Posted on 10/17/2014 11:43:46 AM PDT by Chgogal
U.S. standards for protecting healthcare workers from Ebola are weaker than those widely used in West Africa, according to the leader of a group treating victims of the virus in Liberia.
“We’re not comfortable with [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)] procedures,” Ken Isaacs, the vice president of Samaritan's Purse, told The Hill.
When Samaritan's Purse health workers treat patients in Liberia, they wear two pairs of gloves and spray themselves with disinfectant twice before leaving the isolation ward. They have a three-foot “no touch” policy and hold safety meetings every day.
In U.S. hospitals — such as Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, which has had three cases of Ebola — workers don't have to hose down their gear and are told it’s OK for gloves to expose their wrists.
“If you slip, and you touch your skin on the wrist, you’re going to get Ebola,” said Isaacs, who has worked on-the-ground disaster relief in countries like Haiti, the Philippines and Bosnia. “Can we trust CDC? They said they were going to stop it in its tracks, but I don’t know."
The CDC has faced a tide of criticism this week after two nurses contracted Ebola after treating a Liberian man, Thomas Eric Duncan, who was diagnosed with the disease in Dallas.
Both nurses had cared for Duncan daily, but because he was not immediately diagnosed with Ebola at the hospital, they reportedly did not wear special protective gear for two days during that treatment.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
REQUIREMENTS: Containment Level 4 facilities, equipment, and operational practices for work involving infectious or potentially infectious materials, animals, and cultures.
PROTECTIVE CLOTHING: Personnel entering the laboratory must remove street clothing, including undergarments, and jewellery, and change into dedicated laboratory clothing and shoes, or don full coverage protective clothing (i.e., completely covering all street clothing). Additional protection may be worn over laboratory clothing when infectious materials are directly handled, such as solid-front gowns with tight fitting wrists, gloves, and respiratory protection. Eye protection must be used where there is a known or potential risk of exposure to splashes (39).
OTHER PRECAUTIONS: All activities with infectious material should be conducted in a biological safety cabinet (BSC) in combination with a positive pressure suit, or within a class III BSC line. Centrifugation of infected materials must be carried out in closed containers placed in sealed safety cups, or in rotors that are unloaded in a biological safety cabinet. The integrity of positive pressure suits must be routinely checked for leaks. The use of needles, syringes, and other sharp objects should be strictly limited. Open wounds, cuts, scratches, and grazes should be covered with waterproof dressings. Additional precautions should be considered with work involving animal activities (39).
SUSCEPTIBILITY TO DISINFECTANTS: Ebola virus is susceptible to sodium hypochlorite, lipid solvents, phenolic disinfectants, peracetic acid, methyl alcohol, ether, sodium deoxycholate, 2% glutaraldehyde, 0.25% Triton X-100, β-propiolactone, 3% acetic acid (pH 2.5), formaldehyde and paraformaldehyde, and detergents such as SDS (20, 21, 31-34).
BOTTOM LINE: Up to 150 Hot Zone citizens are entering the US each and every day or about 3,150 every week. There is room for only 11 patients in this country's "Containment Level 4" facilities. The Obama Administration seems to be using New Math to determine how to handle the Ebola crisis. To make matters worse, Obama appoints a political hack to be Ebola Czar? Are you kidding me?
CDC has NO standards
Ebola-eussical, the Musical..
You cannot catch it on a Bus.
Even if you lick infected pus.
You cannot catch it from a Hug.
Harder to get than flu, this ebola bug.
You cannot catch it from a mouse.
Or rooming in an infected house.
You cannot catch it from the air.
Even on a plane ride from Zim-zam-zaire.
You can trust the Cee Dee Cee
Obama will save us, you will See....
(cough cough, Vomit Noise)
(Into the hot zone go our boys)
I’ve been bitching about this for several months now.
Rush mentioned on his show today that the country of Senegal was about to be declared Ebola free by the World Health Organization. They had one case in August but that was it. This is important because Senegal borders the nations of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. How did they do it? They sealed their freaking borders!!!! They’re right on the doorstep and they’ve kept Ebola out of their country! The rest of the world is showing a much stronger and more common sense response to this disease than we have. Not easy admitting we’ve been shown up by countries like Belize, the Philipines, and Senegal but we have.
Please call congress and tell them that we must be deadly serious about containing Ebola by strict quarantine within the United States and from infected nations. This is our right and our duty and it is THEIR duty to protect US.
Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121 or Google your congressman or senator and get his contact information and call him / her office directly. You can also call or go to their local offices.
I believe decisive response is urgent because you can’t put this Ebola genie back in the bottle once it gets out. It is a fire, it consumes all the fuel it can get and the fuel is people. The only way to stop a fire is to block it from the fuel or cool it with water. A vaccine or medicine to treat Ebola would be the water and we don’t have reliable, enough or any.
Every possible measure must be taken to stop the spread before draconian measures are imposed. What is being done now is sloppy. We are walking a dangerous road. The threat is blossoming by the day if not hour. Almost every hour there is some new Ebola development and none of them are good. This is a serious and potentially deadly event. Unchecked it could destroy or weaken the United States and facilitate our destruction by others. It has that potential for every country and that is why so many are responding with such strict quarantines. These consequences, no matter how small the probabilities, demand a full effort and significant response.
Ebola is being spread here in the United States right now. First Texas, then Ohio then? Terror is an excellent weapon. It disrupts, confuses, paralyzes and destroys a society. Many others and we on FR have speculated that terrorists may spread Ebola. How do you that remember 9/11 feel right now compared to what you felt then? Do you want to gather your loved ones near you to protect them? I do. Even more than I did on September 11, 2001! Isn’t this passive response by this administration accomplishing the very same things a terrorist would want?
When something is being done that makes as little sense as what Obama is doing there has to be some other reason. I leave it to you dear reader to draw your own conclusions as to the reasons.
What is happening now is insane. It makes no sense at all. For example the head of CDC says: “Stopping travel from Africa won’t do any good because you have to get people into Africa to fight Ebola.” “You can’t get Ebola from an infected person on a bus but an infected person should never be on a bus because he can infect others.” “Blocking travel from infected countries would damage their fragile economies.” What about ours? What about our safety? What about resources we have paid for that should be protecting us?
Even the most despotic dictatorship in Africa has acted to protect his nation by strict quarantine and stopping travel from infected countries. Even CDC, the UN and WHO advocate and credit strict quarantine for nipping the spread of Ebola in the bud at the source in places like Senegal and Nigeria where both have had faster and more successful outbreak controls than we have had here. 35 countries have stopped travel of people from infected West African countries. It is so obvious even a child could understand it so why is it OK for people from infected countries to travel here?
I will post this message and keep posting it until someone stops me.
For further reference:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3216461/posts
Such a common sense approach.
WTH is going on here?
It is my sincere belief that the spread of this Ebola outbreak in the US is intentional. Nothing else makes any sense.
WHO now recommends 42 Day Quarantine
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3216181/posts
21 Days Not A Long Enough Quarantine For Ebola, New Study Suggests
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonfortenbury/2014/10/15/21-days-not-a-long-enough-quarantine-for-ebola-according-to-new-study/
This is damning.
“Rush mentioned on his show today that the country of Senegal was about to be declared Ebola free by the World Health Organization. They had one case in August but that was it. This is important because Senegal borders the nations of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. How did they do it? They sealed their freaking borders!!!! They’re right on the doorstep and they’ve kept Ebola out of their country! The rest of the world is showing a much stronger and more common sense response to this disease than we have. Not easy admitting we’ve been shown up by countries like Belize, the Philipines, and Senegal but we have.”
Maybe we should be following what Senegal did to be declared Ebola free by the WHO, instead of appointing a party hack lawyer to be our EbolaCzar:
I have no pull with the mods. :P
But I have been bitching about the difference in standards for a long time now.
If an NGO can protect their workers in the AFrican bush better than we can at an advanced hospital in CONUS...question has to be why...
This is huge!
Yup, it IS so obvious. Ebola is a Risk Group 4 contagion. Yet, the CDC/Obama Administration is so lax about everything. I just shake my head : (
Indeed you have. And good for you.
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