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Without a doubt the best coverage is coming from the Extinction Protocol
Ebola
escapes Europe's defenses; pet dog must die
AP,
7
October, 2014
MADRID
(AP) — Health officials in Spain rushed to contain the Ebola virus
Tuesday after it escaped Europe's defenses, quarantining four people
at a Madrid hospital where a nursing assistant got infected and even
getting a court order to kill the woman's dog.
The
first case of Ebola transmitted outside Africa, where a months-long
outbreak has killed more than 3,400 people, is raising questions
about how prepared wealthier countries really are. Health workers
complained Tuesday that they lack the training and equipment to
handle the virus, and the all-important tourism industry was showing
its anxiety.
Medical
officials in the United States, meanwhile, are retraining hospital
staff and fine-tuning infection control procedures after the
mishandling of a critically ill Liberian man in Texas, who might have
exposed many others to the virus after being sent away by a hospital.
In
Africa, the U.S. military was preparing to open a 25-bed mobile
hospital catering to health care workers with Ebola, before building
a total of 17 promised 100-bed Ebola Treatment Units in Liberia. The
virus has taken an especially devastating toll on health care
workers, sickening or killing more than 370 in the hardest-hit
countries of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, where doctors and
nurses were already in short supply.
And
as the disease moved from a seemingly distant continent to the
doorsteps of the world's largest economies, government leaders faced
growing pressure to ramp up responses. Spanish opposition parties
called for the resignation of Health Minister Ana Mato, and the
European Union demanded answers to what went wrong.
Obama
administration spokesman Josh Earnest said Tuesday that more
passenger screening measures would be announced "in the next
couple of days," even though the White House remains "confident
in the screening measures that are currently in place."
The
nursing assistant in Madrid was part of a special team caring for a
Spanish priest who died of Ebola last month after being evacuated
from Sierra Leone. The nursing assistant wore a hazmat suit both
times she entered his room, officials said, and no records point to
any accidental exposure to the virus, which spreads through direct
contact with the bodily fluids of a sickened person.
The
woman, who had been on vacation in the Madrid area after treating the
priest, was diagnosed with Ebola on Monday after coming down with a
fever, and was said to be stable Tuesday. Her husband also was
isolated as a precaution. Another quarantined nurse tested negative,
but a man who traveled in Nigeria remained in isolation.
Madrid's
regional government even got a court order to euthanize and
incinerate their pet, Excalibur, against the couple's objections,
without even testing the animal. A government statement said
"available scientific information" provides no guarantee
that infected dogs can't transmit the virus to humans.
Some
reports in medical journals suggest that dogs can be infected with
Ebola without showing symptoms, but whether they can spread the
disease to people is unclear.
Ebola's
source in nature hasn't been pinpointed. The leading suspect is a
certain type of fruit bat, but the World Health Organization lists
chimpanzees, gorillas, monkeys, forest antelope and porcupines as
possibly playing a role in spread of the disease. Even pigs may
amplify infection because of bats on farms in Africa.
Spanish
authorities also were tracking down all the woman's contacts, and put
more than 50 other people under observation, including her relatives
and fellow health care workers. "The priority now is to
establish that there is no risk to anybody else," emergency
coordinator Fernando Simon said.
Even
so, the potential repercussions of Ebola's presence in Europe became
clear, as shares of Spanish airline and hotel chain companies slumped
in Tuesday's trading. Spain is Europe's biggest vacation destination
after France, and investors were apparently spooked that the deadly
virus could scare away travelers.
The
afflicted woman, reportedly in her 40s and childless, was not
identified to protect her privacy, but nursing union officials she
had 14 years' experience. Spanish officials said she had changed a
diaper for the priest and collected material from his room after he
died. Dead Ebola victims are highly infectious, and in West Africa
their bodies are collected by workers in hazmat outfits.
An
official investigation has begun and aims to "identify ... what
is vulnerable: the procedures, or their implementation," he
said.
The
Madrid infection shows that even in countries with sophisticated
medical procedures, frontline health care workers are at risk while
caring for Ebola patients. Some two dozen health workers protested
outside a Madrid hospital Tuesday, where union representative Esther
Quinones complained that they lack resources and training.
In
the United States, health care providers are implementing many
precautions — reviewing triage procedures, creating isolation
units, and even sending actors with mock symptoms into New York
City's public hospital emergency rooms to test reactions.
"You
never know when (an Ebola) patient's going to walk in," said Dr.
Debra Spicehandler, an infectious disease expert at Northern
Westchester Hospital in Mount Kisco, New York. "Education is key
to controlling this — education of the public and of health care
workers."
Vaccine
may be only way to bring Ebola under control in West Africa – may
have to vaccinate an entire country to save it
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2014/10/08/vaccine-may-be-only-way-to-bring-ebola-under-control-in-west-africa-may-have-to-vaccinate-an-entire-country-to-save-it/
October
2014 – HEALTH - A
dire warning from one of the aid groups on the ground in western
Africa: UNICEF has now declared the Ebola epidemic an extreme crisis.
And one of the outcomes of this crisis is the thousands of children
who are now Ebola orphans. Jackson Proskow reports. As West Africa’s
Ebola outbreak continues to rage, some experts are coming to the
conclusion that it may take large amounts of vaccines and maybe even
drugs – all still experimental and in short supply – to bring the
outbreak under control. Embedded in that notion is the reality that
the catastrophic epidemic may remain unchecked for months, given that
these products haven’t yet been proven to be safe or effective in
people, and won’t be available in significant amounts any time
soon. Experimental Ebola drugs in particular will remain in scarce
supply for a considerable time.“It is conceivable that this
epidemic will not turn around even if we pour resources into it. It
may just keep going and going and it might require a vaccine,” Dr.
Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute for Allergy
and Infectious Diseases, told The Canadian Press in
an interview.
“As
the epidemic gets more and more formidable and in some cases out of
control it is quite conceivable, if not likely, that we may need to
deploy the vaccine to the entire country to be able to shut the
epidemic down. That is clearly a possibility.” Earlier in the
outbreak many experts insisted experimental vaccines could not be
tested and produced in large enough amounts in time to have an impact
on the outcome. They stressed – publicly, some still do – that
the “tried and true” measures used to contain Ebola outbreaks in
the past would eventually control this one. Those measures are aimed
at breaking the chains of transmission. The sick are housed in
isolation units, where the only people they have contact with are
garbed head-to-toe in protective apparel. Those who don’t survive
are buried in thick body bags, without the cultural rituals that
often spread the disease. Contacts of the sick are monitored for 21
days and are whisked into isolation if they start to get ill. People
with Ebola are believed to be contagious only when they have
symptoms, which is when you need to ensure they don’t come into
contact with others.
But
this epidemic is so large it has long since outstripped the capacity
of responders to care for all the sick, let alone trace their
contacts. People are dying at home, infecting their families in the
process. Some are dying abandoned on streets, or outside the gates of
over-full treatment centers. On Sunday, Sierra Leone reported 121
deaths. That is more deaths in a single day than recorded in most
Ebola outbreaks from start to finish. The World Health Organization
says to date about 7,500 people are known to have been infected with
the virus, and more than 3,400 have died. The head of the Wellcome
Trust says it’s time to stop telling the public the traditional way
of containing Ebola can quell this epidemic. Dr. Jeremy Farrar, who
runs the global charitable foundation, says that message is now
counterproductive, getting in the way of spurring the pharmaceutical
industry to put on the type of full-court press that the situation
demands.
Liberia
burns its bodies as Ebola fears run rampant – burial crews in
Sierra Leone go on strike
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2014/10/08/liberia-burns-its-bodies-as-ebola-fears-run-rampant-burial-crews-in-sierra-leone-go-on-strike/
October
2014 – LIBERIA – In
an effort to stem Ebola’s spread, Liberia’s government has all
but banned burials in favor of cremation. In the dusty shop-front of
one of downtown Monrovia’s more desolate side streets, Sam Agyra
flips through a fly-specked photo album showing off his custom
caskets. Cake-like confections of pale satin, gold detailing and
elaborate wooden scrollwork, his coffins have earned him a
well-deserved reputation for beautiful work at a cheap price. In good
times he was turning out five handcrafted pine coffins a week. Now?
He doesn’t even want to talk about it. Instead he just laughs, the
hysterical cackle of a man watching his business of 25 years grind to
a halt. He hasn’t sold a coffin in two months, ever since the
Liberian government declared, in an effort to tackle the Ebola
crisis, that all of the country’s dead should be burned and not
buried. An Ebola victim is most contagious in the moments and days
after death, when unprotected contact with infected bodily fluids
carries an extremely high risk of transmission. Liberia’s
traditional burial practices, in which mourners bathe, dress and even
kiss the corpse, are widely credited with the early explosion of
Ebola in the country, where over 2,000 have so far died of the
disease.
Overwhelmed
by the increasing number of dead,
and faced with community fears that the buried bodies may also
transmit the disease—which, if interred properly, they
won’t—Liberia’s government declared in August that all those
who died of Ebola should be cremated. With international help and
advice, the government established a Dead Body Management program to
pick up Ebola’s victims and dispose of them safely. But testing for
Ebola is difficult and time consuming. What little testing resources
do exist are reserved for the living, says assistant health minister,
Tolbert Nyenswah. With hospitals closed and doctors overwhelmed, it
is almost impossible to prove that the cause of death is anything but
the deadly virus. “These days, if someone dies, it’s Ebola,”
says Agyra. “There is no testing, no questions. Just Ebola, and
they take the body away. No one has time for coffins.” The
government directive, while logical from an epidemiological aspect,
has taken a toll on a society already traumatized by Ebola’s sweep.
It denies communities a final farewell, and has led to standoffs with
the Dead Body Management teams who must pick up the dead even as the
living insist that the cause of death was measles, or stroke, or
malaria — anything but Ebola. “We take every body, and burn it,”
says Nelson Sayon, who works on one of the teams. Dealing with the
living is one of the most difficult aspects of his job, he says,
because he knows how important grieving can be.
“No
one gets their body back, not even the ashes, so there is nothing
physical left to mourn.” Monrovia’s mass cremations, which take
place in a rural area far on the outskirts of town, happen at night,
to minimize the impact on neighboring communities. For a while the
bodies were simply burned in a pile; now they are placed in
incinerators donated by an international NGO. There are so many that
it can sometimes take all night, says Sayon. In a country where
distrust between the people and the government runs deep, the mass
cremations have caused a deeper rift, says Kenneth Martu, a community
organizer from the Westpoint area of Monrovia. “In west Africa we
don’t cremate bodies at all. So when the government takes away our
bodies, and can’t even tell us if they died of Ebola or not, it
breeds resentment.” Liberians, he points out, are no strangers to
mass casualties: two civil wars, from 1989 to 1996 and 1999 to 2003,
saw nearly half a million die. “Even with mass. “Even with
mass graves, people can bring flowers. They know where to find the
dead. But here we don’t even know where the ashes are.” There are
exceptions to the cremation directive. If a family can get a signed
death certificate from the Ministry of Health stating that the cause
of death was not Ebola, they can take the body to a funeral parlor
for embalming and eventual burial. There are even dispensations for
those who do die of Ebola; under certain circumstances the dead can
be buried in a cemetery, if the Dead Body Management team conducts
the preliminary steps of laying the body six feet deep and soaking
the next four feet of earth with chlorine solution.
Burial
crews in Sierra Leone go on strike: Workers
charged with burying the bodies of Ebola victims in and around Sierra
Leone’s capital Freetown have gone on strike. The action has been
called over the alleged non-payment of a weekly risk allowance. One
of the workers, Tamba Nyandemoh, told Reuters:
“We have decided to stop working until they pay us our weekly risk
allowance.” The specialized teams who are striking say they bury
between 17 and 35 bodies a week and wear protective clothing to
remove and dispose of the corpses. “We have been stigmatized in our
communities, so let the government try to pay us our money.” One of
the burial team workers who asked to remain anonymous. Sierra Leone’s
deputy health minister Madina Rahman said the burial teams have been
paid through the end of September and were only awaiting payment for
this week.
WHO
says Ebola spread ‘unavoidable’ in Europe due to extensive travel
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2014/10/08/who-says-ebola-spread-unavoidable-in-europe-due-to-extensive-travel/
October
2014 – GENEVA -
The spread of Ebola in Europe is “unavoidable,” the World Health
Organization said shortly after the contraction of four new cases was
announced in Spain. “Such imported cases and similar events as have
happened in Spain will happen also in the future, most likely,” the
WHO European director Zsuzsanna Jakab told Reuters.
On Monday scientists predicted that there was a 75 percent chance
that Ebola would reach France by the end October and a 50 percent
chance for the UK. A new study warns there’s now more than a 75%
chance Ebola will reach France by end October, and a 50% chance
it will reach the UK before the end of October. The most
dangerous contributor to the spread is the behavior of the virus. Its
symptoms catch people unawares and normally follow a 21-day
incubation period, during which there’s literally no visible sign
the person has contracted Ebola. This is further complicated by
the EU’s free movement system – one can literally infect anyone
they come into contact with in the space of a few days if they were
to drive or fly from one country to another.
“It
is quite unavoidable … that such incidents will happen in the
future because of the extensive travel both from Europe to the
affected countries and the other way around,” Jakab said. WHO has
so far placed no restrictions on flights to the worst-affected
countries. While British Airways and Emirates are no longer flying
there, Air France has only suspended flights to Sierra Leone – not
Liberia, Guinea or Nigeria (though air crews were recently offered
the option to refuse flying to those destinations). Additionally,
patients who have contacted the disease in West Africa have been
repatriated for treatment – such as the two missionaries who died
in September in Spain – one of whom infected a 44-year-old Spanish
nurse who was diagnosed on Monday.
Health officials in Madrid
said on Tuesday that three more people are in hospital on suspicion
of contracting Ebola after the diagnosis of the nurse. The nurse is
now being treated with a drip using antibodies from those previously
infected with the virus. Approximately 22 people who have been in
contact with the woman, dubbed by media the “Spanish Ebola nurse,”
have been identified and are being monitored, Madrid health officials
told reporters Tuesday. However, WHO has stated that the continent is
well prepared to control the disease. “It will happen,” she said.
“But the most important thing in our view is that Europe is still
at low risk and that the western part of the European region
particularly is the best prepared in the world to respond to viral
hemorrhagic fevers including Ebola,” Jakab said.
-RT
Who’s
going to pay? The average cost to treat an Ebola patient could run as
high as half a million dollars
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2014/10/08/whos-going-to-pay-the-average-cost-to-treat-an-ebola-patient-could-run-as-high-as-half-a-million-dollars/
October
2014 – HEALTH - Caring
for Thomas Eric Duncan, the Dallas Ebola patient, may cost as much as
$500,000, a bill that his hospital is unlikely to ever collect.
Duncan is in critical condition at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital
Dallas, where he has been isolated since Sept. 28. He’s on a
ventilator, has been given an experimental medicine and is receiving
kidney dialysis, a hospital spokeswoman said Tuesday. His treatment
probably includes fluids replacement, blood transfusions and drugs to
maintain blood pressure. There’s also the cost of security,
disposing of Ebola-contaminated trash and equipment to protect
caregivers. The bill may eventually total $500,000 including indirect
costs such as the disruption to other areas of hospital care, said
Dan Mendelson, chief executive officer of Avalere Health, a
Washington consulting firm. Duncan’s care probably costs $18,000 to
$24,000 a day, said Gerard Anderson, a health policy professor at
Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Duncan
has been in isolation in the hospital for nine days so far. “If
they recognize that he has no money they will clearly just write it
off as charity care,” Anderson said in a telephone interview.
Duncan came to the United States from Liberia on Sept. 20 on a
tourist visa. He has no health insurance to pay for his care, said
civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, who traveled to Dallas at the
request of Duncan’s mother. Spokesmen for Texas Health Presbyterian
and for the Liberian embassy in Washington declined to discuss who
will pay for Duncan’s care. “It’s too early to make a decision
about payment of bills; he is in critical condition,” Gabriel
Williams, a Liberian Embassy spokesman, said in a phone interview.
“The focus is on his health.” Duncan is the first case of Ebola
diagnosed in the United States. Emory University Hospital in Atlanta
and Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha have also treated Ebola
patients, three of whom have been released after recovering. A fourth
patient is under care in Omaha and a fifth in Atlanta. Neither of the
hospitals would comment on the cost of treating those patients. Kent
Brantly, the first person to be transported from Liberia to the
United States for care, was covered under health insurance provided
by his charity, Samaritan’s Purse, said Todd Shearer, a spokesman
for the group. Two other aid workers, Nancy Writebol and Rick Sacra,
went to Liberia with the Charlotte, N.C.-based missionary group SIM.
They are covered by the group’s health and workers’ compensation
insurance plans, and SIM plans to pay their $25,000 deductibles, said
George Salloum, the group’s vice president for finance and
operations.
Writebol’s
evacuation from Liberia was covered in full by one of SIM’s
insurance carriers, Aetna Inc., he said. He’s still waiting for
bills from other carriers, whom he declined to name, and said he
didn’t know what the hospital care cost. “The hospitals have not
disclosed that information to us,” Salloum said in a phone
interview. “I’m very anxious to find out, personally, just
wondering what they’re charging for that kind of care.” Emory and
Nebraska are known for their expertise in exotic diseases and careful
isolation of infectious patients. Texas Health Presbyterian doesn’t
not have that reputation, but is ranked the fifth-best hospital in
the Dallas-Fort Worth region by U.S. News and World Report. Duncan
arrived there in an ambulance on Sept. 28, after being initially sent
home two days earlier from the emergency room with antibiotics.
Anderson, a former federal health official, said that as a foreign
citizen Duncan wouldn’t be eligible for any U.S. health programs
such as Medicaid, for low income people. Texas hospitals charge
$8,176 per day on average for treatment of viral illnesses, including
exotic diseases such as West Nile virus and Dengue fever, said Andrew
Fitch, a health-care pricing expert at NerdWallet, a San
Francisco-based company that provides consumer finance and health
data. That figure “is actually probably on the low end” for
Ebola, Fitch said in a phone interview. “The isolation ward would
bump up the charge a lot.” –
Spanish
officials mystified how nurse contracted Ebola – ‘we followed
protocols, she was in a full body suit’
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2014/10/08/spanish-officials-mystified-how-nurse-contracted-ebola-we-followed-protocols-she-was-in-a-full-body-suit/
October
2014 – SPAIN – The
director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says
details on the measures to screen air passengers for Ebola, mentioned
Monday by President Obama, will be announced this week. Thomas
Frieden, in an interview with All Things Considered, says he’s
“confident that you’ll hear about it this week. When we tell you
about it this week, we’ll tell you when we’ll start,” Frieden
says. Obama said Monday that the U.S. would step up screening for
travelers with the disease at airports in the United States and West
Africa. The CDC director’s remarks come as doctors say a man being
treated in Dallas for Ebola remains in critical condition but has
stabilized somewhat, and that he is receiving an experimental drug.
And, in Spain, a nurse who cared for an Ebola patient there has
tested positive for the disease — the first known instance of a
transmission of the virus outside West Africa. Texas Health
Presbyterian Hospital announced Monday that Thomas Eric Duncan, who
apparently contracted Ebola in Liberia before coming to the U.S., is
being treated with brincidofovir, an oral medicine developed by
Chimerix Inc. North Carolina-based Chimerix announced Monday that
“brincidofovir” has been provided for potential use in patients
with Ebola Virus Disease. These requests were made by treating
physicians. “Chimerix is working closely with the FDA to finalize a
clinical trial protocol early this week to assess the safety,
tolerability, and efficacy of brincidofovir in patients who are
confirmed to have an infection with the Ebola virus,” the company
said.
Duncan
began receiving the drug Saturday, according to a spokeswoman for
Texas Health Resources, which operates the hospital where Duncan is
receiving care. Another patient, Ashoka Mukpo, a freelance cameraman
who contracted the disease in West Africa and is being treated in
Nebraska, is also receiving the experimental drug. In Madrid, the
health of the 40-year-old nurse with Ebola is said to have
stabilized. Health officials said the woman, who has not been
identified, had no symptoms besides a fever, according to The
Associated Press.
The infected nurse had assisted in the treatment of a 75-year-old
Spanish priest who had been flown from Liberia. The priest died after
being treated with the experimental Ebola medicine ZMapp, the AP
says. NPR’s Lauren Frayer reports that a few months ago, Spanish
officials were touting the country’s ability to handle Ebola
patients. “But last night, the tone abruptly changed,” Lauren
reports on Morning Edition. Spanish Health Minister Ana Mato urged
the country to remain calm. “We followed the protocol and we don’t
know how she got infected,” Mato told a news conference. We know
she entered the infected priest’s room twice — once to treat him
and once after he died to collect some of his things,” said Dr.
Antonio Alemany, a health official from the regional government of
Madrid. “As far as we know, she was wearing a protective suit the
whole time and didn’t have any accidental contact with him.”
Alemany
said the nurse went on vacation for a week after treating the priest,
but he didn’t say where. He said that all of the woman’s
co-workers were being monitored twice a day for fever. The World
Health Organization issued a statement saying: “Spanish authorities
are conducting an intensive investigation of this case, in order to
determine the mode of transmission and to trace those who have been
in contact with the health care worker. WHO is ready to provide
support to Spain, as and if required.” The Guardian reports that
health officials in Madrid have blamed substandard equipment and “a
failure to follow protocol” for the nurse’s infection. –NPR
See also: Ebola:Evolution of an epidemic (INTERACTIVE MAP)
The gap between medical knowledge and the political response. Definitely worth watching despite the fact this comes from the Alex Jones show – without Alex Jones
Governments
Continue To Censor Information About Ebola
The gap between medical knowledge and the political response. Definitely worth watching despite the fact this comes from the Alex Jones show – without Alex Jones
Governments
Continue To Censor Information About Ebola
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