Health and Wellness : EBOLA OUT BREAK SPREADS!

New York tests doctor who was in West Africa for Ebola



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© REUTERS/Mike Segar An exterior view of Bellevue Hospital in New York City, October 23, 2014.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A physician with Doctors without Borders who returned from West Africa recently and developed potential symptoms was being tested for Ebola at a New York City hospital, health officials said on Thursday, setting off fresh fears about the spread of the virus.
The doctor was identified as Craig Spencer, who was working for the humanitarian organisation in Guinea, one of three West African nations hardest hit by Ebola.
Spencer, 33, developed a fever and gastrointestinal symptoms and notified Doctors Without Borders on Thursday morning, the organisation said in a statement.
City health officials were alerted, and Spencer was transported from his Manhattan apartment by a specially trained team wearing protective gear, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said in a statement.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said test results on the doctor would be made public, possibly late on Thursday evening.
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© REUTERS/Brendan McDermid Members of the New York City Department of Health speak to neighbors of a Health Care worker who is suspected to have Ebola in in the Harlem section of New York, October 23, 2014.
"It is our understanding very few people were in direct contact with him," de Blasio said at a news conference. "Every protocol has been followed."
The health department said it was tracing all of the patient's contacts to identify anyone who may be at potential risk.
Spencer was being treated at Bellevue Hospital, the health department said. The historic city hospital is one of the eight in New York state designated this month as part of an Ebola preparedness plan.
Spencer's Facebook page, which included a photo of him clad in protective gear, said he went to Guinea around Sept. 18 and then flew to Brussels on Oct. 16.
He has specialised in international emergency medicine at Columbia University-New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York City since 2011, according to his profile on the LinkedIn career website.
Columbia in a statement said he has not been to work nor seen any patients since his return. It called him "a dedicated humanitarian ... who went to an area of medical crisis to help a desperately underserved population."
APARTMENT SEALED OFF
Americans' fears about Ebola, which has killed nearly 4,900 people, largely in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, have mounted since the first person diagnosed with it in the United States, a Liberian man who had flown to Texas, was hospitalized in Dallas last month.
The man, Thomas Eric Duncan, died on Oct. 8, and two nurses who treated him became infected with the virus. A task force has been set up following missteps in handling the case.
Before Spencer was admitted between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. local time to Bellevue, the staff spent about three hours shutting off certain areas to isolate the seventh-floor ward where he would be kept, one nurse aide said.
"Anyone would be scared to be next door to a patient. But if we do it the right way there's nothing to be scared of," said the aide, Kirk Elphage.
A woman at the Bellevue information desk identified herself to a staff member as the patient's fianceé. She appeared very agitated and declined to comment.
Spencer's apartment in Manhattan's Harlem neighbourhood was sealed off but the rest of the six-story brick building remained open to residents, health officials said.
Three police officers stood outside. Neighbours stopped to ask what was going on but did not appear visibly concerned.
Another employee at Bellevue said the hospital's staff had been trained and was well prepared for the possible case.
"Everybody's calm, said Maria Delgado, 60, a clerk with the radiology department. "To be quite honest, you really don't know who walks in there anyway."
News of the latest potential Ebola case in the United States caused stocks to pare gains late in the trading session.
"It threw a little scare into the market," said Michael James, managing director of equity trading at Wedbush Securities in Los Angeles.
The virus is spread through direct contact with bodily fluids from an infected person and is not airborne.
The United States this week began requiring travellers coming from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea to enter through one of five airports conducting increased screening for the virus. It also is directing those travellers to check in with health officials every day and report their temperatures and any Ebola symptoms for 21 days.
(Additional reporting by Barbara Goldberg, Sebastien Malo, Jonathan Allen and Laila Kearney; Editing by Sandra





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I just read that this doctors has tested positive for the Ebola virus.
 
I just read that this doctors has tested positive for the Ebola virus.



Yes, he knew he had it. His girlfriend knew he was sick. This is how this disease will spread here





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U.S. personnel go overseas to ‘take the fight’ to Ebola

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© The Washington Post

Hundreds of Americans have flown to Liberia in the past few days. Thousands more are on the way.
This Ebola corps is a collection of doctors, nurses, scientists, soldiers, aviators, technicians, mechanics and engineers. Many are volunteers with nonprofit organizations or the government, including uniformed doctors and nurses from the little-known U.S. Public Health Service. Most are military personnel, snapping a salute when are assigned to their mission — “Operation United Assistance.” It does not qualify for combat pay, only hardship-duty incentive pay, which is about $5 a day — before taxes.
“We’re going over there to take the fight to the enemy,” said Sgt. Maj. John Kolodgy of the 2nd battalion of the 501st Aviation Regiment, stationed in Fort Bliss, which is sending 85 soldiers this weekend to Liberia to provide airlift capability. “In this situation the enemy is Ebola and the spread of Ebola in Africa.”
The “Iron Knights” from Fort Bliss, in El Paso, will join hundreds of soldiers from the 101st Airborne who departed for Liberia in flights from Kentucky’s Fort Campbell on Thursday and Saturday. The U.S. military presence in West Africa is expected to grow to more than 900 troops by Sunday, a number that will climb to 3,900 in coming weeks.
Global health officials have a plan to bring Ebola victims out of their homes, where they can easily spread the virus, and treat them in health facilities. The 101st Airborne officially took command Saturday of the effort to build 17 Ebola treatment units (ETUs) in Liberia with 100 beds each.
For the military, this is an unusual mission. Past humanitarian efforts have involved events that have already occurred, such as hurricanes, typhoons and earthquakes, but this crisis is still developing, generated by a pathogen that is dynamic and unpredictable.
The U.S. military is deploying primarily to Liberia, though the U.S. civilian operations include Guinea, Sierra Leone and other nations in West Africa. President Obama announced Sept. 16 that the military would provide support to the civilian-run effort that had failed to keep the epidemic from growing exponentially. The question now is whether this more muscular response is too little too late.
The outbreak on Saturday officially topped 10,000 cases — 10,141 confirmed or suspected cases and 4,922 deaths, according to the World Health Organization. Those are only the official numbers; the affected region includes rural areas and forested regions where disease surveillance has been minimal. The virus has now spread to Mali, where an infected 2-year-old girl who traveled from Guinea with her grandmother died Friday. (A small, unrelated outbreak of Ebola is underway in Congo, which has more experience fighting the disease.)
The WHO said this past week that there is no evidence the infection rate is dropping. A report in the Lancet medical journal said, based on a mathematical model of the outbreak in Liberia, that the U.S. military’s plans to create 1,700 new beds for Ebola patients is inadequate and that there is a “rapidly closing window of opportunity for controlling the outbreak and averting a catastrophic toll.”
‘I’m not afraid of it’
U.S. military personnel will construct ETUs and fly cargo across Liberia but will not directly treat Ebola patients or come into contact with them. That is a point stressed by the Pentagon in trying to assuage the concerns of military families.
Instead, volunteer health-care workers will staff the 17 ETUs, which will not all be completed until December, a Pentagon spokeswoman said. The U.S. Agency for International Development, which is coordinating the overall effort, said late this week that 3,700 people from around the world had volunteered online to serve in West Africa. But it is unclear how many will make it through the vetting process, which USAID said is being handled by organizations such as the International Medical Corps, Save the Children, the International Organization for Migration and the International Rescue Committee.
A potential complication in recruiting health-care workers to fight Ebola arose Friday when the states of New York, New Jersey and Illinois announced they will quarantine for 21 days travelers from West Africa who have directly dealt with Ebola patients.
A nurse, Kaci Hickox of Doctors Without Borders, was immediately detained Friday in New Jersey and quarantined in a hospital against her will. She has no Ebola symptoms, has tested negative for Ebola and is angry about her treatment, writing in the Dallas Morning News, “This is not a situation I would wish on anyone, and I am scared for those who will follow me.”
A key to attracting volunteers has been the promise that they will be given top-flight medical treatment if they get sick. To that end, the U.S. military is completing a 25-bed field hospital near the airport in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, expected open the first week of November.
It will be staffed by members of the Public Health Service, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. It is one of the seven uniformed services; members receive military pay and benefits, and their uniforms look like those of the Coast Guard, only with PHS insignia. The service’s officers fought yellow fever, cholera and plague in the early years of the 20th century and examined immigrants at Ellis Island. In recent years, they have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
About 65 PHS officers are scheduled to arrive in Monrovia this coming week and could stay for up to 60 days. They were handpicked for the mission and had the option of declining. But no one who was asked to go said no, according to an HHS spokeswoman.
“I’m respectful of the pathogen, but I’m not afraid of it,” said Capt. Calvin Edwards, 51, who will oversee the PHS team in Liberia. “It doesn’t hop from person to person. It requires contact with bodily fluid.”
Edwards works full time for the Food and Drug Administration in Harrisburg, Pa., overseeing food safety inspections. Married with four children, he lives in Chambersburg, Pa., and left for training in Alabama on Oct. 19, his 29th wedding anniversary. He bought his wife a dozen roses before he left and took the family out for dinner at the LongHorn Steakhouse.
Edwards said he is bringing the same New Testament he has brought on previous deployments, as well as a foam pillow that will remind him of home. To relax, he said, he will try to summon the sense memories of his new hobby, beekeeping.
He will close his eyes in Liberia and imagine the smell of wax in the hive, and the buzzing of the bees.
The field hospital where he will work is a series of domed structures lined up on a campus the size of a football field. The hospital will have air conditioning, because U.S. medical staffers will be working in stifling-hot personal protective equipment. “When you are in full PPE, it’s like 90 to 100 degrees,” said Rear Adm. Scott Giberson, the acting deputy surgeon general, who is already in Monrovia. “Shift work is exhausting.”
Cmdr. Anthony Tranchita, the head of a four-member team of behavioral-health specialists from the PHS, said he is bringing photos of his wife, 4-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter, plus a photo of a favorite spot in North Dakota where he and his father hunted this fall. It is a wooded area on the edge of an open field. It had just rained, and Tranchita had captured the soft glimmer of a rainbow.
He has mixed feelings about the mission. He is fulfilling an obligation, he said, “but there’s also some of that fear, some of that, ‘Wow, what is this going to be like?’ ”
Lt. Cmdr. Greg Raczniak, 40, who will be one of the doctors at the field hospital, is a clinician for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He has been in West Africa before and likes the cuisine there. He is thinking about rice with sauce, plantains with ginger, roasted chicken. He said his wife, a parasitologist, supports the mission.
“She wishes she could take off law school to come with me,” Raczniak said. “This is what I’m trained to do. This is the life my wife and I have chosen.”
‘You have to stay positive’
Military personnel are flying to Liberia from places such as Forts Campbell, Bliss, Hood, Carson and Benning, and the Aberdeen Proving Ground. Many do not know when, exactly, they will be airborne, or when they will return home, though they have been told they should expect a deployment lasting nine to 12 months.
Sgt. Jasmine Holmes, 24, of the 36th Engineer Brigade based at Fort Hood, is making the journey in the coming weeks and has taught herself how to prepare mentally: “You’ll come back soon — safe, healthy. It’s not going to last long. Those are the kinds of things you have to put in your head. You have to stay positive. You’re going to a country you’ve never seen before. It’s going to be a life experience.”
The military is supporting the hundreds of American civilians who have been fighting the Ebola outbreak for months in West Africa. They range from epidemiologists from the CDC to specialists in emergency logistics from the U.S. Forest Service.
Greg Thorne, the deputy team leader for the CDC in Liberia, wrote to Peace Corps Director Carrie Hessler-Radelet this past week, thanking the agency for smoothing the path for American public health workers in the county of Gbarpolu.
“We, the CDC team members, entered Gbarpolu as strangers,” Thorne wrote. “Carried by community goodwill . . . and connected by our Peace Corps colleague’s extensive local network, we were able to rapidly integrate with the county leadership and earn the trust necessary for them to openly discuss challenges and take our suggestions to heart.”
The Peace Corps staffers have relationships with local leaders, police officers, religious officials and fellow teachers. They know the local English dialects and have been interpreting for CDC workers and helping them understand local customs.
The Liberian civil war took away the country’s political infrastructure, said Samuel Sampson, a Liberian and the Peace Corps’s program manager for secondary education. He said credibility and political clout lie primarily with local people in each county.
“You need to know these people,” Sampson said. “You need to know the gathering spots.”
George Karneh, another Liberian working with the Peace Corps, has also guided CDC teams into rural areas. “For me, I look at Ebola as a war,” Karneh said. “I look at it as an important mission, a lifesaving one. It’s going to be written in history that, once upon a time, we had this awful thing . . . and people were able to stand and fight it along with the CDC.”
The virus is just one of the many challenges for those flying into West Africa. Mosquitoes and malaria are another. Just getting around can be a challenge. The roads can be treacherous, particularly in the rainy season.
Sometimes there is no road, only a canoe. That is what CDC disease detective Katie Curran, 33, of Atlanta discovered in rural Sierra Leone. She has been making arduous trips into the bush to meet with village leaders and discuss ways to contain the outbreak. One day recently, she traveled with a team of health-care workers to a remote village that could be accessed only by crossing a river in a one-person dugout canoe. At the village they met the chief, who was wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers cap.
To get to the next village they had to cross another river, this time in a larger dugout.
At the end of a long working day, she invariably eats dinner in her guesthouse. “We don’t have reliable Internet,” Curran said. “We don’t have reliable power. We don’t have reliable water. We have to travel very long distances on bumpy roads.”
She is making an observation, not complaining. She said she is enjoying the experience and is in awe of her colleagues. And it is simply not true, she said, that everyone in West Africa is dying of Ebola.
“It’s not as scary as you think,” Curran said. “I think it’s scarier in the U.S. watching the news.”
Brady Dennis and Alice Crites contributed




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Nurse Under Ebola Quarantine Hires Civil Rights Lawyer

Carly Schwartz8 hrs ago
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© University of Texas at Arlington
Kaci Hickox, the nurse currently being held in quarantine at Newark University Hospital despite testing negative for Ebola, has hired a prominent civil rights attorney to help get her out of isolation.
The lawyer, Norman Siegel, told the New York Times on Sunday that Hickox's quarantine order has "raised substantial civil liberties issues." Meanwhile, the ACLU of New Jersey released a statement demanding Gov. Chris Christie (R) provide more information on the circumstances surrounding his new policy calling for a mandatory 21-day quarantine of any health worker returning home from West Africa who came into contact with Ebola patients.
"Ebola is a public health issue and the government’s response should be driven by science and facts and not by fear. We must treat our medical workers who put their lives at risk, and are the only ones who can contain this epidemic, with compassion and not like criminals," Udi Ofer, executive director of New Jersey's ACLU, said in a statement, adding that the organization had "serious constitutional concerns about the state abusing its powers."
Hickox, a nurse who had been treating Ebola victims in Sierra Leone, landed at Newark Liberty Airport Friday night just hours after Christie's abrupt announcement about the mandatory quarantine, made in conjunction with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D). In an op-ed published in the Dallas Morning News Saturday, Hickox described the "emotionally exhausting" ordeal she endured following her arrival, during which she was held in a quarantine office for six hours and only given a granola bar and water while officials refused to answer her questions.
"I was tired, hungry and confused, but I tried to remain calm," she wrote. "My temperature was taken using a forehead scanner and it read a temperature of 98."
Hickox later registered a temperature of 101 (which she said was a result of being flushed and upset), and she was subsequently put into quarantine at Newark University Hospital, where she tested negative for Ebola but is still being held. She spoke to CNN Sunday from her medical tent, which she says has a portable toilet but no shower, no television and weak cell phone reception.
Two high-ranking federal officials criticized the quarantine policy on Sunday, arguing that it will deter medical professionals and aid workers from visiting Ebola-ravaged West Africa to help combat the spread of the fatal disease. Ebola can only be transmitted through contacting bodily fluids of patients exhibiting symptoms, and under the most recent federal guidelines, travelers returning home from West Africa must have their temperature taken twice a day for three weeks -- the amount of time it takes the virus to develop in the body after exposure.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Sunday that not only do aggressive quarantines of asymptomatic health workers contradict science, but such measures could ultimately worsen Ebola's impact in Africa. "Let’s not forget the best way to stop this epidemic and protect America is to stop it in Africa, and you can really help stopping it in Africa if we have our people, our heroes, the health care workers, go there and help us to protect America," he told ABC. "If you put everyone in one basket, even people who are clearly no threat, then we have the problem of the disincentive of people that we need."
United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power said that instead of disenfranchising aid workers, "we need to make sure they are treated like conquering heroes."
The New York Times reported Sunday that the White House is also pressuring Christie and Cuomo to reverse the mandatory quarantine. In the mean time, Illinois and Florida have adopted similar measures.
Christie staunchly defended the policy in an interview with Fox News on Sunday. "The government's job is to protect safety and health of our citizens," he said. "I have no second thoughts about it." Cuomo echoed Christie's sentiments during a radio interview on Sunday.
The governors announced the quarantine rule one day after New York City doctor Craig Spencer, who had recently returned from treating Ebola patients in Guinea, tested positive for the disease. He is the fourth person to have been diagnosed with Ebola in the United States.
In a press release Saturday, Doctors Without Borders, the Nobel Prize-winning organization that both Spencer and Hickox volunteered for, spoke out about the circumstances surrounding Hickox's quarantine. "Doctors Without Borders is very concerned about the conditions and uncertainty she is facing," it read. "While measures to protect public health are of paramount importance, they must be balanced against the rights of health workers."
The ACLU has not announced whether it will legally challenge the states' authority to quarantine individuals who exhibit no symptoms and test negative for Ebola, but Ofer encouraged lawmakers to base their decisions in science.
"This is a challenging time for New Jersey, but decisions must be made based on sound medicine, and not on fear," she said in a statement. "Governor Christie must provide more information to the public about how the state came to the conclusion that mandatory quarantine of our healthcare workers was medically necessary."


This is how it's going to spread. Someone will think they have a right to be 'Typhoid Mary'.



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Ebola Puts Ghana’s Bush Meat Traders Out of Work

ACCRA, Ghana— Yaa Kyerewaa cuts a lonely figure beside a pile of animal parts: the jaws of a giant rodent, the hooves of wild pigs, snails. This bush meat was once considered a delicacy and fetched premium prices. But Ebola has frightened away customers and Kyerewaa hasn’t sold anything in days.

Accra’s busy Agbogbloshie market used to have several bush meat vendors but now she is the only one.


http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1048939-ebola-puts-ghanas-bush-meat-traders-out-of-work/

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(AP Photo/Christian Thompson)

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