Paul Chehade - Ebola virus in the United States of America.

Paul Chehade – Ebola virus in the United States of America.

The government has been incompetent in the face of the Ebola threat. But our other institutions are dropping the ball, too.

What inexcusable incompetence. The fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention allowed a nurse who had cared for an Ebola patient to board a commercial airplane despite a 99.5-degree fever is shocking. All that was needed was common sense.

We in the United States have protocols for everything but the problem is who know and respect them?

Containing Ebola means setting and enforcing strict protocols. Just one weak link in the chain is a recipe for disaster. So administrators need to be vigilant in their hiring, training and supervision of health care workers, to ensure that patients.

America’s Ebola Panic.

What’s wrong with news articles and cable-news segments that caution against Ebola hysteria by telling the truth? Two things: First, the non-stop harping about people overreacting to Ebola is turning into another form of overreaction. Second, the coverage of Americans freaking out about the disease, might, ironically, make widespread panic more likely.

Ebola has been making headlines since March when an outbreak of the rare, but deadly, hemorrhagic disease began in Guinea.

Earlier this year, two American aid workers, Dr. Kent Brantly and missionary Nancy Writebol, who contracted the virus overseas have been transferred to Emory University’s hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, for treatment. Both have received doses of an experimental serum to help fight the disease, which has no known cure.  

How Ebola is transmitted?

Ebola is transmitted through the bodily fluids of an infected person. So it’s much harder to contract than the common cold or influenza, Dr. Schaffner said. “People from West Africa can be brought into the United States. If they are healthy, they don’t put anybody at risk,” he said. “It’s when they become sick that [they’re contagious.” Although, he continued, Ebola transmission requires fairly intimate contact with someone — you must swap bodily fluids for the virus to transmit.

True Ebola symptoms.

There’s a misconception that Ebola causes victims to bleed from every orifice in their body, including their pores.

The reality is that only some late-stage patients bleed externally, sometimes from the eyes, nose, ears, mouth and rectum, and internally as well, according to the National Institutes of Health. But this only happens in about 41 percent of patients, according to a study in the wake of the 1995 Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo — and it’s not correlated with death or survival.

Bodily secretions such as blood, salvia and semen are how the virus transmits person to person. In Africa, viral spread has also been recorded through the handling of infected animals, including chimpanzees, gorillas, fruit bats, monkeys, forest antelope and porcupines found ill or dead or in the rainforest, according to the World Health Organization.

How common is Ebola?

Ebola   for all its horrifying complication and mystery — is well known around the world. But it is also relatively rare.

How common is Ebola?

There are five known types of the virus, three that have been associated with large human outbreaks. Zaire ebolavirus (EBOV) is the strain currently devastating West Africa — though this outbreak marks the first appearance of a new, perhaps particularly tough to treat strain of EBOV, according to a preliminary report published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Two strains of Ebola, Tai Forest ebolavirus and Reston ebolavirus, can infect humans, but have not been associated with human disease outbreaks to date.

Fighting Ebola.

No cure or vaccine exists for Ebola. There aren’t even any specific treatments for the disease, though typically patients are given intravenous hydration and electrolytes

Patients can remain infected — and perhaps contagious — for an unknown amount of time.

The Ebola’s virus is mysterious.

Fruit bats are believed to be the natural reservoir of the virus reinforcing the idea that more research and prevention guidelines are needed.

Medical care in the United States has traditionally been judged superior to that of many other developed nations.

More recently, however, public support for research and education has been reduced, while freedom from bureaucracy has yielded to onerous insurance and governmental regulation. As a result, the superiority of American medicine is waning.

God Bless America.

Paul Chehade:.
Honor and Truth