It should be pointed out (via Brit press this morning) that Spain only has ONE hospital in the country with level-4 capability, as prescribed for containing Ebola situations. Oddly enough....this was NOT the one that they sent the Spanish priest to. It begs questions about incompetence of both medical management and political leadership who allowed this to occur.
But onto a bigger issue. There are only ten hospitals in the US which have level-4 capability. You can figure that once you get past three-hundred patients...our system is then maxed out.
Finally, the Brit press says that the Spanish authorities finally came to the apartment/house of the nurse involved here....twelve hours after they noted she had Ebola...to sanitize her place. I could understand it taking three or four hours to get the “A-team” in place, but you have to wonder if they even had a process ready to go. And then....they killed the nurse’s dog as part of the process. An odd note...does Ebola cross over into animals? And if so...would we have to put down entire herds of cattle in the US, if got out of control?
The treatment clinics don’t actually use the scale that the research labs do, the bio 4-3... designations.
“BSL designations only apply to research laboratories. There is no equivalent grading system for health care facilities.”
We will see similar problems here if this gets rolling. Even simple negative pressure isolation rooms are scarce. We routinely groan under the strain of the annual flu season with ERs holding patients for long times waiting for beds. Arranging transfers to specialized , distant , higher care facilities takes time AND a patient stable enough to make the trip.
As to dogs, there is some evidence they can get asymptomatic infection with the virus. Whether they can then transmit it to humans ? Here’s a link to a paper someone else found that documents that....
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Ebola+virus+antibody+prevalence+in+dogs+and+human+risk.-a0131127452
But onto a bigger issue. There are only ten hospitals in the US which have level-4 capability. You can figure that once you get past three-hundred patients...our system is then maxed out.”
In Seattle, the news announced a couple days ago that Harborview Hospital would be accepting Obola patients. Are they a Level 4 hospital? It is the big emergency hospital, but there are a lot of Somalis always waiting for free treatment. So I suppose we could fly in a Spanish person and then infect the Nigerians who are always there. Kind of ironic, really.
CDC is not recommending level 4. Currently they recommend droplet and contact precautions, something that can be done at any hospital. Any hospital in the US that gets an Ebola patient will likely keep them.