A second person, who was a caretaker in the Dallas hospital for Duncan – Patient 0 – has now tested positive for Ebola in Dallas. The nurse flew the day before her symptoms became apparent from Cleveland to Dallas. Those passengers who were unlucky enough to be her travel buddies went to the four winds and on it goes. If you flew on Frontier Airlines flight 1143 Cleveland to Dallas/Fort Worth, for God’s sake get to a hospital and get checked and fast. Dr. Tom Frieden, head of the CDC, should resign immediately for overseeing what could be a modern-day Captain Trips event in the US.
The nurses who cared for Duncan before he died and all the medical staff are terrified and pissed. I don’t blame them. When I read this morning how he was handled, it sent a long, cold shudder down my spine that just kept on going. The kind that makes you go weak in the knees and elicits an ardent prayer that somehow this plague is contained before we have mass graves and incinerations to deal with.
Excerpts from CBS Houston:
A Liberian Ebola patient was left in an open area of a Dallas emergency room for hours, and nurses treating him worked without proper protective gear and faced constantly changing protocols, according to a statement released by the nation’s largest nurses’ union.
[…]
Deborah Burger of National Nurses United, who convened a conference call with reporters to relay what she said were concerns of nurses at the hospital, said they were forced to use medical tape to secure openings in their flimsy garments and worried that their necks and heads were exposed as they cared for Duncan.
RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of Nurses United, said the statement came from “several” and “a few” nurses, but she refused repeated inquiries to state how many. She said the organization had vetted the claims, and that the nurses cited were in a position to know what had occurred at the hospital. She did not specify whether they were among the nurses caring for Duncan.
The nurses allege that his lab samples were allowed to travel through the hospital’s pneumatic tubes, possibly risking contaminating of the specimen-delivery system. They also said that hazardous waste was allowed to pile up to the ceiling.
And yet the bullcrap and lying flow like blood all over America covering official’s behinds as they claim there is nothing to worry about… don’t panic… calm down… nothing to see here as they prepare for the real possibility of closing another set of eyes and pulling the covers over another body, with more on the way.
The nurses and doctors had to punt. They weren’t ever trained for pandemic procedures evidently and the handling of Duncan was a dark comedy of errors:
The nurses’ statement said they had to “interact with Mr. Duncan with whatever protective equipment was available,” even as he produced “a lot of contagious fluids.” Duncan’s medical records underscore that concern. They also say nurses treating Duncan were also caring for other patients in the hospital and that, in the face of constantly shifting guidelines, they were allowed to follow whichever ones they chose.
When Ebola was suspected but unconfirmed, a doctor wrote that use of disposable shoe covers should also be considered. At that point, by all protocols, shoe covers should have been mandatory to prevent anyone from tracking contagious body fluids around the hospital.
The CDC has not just dropped the ball here, they can’t even find it with both hands and a flashlight:
Nurses at the Dallas hospital where the first patient died of Ebola in the US insisted there were no protocols in place for dealing with the virus – and claimed that no hospital in the country was prepared to deal with the deadly virus.
The director of the National Nurses Union RoseAnn DeMoro directly contradicted the CDC’s initial claim that a breach in protocol lead to the infection of Nina Pham as she treated Thomas Eric Duncan at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas.
She said: ‘Our nurses are not protected, they’re not prepared to handle Ebola or any other pandemics.’
‘The protocols that should have been in place in Dallas were not in place and are not in place anywhere in the United States, as far as we can tell.’
The warnings became even more poignant after it was revealed that a second female nurse who treated Duncan has been diagnosed with the deadly infection.
The number of people who now have come into contact with other individuals who are infected is staggering. The horse is out of the barn and America is beginning to realize that death comes to us all – for some, sooner than others.
There is no excuse when a deadly contagion is being treated to let bloody linen and waste pile up. There is no excuse for processing blood samples that are in the same machines as the general populace. There is no excuse for not wearing protective gear and using decontamination procedures to protect the healthcare professionals. There is no excuse for not banning flights from infected countries. There is no excuse for introducing a plague into the American mainstream that could kill millions – Mr. President, you have no excuses left.
SOURCE: NOISYROOM
Terresa Monroe-Hamilton
Editor/Author
Terresa Monroe-Hamilton is a Libertarian and she writes at NoisyRoom.net. NoisyRoom is a Conservative blog that focuses on political and national issues of interest to the American public.