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Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

In the News: Ebolinsanity

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A series of tubes filled with enormous amounts of non-contagious but highly infectious material

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Threat of Lawsuit Could Test Maine’s Quarantine Policy

A nurse who cared for Ebola patients in Sierra Leone was headed for a legal showdown with the State of Maine on Wednesday over whether the state can quarantine her against her will.

The dispute is heightening a national debate over how to balance public health and public fears against the rights and freedoms of health care workers, and troops, returning from West Africa.

“This is a tipping point in this whole process,” the nurse, Kaci Hickox, said in an interview, one of several she did from her home in northern Maine on Wednesday, as state troopers and television trucks stood outside.

“So many states have started enacting these policies that I think are just completely not evidence-based. They don’t do a good job of balancing the risks and benefits when thinking about taking away an individual’s rights.”[…]

Ms. Hickox, 33, returned last Friday from a month treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone with the rescue group Doctors Without Borders, She was isolated in a tent at a New Jersey hospital after she registered a low-grade fever on a forehead scanner, though she had not previously registered a fever and has not since.

She has never shown symptoms of the virus and tested negative for it several hours after being quarantined. […]

“I understand how fear spreads,” she added. “But if I’m a nurse and I have a patient in the hospital, it’s our responsibility as medical professionals to advocate for our patients. Now, it’s the medical professionals who are being stigmatized. Even if there is popular public opinion, we still have to advocate for what’s right.”

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Connecticut father sues after Ebola fears keep daughter from school

Oct 28 (Reuters) – A father sued a Connecticut elementary school on Tuesday, saying his 7-year-old daughter was discriminated against and banned from school for 21 days based on irrational fears of Ebola because she attended a wedding in Nigeria.

Stephen Opayemi filed the lawsuit in federal court in New Haven, Connecticut. He asked a judge to order the schools in Milford, Connecticut, to immediately permit his daughter to return to her third-grade class.

Opayemi’s daughter has not experienced any symptoms associated with Ebola and her health is fine, but parents and teachers were concerned she could transmit Ebola to other children, the lawsuit says.[…]

According to the suit, a city health official said in an Oct. 15 meeting that the risk of the girl infecting anyone was minor but that she ought to be quarantined because of rumors, panic and the climate of the school.

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Louisiana To Ebola Experts: Stay Away

Louisiana state officials wants scientists and medical researchers who have dealt with Ebola patients not to come to the state’s annual American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene conference next week in New Orleans.

In a letter to the organization, reported by Bloomberg News, the heads of Louisiana’s health and homeland security departments effectively disinvited those who have recently cared for Ebola patients.

Just who are these folks who dare to gather in Louisiana?

The American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH), founded in 1903, is a worldwide organization of scientists, clinicians and program professionals whose mission is to promote global health through the prevention and control of infectious and other diseases that disproportionately afflict the global poor. Research, health care and education are the central activities of ASTMH members, whose work bridges basic laboratory research to international field work and clinics to countrywide programs.

Specific ASTMH goals include:

   Improving the health of people worldwide

   Advancing research in tropical diseases

   Fostering international scientific collaboration

   Supporting career development in tropical medicine and global health

   Educating medical professionals, policymakers and the public about tropical medicine and global health

   Promoting science-based policy regarding tropical medicine and global health

   Recognizing exceptional achievement in tropical medicine and global health

Certainly there would be no discernible benefit from their meeting. Sigh.

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More …

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What Makes America Exceptional: President Obama Thanks U.S. Health Care Workers Fighting Ebola

That’s what I want to see from us — the pride of a nation that always steps up and gets the job done.  America has never been defined by fear.  We are defined by courage and passion and hope and selflessness and sacrifice and a willingness to take on challenges when others can’t and others will not, and ordinary Americans who risk their own safety to help those in need, and who inspire, thereby, the example of others — all in the constant pursuit of building a better world not just for ourselves but for people in every corner of the Earth.

— President Obama, October 29, 2014

Transcript

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CNN poll: Americans confident in Ebola response

More than 7 in 10 Americans say the federal government can stop an Ebola epidemic, and 54% believe the federal government is doing a “good job” in addressing the disease.[…]

“Most Americans seem to recognize that they are not in personal jeopardy themselves,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “In fact, the vast majority of Americans probably don’t know anyone who has ever been to West Africa.”

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Sam Wang: Overreacting to Ebola

The amount of Ebola coverage is amazing: 1,869 stories from October 20 to 24 alone. That coverage came on the heels of the death of one patient in Dallas, Texas. The level of coverage is amazing considering the far greater impact of other infectious diseases in the United States: rotavirus, which kills dozens of small children every year; West Nile virus, a similar number of adults; and of course influenza, which kills thousands even in years when there is no epidemic. One way to look at this is to calculate the ratio of stories to deaths. It’s about 6 million times higher for Ebola than for influenza.

Ebola appeals to our fears: the disease is grisly. It is a serious threat with tremendous public health implications – in western Africa. That is the reason for sending relief workers overseas – fighting it there so we don’t have to fight it over here.

One of the comments: “Several thousand Americans are going to die from influenza. There is a vaccine but innoculation rates are abysmal.” Indeed.

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Editor’s Note: Feel free to share other news stories in the comments.


Categories: Uncategorized.

/ 13 Comments

13 comments

  2. princesspat

    So one nurse in Maine should be quarantined, but the entire teams of nurses and doctors who successfully treated the two infected nurses are free to continue taking care of the sick people who need them?

    Political grandstanding at it’s worse!

    President Obama’s remarks were as always inspiring, and I share his “frustration.”

  3. JanF

    WaPo Poll

    While personal worries about an Ebola infection or a larger outbreak in the United States persist, they have eased in the past two weeks amid constant reminders from health officials about the unlikelihood of widespread transmission and the fact that the handful of U.S. cases have occurred only among people who have treated Ebola patients.

    Still, 36 percent of respondents say they are at least “somewhat worried” that a family member will contract Ebola, down from 43 percent two weeks ago. Sixty percent say they are at least somewhat concerned about a broader Ebola outbreak in the United States, down from 65 percent earlier this month.

    Americans worry about a lot of things and Ebola at 36% means that more are worried about ghosts than infection.  

  4. DeniseVelez

    insanity and anti-science and reading so much misinformation wrapped in hysteria mode.

    Coming home from school the other day I was listening to my  public radio mid-day phone-in program in the car and the topic was ebola.  I got so pissed off I pulled the car over to the side of the road and called the program – after about 5 minutes wait time I was on the air.

    I identified myself as a medical anthropologist, who has worked with epidemics for years – but not ebola.  I suggested that people read Tara Smith

    http://scienceblogs.com/aetiol…

    and listen to physician and medical anthropologist Paul Farmer, and the heads of Doctors without Borders.

    Farmer makes it very clear – what is needed is “staff, stuff and systems”

    So many callers were hyperventilating with concerns straight out of that horrid book “The Hot Zone.”, which Tara Smith critiques

    http://scienceblogs.com/aetiol…

    Others kept harping on virus mutation – yes viruses mutate (no ebola is not going to mutate to being airborne)

    How to stop ebola?  Must be done in parts of West Africa where the medical infrastructures have collapsed.  It would also help if people had food, clean water and treatment for malaria – the death rates aren’t simply “because ebola”.

    Other callers were blaming returned health care worker Doctor for riding the subway (when he was not infectious – sigh)

    Thankfully a sane infectious disease nurse called in and talked about viral loads.

    People don’t seem to “get it” that when Duncan, who died in Dallas was infectious – after he was sent home from the hospital – not one person who lived in the house with him (close contact) was infected – this is about the viral loads – by the time he was finally hospitalized the viral load was high enough that Hazmat was needed for the health care workers(they did not have the correct gear or follow the correct procedures – in spite of that the nurses who were infected are fine).

    I need more coffee this morning – I get agitated by this discussion 🙂

  5. Diana in NoVa

    insane. Hickox has already tested negative for Ebola TWICE.

    Why aren’t people panicked about the epidemic of people dying by gunfire? Children die from it every day.

    Stupid, stupid, stupid. “Idiotocracy” is here!

  6. JanF

    Not surprisingly … it is tinged with racial fears.

    Awful Moments In Quarantine History: Remember Typhoid Mary?

    The idea of putting a possibly sick person in quarantine goes back to the ancient texts. The book of Leviticus tells how to quarantine lepers. Hippocrates covered the issue in a three-volume set on epidemics, though he came from a time in ancient Greece when disease was thought to spread from “miasmas,” or foul-smelling gas that came out of the ground.

    Fox News is one such miasma. Back to the story …

    1892

    An outbreak of cholera followed in New York, from a ship bringing more Russian Jewish immigrants. According to Markel, the front page of The New York Times ran a piece saying, “We don’t need this kind of riff-raff on our shores,” referring to Russian Jews.

    1900

    City authorities strung rope and barbed wire around a 12-square-block section of Chinatown (after allowing all Caucasian residents to leave). The cause: fear of bubonic plague, after a Chinese immigrant was found dead in a hotel basement. The quarantine was lifted after a few days, but not before countless Chinese laborers had lost their jobs. This “bubonic bluff,” as it became known in the press, prompted ugly discussion – never put into action – about mass deportation of Chinese immigrants.

    1907

    [“Typhoid Mary”] was an Irish-born cook who carried the bacteria that causes typhoid fever, a form of salmonella that can cause fever, diarrhea and death. But Mallon herself was immune to the disease. When authorities figured out her work as a cook had caused the city’s typhoid outbreak, she was sent to North Brother Island for a three-year quarantine. She promised never to cook for others again. But she broke her word. (She was especially fond of making peach ice cream.) When apprehended in 1915, she was sent back to the island for the rest of her life – 23 more years.

    1980s

    There was no AIDS quarantine, but that doesn’t mean some people didn’t want one. In a 1985 Los Angeles Times poll, 51 percent of respondents supported quarantining AIDS patients [even though we knew that AIDS] is transmitted through very specific activities.

    2014

    Sierra Leone. 3 day lockdown and quarantine: Doctors Without Borders, the medical organization that’s fighting Ebola, said, “It has been our experience that lockdowns and quarantines do not help control Ebola, as they end up driving people underground and jeopardizing the trust between people and health providers.”

  9. JanF

    NY Times BREAKING NEWS Friday, October 31, 2014 1:26 PM EDT

    In About-Face, Judge Rules Against Maine in Quarantine of Nurse

    Less than a day after confining a nurse who treated Ebola victims to her house, a judge in Maine has lifted the quarantine, rejecting arguments by the State of Maine that the measure was necessary to protect the public.

    Within an hour of the decision, state troopers who had been parked outside the nurse’s house for days had left.

    The order, signed on Friday by Judge Charles C. LaVerdiere, the chief judge for the Maine District Courts who serves in Kennebec and Somerset counties, said the nurse, Kaci Hickox, “currently does not show symptoms of Ebola and is therefore not infectious.

    READ MORE

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11…

    Now they just need to vote out their awful governor.

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