St. Patrick Hospital 1 of 4 sites in U.S. ready for Ebola patients ( Montana )

Missoulian ^ | Sep 30, 2014 | Rob Chaney

[george76]

There are four places in the United States set up to handle a patient sickened by the Ebola virus, and Missoula is one of those.

....

And any hospital equipped to care for a tuberculosis patient can care for an Ebola patient, according to Dr. George Risi, an infectious disease specialist who recently returned from spending 20 days in a Sierra Leone Ebola ward. Accompanied by St. Patrick’s intensive care nursing director Kate Hurley, Risi helped local clinic staff care for up to 95 patients at a time. While untreated Ebola kills more than 70 percent of its victims, more than half of those who made it to the clinic recovered.

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The three rooms are qualified to handle Level 4 safety concerns. Level 1 has protection against things generally not dangerous to healthy people, like brewer’s yeast. Level 2 is the safety margin of the standard hospital microbiology lab, where clinicians test for routine diseases like chicken pox or staph infections.

Level 3 spaces can handle infectious diseases spread by air, like influenza, bubonic plague or yellow fever – that have known cures. Level 4 units are for exotic agents that may or may not have cures available, or appear in highly concentrated or modified forms from a research institution.

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The other U.S. sites cleared for Ebola treatment are in Bethesda, Maryland; Atlanta; and Omaha, Nebraska. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control have deployed teams of health workers to numerous sites in West Africa to slow the epidemic’s progress. U.S. military personnel have also been sent there to build hospital clinics

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!