Posted on 10/15/2014 2:25:23 AM PDT by zeestephen
A second Texas healthcare worker who treated the first patient in the United States to be diagnosed with Ebola has tested positive for the disease, the Texas Department of State Health Services said in a statement on Wednesday.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
I guess another health care worker in Dallas did not follow protocol? What gives Obama the right to risk American lives? Please make it a point to tell everyone you can to get out on Nov 4th and punish the Democrats for this.
“I don’t think so. I mean, about needing to have break in the skin.”
I agree. You can make yourself ‘bleed’ just by lightly rubbing your skin with your hand.
You don’t actually see the blood, but it is there. You would see a wound under an electron microscope. Albeit, very small, but significant enough to allow penetration of a virus.
Or could it be that it isn’t really known yet at what point one is contagious... My guess is you get gradually more contagious as the virus replicates... Symptoms or not...
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Rush had a good call from a doctor yesterday ..... briefly a couple of his statements - much longer, detailed conversation at the link:
CALLER: According to the guidelines on the CDC, they state that 21 days is the incubation period, so to speak, and before the viral entity in your body gets large enough before it becomes contagious.
Studies that show that a viremia can be spread prior to 21 days have not been vigorously pursued. Meaning, there’s not enough data out there to disprove the fact that it can be spread prior to you getting symptoms.
RUSH: Wait a minute. If there had been no studies, Doctor, why are they telling everybody, “Don’t worry! If you don’t see anybody with any symptoms, you can’t get it.” On what basis are they promising that.
CALLER: Because from a statistical point of view, that’s probably true 99% of the time, for the majority of the time. But the virus is replicating in the body prior to it getting to a high enough titer where they can get sick. But prior to the symptoms occurring, the virus can still be spread or shed from the body that has been infected prior to actually having symptoms. This is what people need to know. We cannot be allowing people to come into America even if they’re asymptomatic, because the virus can be shed prior to symptoms. Prior to a level of the virus actually hurting the body, the body can be shed in the same manner prior to sickness. It may be statistically low, but it can happen.
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2014/10/14/a_doctor_on_the_virology_of_ebola
“They [Duncan family] had several days of unprotected contact with the guy, but only the health care workers are getting sick.”
Perhaps they have a higher resistance to this virus since they are also from Liberia?
As another FReeper pointed out. Flu and cols are spread the same way. None are “airborne”.
Last night this idiot was insisting to Megan Kelly on Fox that it was OK that nurses in Dallas were not given covers for their shoes or hair. I spent a little time in the Soviet Union in the 70s, and now I feel I've fallen down the rabbit hole into a communist double-speak state. Then I hear that our air force pilots are somehow bombing around concentrated ISIS forces, and hitting only insignificant targets. Now, the air force has been laughably PC for years, but I'm still surprised at the lack of principle. Where is the anger? Oh, and don't forget to check out the article linked on Drudge, very lengthy, describing how our troops were exposed to chemical weapons in Iraq, and the whole miserable affair was covered up. ISIS has some of those now.
The Ebola virus transforms its victim into a soup of virons and water. Ebola would be most infectious in the final stage of disease, and the greatest danger would be to the health care workers attempting to care for the victim and to those handling the body after the victim has died.
Presbyterian Hospital Dallas seems to have done more to protect workers than the CDC recommended. The problem wasn't that protocols were breached, the problem is with the CDC Ebola protocols, which are straight out of the Reagan era.
"Dallas hospital learned its Ebola protocols while struggling to save mortally ill patient"
This is the 34th outbreak of Ebola. So far it has killed more people than the prior 33 outbreaks combined. We -- and other Western countries -- are woefully unprepared for this.
CDC: "Known Cases and Outbreaks of Ebola Virus Disease, in Reverse Chronological Order"
Note: Link is a pdf document.
Charles Monet returned to his job at the pump house at the sugar factory. He walked to work each day across the burned cane fields, no doubt admiring the view of Mount Elgon, and when the mountain was buried in clouds, perhaps he could still feel its pull, like the gravity of an invisible planet. Meanwhile, something was making copies of itself inside Monet. A life form had acquired Charles Monet as a host, and it was replicating.
THE HEADACHE BEGINS, typically, on the seventh day after exposure to the agent. On the seventh day after his New Year's visit to Kitum Cave--January 8, 1980--Monet felt a throbbing pain behind his eyeballs.
He decided to stay home from work and went to bed in his bungalow. The headache grew worse. His eyeballs ached, and then his temples began to ache, the pain seeming to circle around inside his head. It would not go away with aspirin, and then he got a severe backache. His housekeeper, Johnnie, was still on her Christmas vacation, and he had recently hired a temporary housekeeper. She tried to take care of him, but she really did not know what to do. Then, on the third day after his headache started, he became nauseated, spiked a fever, and began to vomit. His vomiting grew intense and turned into dry heaves. At the same time, he became strangely passive. His face lost all appearance of life and set itself into an expressionless mask, with the eyeballs fixed, paralytic, and staring. The eyelids were slightly droopy, which gave him a peculiar appearance, as if his eyes were popping out of his head and half-closed at the same time. The eyeballs themselves seemed almost frozen in their sockets, and they turned bright red. The skin of his face turned yellowish, with brilliant star-like red speckles. He began to look like a zombie. His appearance frightened the temporary housekeeper. She didn't understand the transformation in this man. His personality changed. He became sullen, resentful, angry, and his memory seemed to be blown away.
He was not delirious. He could answer questions, although he didn't seem to know exactly where he was.
When Monet failed to show up for work, his colleagues began to wonder about him, and eventually they went to his bungalow to see if he was all right. The black-and-white crow sat on the roof and watched them as they went inside. They looked at Monet and decided that he needed to get to a hospital. Since he was very unwell and no longer able to drive a car, one of his co-workers drove him to a private hospital in the city of Kisumu, on the shore of Lake Victoria. The doctors at the hospital examined Monet, and could not come up with any explanation for what he might have some kind of bacterial infection, they gave him injections of antibiotics, but the antibiotics had no effect on his illness.
The doctors thought he should go to Nairobi Hospital, which is the best private hospital in East Africa. The telephone system hardly worked, and it did not seem worth the effort to call any doctors to tell them that he was coming. He could still walk, and he had to get to Nairobi. They put him in a taxi to the airport, and he boarded a Kenya Airways flight.
A hot virus from the rain forest lives within a twenty-four-hour plan flight from every city on earth. All of the earth's cities are connected by a web of airline routes. The web is a network. Once a virus hits the net, it can shoot anywhere in a day-Paris,Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, wherever planes fly. Charles Monet and the life form inside him had entered the net.
The plane was a Fokker Friendship with propellers, a commuter aircraft that seats thirty-five people. It started its engines and took off over Lake Victoria, blue and sparkling, dotted with dugout canoes of fishermen. The Friendship turned and banked eastward, climbing over green hills quilted with tea plantations and small farms. The commuter flights hat drone across Africa are often jammed with people, and this flight was probably full. The plane climbed over belts of forest and clusters of round huts and villages with tin roofs. The land suddenly dropped away, going down in shelves and ravines, and changed in color from green to brown. The plane was crossing the Eastern Rift Valley. The passengers looked out the windows at the place where the human species was born.
They saw specks of huts clustered inside circles of thorn bush, with cattle trails radiating from the huts. The propellers moaned, and the Friendship passed through cloud streets, lines of puffy Rift clouds, and began to bounce and sway. Monet became airsick.
The seats are narrow and jammed together on these commuter airplanes, and you notice everything that is happening inside the cabin. The cabin is tightly closed, and the air recirculates. If there are any smells in the air, you perceive them. You would not have been able to ignore the man who was getting sick. He hunches over in his seat. There is something wrong with him, but you can't tell exactly what is happening.He is holding an airsickness bag over his mouth. He coughs a deep cough and regurgitates something into the bag. The bag swells up.
Perhaps he glances around, and then you see that his lips are smeared with something slippery and red, mixed with black specks, as if he has been chewing coffee grounds. His eyes are the color of rubies, and his face is an expressionless mass of bruises. The red spots, which a few days before had started out as star-like speckles, expanded and merged into huge, spontaneous purple shadows; his whole head is turning black-and-blue. The muscles of his face droop. The connective tissue in his face is dissolving, and his face appears to hang from underlying bone, as if the face is detaching itself from the skull. He opens his mouth and gasps into the bag, and the vomiting goes on endlessly. It will not stop, and he keeps bringing up liquid, long after his stomach should have been empty. The airsickness bag fills up to the brim with a substance known as vomit negro, or the black vomit. The black vomit is not really black; it is a speckled liquid of two colors, black and red, a stew of tarry granules mixed with fresh red arterial blood. It is hemorrhage, and it smells like a slaughterhouse. The black vomit is loaded with virus. It is highly infective, lethally hot, a liquid that smell of the vomit negro fills the passenger cabin. The airsickness bag is brimming with black vomit, so Monet closes the bag and rolls up the top. The bag bulging and softening, threatening to leak, and he hands it to a flight attendant.
When a hot virus multiplies in a host, it can saturate the body with virus particles, from the brain to the skin. The military experts then say that the virus has undergone "extreme amplification". This is not something like the common cold. By the time an extreme amplification peaks out, an eyedropper of the victim's blood may contain a hundred million particles of virus. During this process, the body is partly transformed into virus particles. In other words, the host is possessed by a life form that is attempting to convert the host into itself. The transformation is not entirely successful, however, and the end result is a great deal of liquefying flesh mixed with virus, a kind of biological accident. Extreme amplification has occurred in Monet, and the sign of it is the black vomit.
He appears to be holding himself rigid, as if any movement would rupture something inside him. His blood is clotting up-his bloodstream is throwing clots, and the clots are lodging everywhere. His liver, kidneys, lungs, hands, feet, and head are becoming jammed with blood clots. In effect, he is having a stroke through the whole body. Clots are accumulating in his intestinal muscles, cutting off the blood supply to his intestines.The intestinal muscles are beginning to die, and the intestines are starting to go slack. He doesn't seem to be fully aware of pain any longer because the blood clots lodged in his brain are cutting off blood flow. His personality is being wiped away by brain damage.
This is called depersonalization, in which the liveliness and details of character seem to vanish. He is becoming an automaton. Tiny spots in his brain are liquefying. The higher functions of consciousness are winking out first, leaving the deeper parts of the brain stem (the primitive rat brain, the lizard brain) still alive and functioning. It could be said that the who of Charles Mont has already died while the what of Charles Monet continues to live.
The vomiting attack appears to have broken some blood vessels in his nose-he gets a nosebleed. The blood comes from both nostrils, a shining, cloudless, arterial liquid that drips over his teeth and chin. This blood keeps running, because the clotting factors have been used up. A flight attendant gives him some paper towels, which he uses to stop up his nose, but the blood still won't coagulate, and the towels soak through.
When a man is ill in an airline seat next to you, you may not want to embarrass him by calling attention to the problem. You say to yourself that this man will be all right. Maybe he doesn't travel well in airplanes. He is airsick, the poor man, and people do get nosebleeds in airplanes, the air is so dry and thin ... and you ask him, weakly, if there is anything you can do to help. He does not answer, or he mumbles words you can't understand, so you try to ignore it, but the flight seems to go on forever. Perhaps the flight attendants offer to help him. But victims of this type of hot virus have changes in behavior that can render them incapable of responding to an offer of help. They become hostile, and don't want to be touched. They don't want to speak. They answer questions with grunts or monosyllables. They can't seem to find words.
They can tell you their name, but they can't tell you the day of the week or explain what has happened to them.
The Friendship drones through the clouds, following the length of the Rift Valley, and Monet slumps back in the seat, and now he seems to be dozing ... Perhaps some of the passengers wonder if he is dead. No, no, he is not dead. He is moving. His red eyes are open and moving around a little bit.
It is late afternoon, and the sun is falling down into the hills to the west of the Rift Valley, throwing blades of light in all directions, as if the sun is cracking up on the equator. The Friendship makes a gentle turn and crosses the eastern scarp of the Rift. The land rises higher and changes in color from brown to green. The Ngong Hills appear under the right wing, and the plane, now descending, passes over parkland dotted with zebra and giraffes. A minute later, it lands at JomoKenyatta International Airport. Monet stirs himself. He is still able to walk.
He stands up, dripping. He stumbles down the gangway onto the tarmac.
His shirt is a red mess. He carries no luggage. His only luggage is internal, and it is a load of amplified virus. Monet has been transformed into a human virus bomb. He walks slowly into the airport terminal and through the building and out to a curving road where taxis are always parked. The taxi drivers surround him--"Taxi?" "Taxi?"
"Nairobi... Hospital," he mumbles.
One of them helps him into a car. Nairobi taxi drivers like to chat with their fares, and this one probably asks if he is sick. The answer should be obvious. Monet's stomach feels a little better now. It is heavy, dull, and bloated, as if he has eaten a meal, rather than empty and torn and on fire.
The taxi pulls onto the Uhuru Highway and heads into Nairobi. It goes through grassland studded with honey-acacia trees, and it goes past factories, and then it comes to a rotary and enters the bustling street life of Nairobi. Crowds are milling on the shoulders of the road, women walking on beaten dirt pathways, men loitering, children riding bicycles, a man repairing shoes by the side of the road, a tractor pulling a wagon-load of charcoal.
The taxi turns left onto the Ngong Road and goes past a city park and up a hill, past lines of tall blue-gum trees, and it turns up a narrow road and goes past a guard gate and enters the grounds of Nairobi Hospital. It parks at a taxi stand beside a flower kiosk. A sign by a glass door says CASUALTY DEPT. Monet hands the driver some money and gets out of the tax and opens the glass door and goes over to the reception window and indicates that he is very ill. He has difficulty speaking. The man is bleeding, and they will admit him in just a moment. He must wait until a doctor can be called, but the doctor will see him immediately, not to worry. He sits down in the waiting room.
It is a small room lined with padded benches. The clear, strong ancient light of East Africa pours through a row of window and falls across a table heaped with soiled magazines, and makes rectangles on a pebbled gray floor that has a drain in the center. The room smells vaguely of wood smoke and sweat, and it is jammed with bleary-eyed people, Africans and Europeans sitting shoulder to shoulder. There is always someone in Casualty who has a cut and is waiting for stitches. People wait patiently, holding a washcloth against the scalp, holding a bandage pressed around a finger, and you may see a spot of blood on the cloth. So Charles Monet is sitting on a bench in casualty, and he does not look very much different from someone else in the room, except for his bruised, expressionless face and his red eyes. A sign on the wall warns patients to watch out for purse thieves, and another sign says:
PLEASE MAINTAIN SILENCE
YOUR COOPERATION WILL BE APPRECIATED.
NOTE: THIS IS A CASUALTY DEPARTMENT.
EMERGENCY CASES WILL BE TAKEN IN PRIORITY.
YOU MAY BE REQUIRED TO WAIT FOR SUCH CASES
BEFORE RECEIVING ATTENTION
Monet maintains silence, waiting to receive attention. Suddenly he goes into the last phase. The human virus bomb explodes. Military biohazard specialists have ways of describing this occurrence. They say that the victim has "crashed and bled out". Or more politely they say that the victim has "gone down".
He becomes dizzy and utterly weak, and his spine goes limp and nerveless and he loses all sense of balance. The room is turning around and around. He is going into shock. He leans over, head on his knees, and brings up an incredible quantity of blood from his stomach and spills it onto the floor with a gasping groan. He loses consciousness and pitches forward onto the floor. The only sound is a choking in his throat as he continues to vomit while unconscious. Then come a sound like bedside being torn in half, which is the sound of his bowels opening and venting blood from sloughed his gut. The linings of his intestines have come off and are being expelled along with huge amount of blood. Monet has crashed and is bleeding out.
The other patients in the waiting room stand up and move away from the man on the floor, calling for a doctor. Pools of blood spread out around him, enlarging rapidly. Having destroyed its host, the agent is now coming out of every orifice, and is "trying" to find a new host.
It's the same virus in all stages. From the literature:
Of particular concern is the frequent presence of EBOV in saliva early during the course of disease, where it could be transmitted to others through intimate contact and from sharing food, especially given the custom, in many parts of Africa, of eating with the hands from a common plate.
Obviously that would include sneezing. The reason why health care workers get it is they are covered in viruses and have woefully inadequate protection including a face mask that does not seal. So a droplet can get in their eyes and in that sense it is airborne.
OTOH if Duncan had sneezed on the people in the apartment they could have gotten infected (in theory).
If only...
Then think feet....How many people walk around in socks or barefooted...especially in Texas. Another big sweat area...
The infected is a walking ebola factory.
I think it relates to the difference between causal contacts and intimate ones. Since the virus spreads through bodily fluids, those the closest to the patient are the most potentially at risk.
I don’t think it’s a union issue. It’s just that the union is the only entity coming forward and telling the CDC that they are wrong.
I have no doubt, that once the nurses are well, that they will go on TV and say they followed protocol.
Luckily according to Youngor (the “stepdaughter”, Duncan was cold and covered from neck to foot with two shirts, socks, etc. That probably helped. And maybe he washed his hands well. Or they were just very lucky.
Consider it a "touch" disease....just like smallpox.
In our early days....people were confined to their homes. Some made it...some didn't. Then everything was burned and/or cleaned with "Clorox".
It is my understanding that the Duncan family has been monitored for fever from the beginning. This is not really “new” news.
It ain’t over. Stats were “created” with a lot of unknown. As we can see....those stats have been blown to hell.
Spraying hazmat suits with bleach solution before removal is the protocol in West Africa and was one of the things NOT stated in the CDC requirements which the Dallas hospital followed.
My guess about the Duncan family members is: knowing Ebola, once he felt even the tiniest bit ill, they maintained distance from him and used bleach solution. In one article I read about his stepdaughter, who is a nursing assistant, she ordered all the family to start using the disinfectant almost immediately. If they do not become infected, it also reveals no one had intimate contact with him prior to his illness.
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