Ebola and other Epidemics, Inadequate Healthcare Threatens Millions

[CountDeMoney]

A little common sense goes a long way.

So does Ebola.  :panic:

[garbon]

A little common sense goes a long way.

So does Ebola.  :panic:

[Jacob]

A little common sense goes a long way.

So does Ebola.  :panic:

[Admiral Yi]

Jail time for the dude who said he has Ebola would be way too much.

[Josephus]

Jail time for the dude who said he has Ebola would be way too much.

Disagree. At this point it's like yelling fire in a crowded theatre.

Death penalty is the better option.

[Eddie Teach]

Jail time for the dude who said he has Ebola would be way too much.

Solitary confinement for a couple weeks.

[Admiral Yi]

Disagree. At this point it's like yelling fire in a crowded theatre.

Death penalty is the better option.

If the crew had asked him if he had Ebola and he had said yes i sure do, then I could see it.  He was making a joke and he said as much.  If we're going to criminalize anything which makes people overreact we need to start jailing people who sneeze too.

[Josephus]

It's no different than the post 9-11 hysteria and someone making a bomb joke on a plane.

[LaCroix]

It's no different than the post 9-11 hysteria and someone making a bomb joke on a plane.

9/11 was essentially national trauma. it made more sense for society to react sensitively to those jokes. ebola is nothing in the US. it would be different if we were experiencing something similar to liberia, but we're not.

[jimmy olsen]

Articles of surrender are being drafted as we speak. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/11/world/africa/officials-admit-a-defeat-by-ebola-in-sierra-leone.html?referrer=&_r=0

Officials Admit a 'Defeat' by Ebola in Sierra Leone

By ADAM NOSSITEROCT. 10, 2014

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone — Acknowledging a major "defeat" in the fight against Ebola, international health officials battling the epidemic in Sierra Leone approved plans on Friday to help families tend to patients at home, recognizing that they are overwhelmed and have little chance of getting enough treatment beds in place quickly to meet the surging need.

The decision signifies a significant shift in the struggle against the rampaging disease. Officials said they would begin distributing painkillers, rehydrating solution and gloves to hundreds of Ebola-afflicted households in Sierra Leone, contending that the aid arriving here was not fast or extensive enough to keep up with an outbreak that doubles in size every month or so.

"It's basically admitting defeat," said Dr. Peter H. Kilmarx, the leader of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's team in Sierra Leone, adding that it was "now national policy that we should take care of these people at home."

"For the clinicians it's admitting failure, but we are responding to the need," Dr. Kilmarx said. "There are hundreds of people with Ebola that we are not able to bring into a facility."

The effort to prop up a family's attempts to care for ailing relatives at home does not mean that officials have abandoned plans to increase the number of beds in hospitals and clinics. But before the beds can be added and doctors can be trained, experts warn, the epidemic will continue to grow.

C.D.C. officials acknowledged that the risks of dying from the disease and passing it to loved ones at home were serious under the new policy — "You push some Tylenol to them, and back away," Dr. Kilmarx said, describing its obvious limits.

But many patients with Ebola are already dying slowly at home, untreated and with no place to go. There are 304 beds for Ebola patients in Sierra Leone now, but 1,148 are needed, the World Health Organization reported this week. So officials here said there was little choice but to try the new approach as well.

"For the first time, the nation is accepting the possibility of home care, out of necessity," said Jonathan Mermin, another C.D.C. official and physician here. "It is a policy out of necessity."

Faced with similar circumstances in neighboring Liberia, where even more people are dying from the disease, the American government said last month that it would ship 400,000 kits with gloves and disinfectant.

"The home kits are no substitute for getting people" to a treatment facility, said Sheldon Yett, the Unicef director for Liberia. "But the idea is to ensure that if somebody has to take care of somebody at home, they're able to do so."

More than 4,000 people have died from the outbreak in West Africa, but the United Nations funding appeal remains woefully short, with countries pledging only one-fourth of the $1 billion that the world body says it needs to contain the disease, the United Nations deputy secretary general, Jan Eliasson, told the General Assembly on Friday.

Britain has pledged to get an additional 400 beds into urban areas around Sierra Leone by sometime next month. More rudimentary holding centers for patients awaiting space in hospitals are planned by the government here. And promises of international aid have increased substantially since the outbreak was first identified in neighboring Guinea in March.

But on Friday, Sory Sesay, 2, lay face down on a bench at his home, an arm dangling, his eyes open, listless and apathetic.

What remained of his family was sitting immobilized on the front porch with him at their house in Waterloo, just outside Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital. All of them were sick: his father, who had already lost his wife and daughter; his 11 year-old brother; and a 16-year-old neighbor, whose mother had already died.

They had no painkillers, no rehydrating solution, and only a sack of rice to eat.

"The government has not yet come in to assist us," said Sheka Dumbuya, the local community leader. "Mr. Sesay is actually traumatized. We took them the day before yesterday to the health center, but there is no space for them."

In a sign of the difficulties confronting the growing epidemic here, Stephen Gaojia, the head of the government agency overseeing the Ebola response here, angrily denied that the policy to help ailing families at home had been adopted. C.D.C. officials said he left the meeting before the vote took place.

"We are not so desperate as to go to that level right now," Mr. Gaojia said.

An official with the World Health Organization in Sierra Leone, Dr. Zabulon Yoti, said that the decision on Friday would help people with no other options. "We support the families," he said. "They should have some basic things as they are struggling" to take care of their families.

Down the hilly road from Mr. Sesay's house, at the local health center in Waterloo, people with Ebola-like symptoms drifted in to be registered, but most of them "sneak away and go home" because there are no services for them, said Alhassan Bangura, a health worker.

A holding center is being set up — the government is banking on them all over the country — but in some places these facilities are little more than death traps, offering scant treatment or hope for the people inside.

Nobody knows exactly how many have died from Ebola in this country. The government figure of 900 to 1,000 is thought by international officials to be a serious underestimation. Even some senior government figures have suggested it is untruthful, and the situation in holding centers and cemeteries suggests the government number is far from reality.

A man arrived at the Waterloo health center on Friday, clutching his seriously ill 4-year-old daughter. He had ridden from a town more than 100 miles away in a taxi shared with others — possibly exposing them to the virus — and he was exhibiting Ebola symptoms. The girl, her eyes open, was rigid in his arms. She had high fever, diarrhea and had vomited — classic symptoms.

A nurse shouted angrily at the man from a few feet away, close enough to be infected: "Are you trying to spread the virus?"

He was too ill to respond.

On the porch of the center lay a corpse, a man dead shortly after arrival. Perpendicular to him lay a patient, still alive but rigid, motionless and prostrate. Inside the center, a few yards away and unprotected from them, dozens of patients had crowded in, seeking treatment for other illnesses.

In another section of Waterloo, burial team workers said they had collected 15 corpses in less than a week, and they carried away another on Friday, spraying it with chlorine as they left. The community chief denied that Ebola was present — health care workers at the clinic insisted it was — and attributed the deaths there to "witchcraft."

Aissata Kargbo sat at the edge of her bed in a darkened house off the dirt road, trembling and unable to speak. Her brother, trying to take care of her, said he had no medicine, that there was no space at any treatment center, and that even an ambulance that had come into the community had no room for her.

"When people are sick, you want to touch them," said the brother, Mohammed Kargbo. "Now, I cannot even touch her. It is a problem."

Somini Sengupta contributed reporting from the United Nations and Norimitsu Onishi from Monrovia, Liberia.

[Ed Anger]

I think my cold has mutated into Ebola. Please panic.

[Caliga]

Relax.

[Eddie Teach]

Relax.

Death comes for us all.

[CountDeMoney]

Relax.

Don't do it.

[DontSayBanana]

Relax.

Don't do it.

He's got a point.  After all, you might say dying young is a reasonable prediction.