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 ...
A link to this thread has been posted on the Ebola Surveillance Thread
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