebola much of a concern "in the wild" because the disease is so debilitating that by the time a person becomes contagious, they don't feel like doing anything. Most people who have fevers and abdominal pain, are vomiting and who have severe diarrhea really don't feel like going bowling or whatever. So their house might be contaminated, but that's about it. Even in Africa, at the heart of this outbreak, where they have cultural practices that facilitate the spread of the disease, the R-naught is still less than 2.

134 posted on 10/27/2014 4:30:56 AM PDT by exDemMom (Current visual of the hole the US continues to dig itself into: http://www.usdebtclock.org/)
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