Person tests positive for Ebola in NYC (4th person in US)

The Nigerian

The Realest Member of TheColi
Joined
Jun 23, 2012
Messages
11,230
Reputation
-5,500
Daps
16,528
Reppin
All The Way One Hunnid
In the first apparent case of Ebola transmission in the United States, a Texas hospital worker who treated an Ebola-stricken Liberian man has tested positive for the deadly virus.

The preliminary test result was announced early Sunday, four days after the death of Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan in Dallas.

The Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital worker reported “a low-grade fever” Friday, the Texas Department of State Health Services said in a statement. This person “was isolated and referred for testing.” The preliminary test result was received late Saturday.

“We knew a second case could be a reality, and we’ve been preparing for this possibility,” Texas Health Commissioner David Lakey said in a statement. “We are broadening our team in Dallas and working with extreme diligence to prevent further spread.”

Health officials are “deeply concerned” about the apparent case, said Thomas Frieden, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Clearly there was a breach in protocol. We have the ability to prevent the spread of Ebola by caring safely for patients,” he said in an interview Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Frieden also promised that protocols at the hospital would be reexamined to find out how the disease was apparently transmitted.

“Our team is intensively working with the hospital on both understanding what happened and to find other health-care workers who may be at risk and also making sure that protocols are followed in the care of this individual,” he said.

Health officials have already begun the contact tracing process, scrambling to identify and check in with anybody who recently made contact with the health-care worker. Those people “will be monitored based on the nature of their interactions and the potential they were exposed to the virus,” the state said.

It was unclear what role the worker had in caring for Duncan, who was the first person in the United States to be diagnosed with Ebola.

“That health-care worker is a heroic person who helped provide care to Mr. Duncan,” Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said. “We expected that it was possible that a second person could contract the virus. Contingency plans were put into place, and the hospital will discuss the way that the health-care worker followed those contingency plans, which will make our jobs in monitoring and containment much easier in this case than in the last one.”

The worker is in isolation and in stable condition, the hospital system said.

Anthony Fauci, acting head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, described the health worker as a woman during an interview on ABC’s “This Week.”

Daniel Varga, chief clinical officer for Texas Health Resources, which operates Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, said the worker had been under self-monitoring in recent days, which includes taking a temperature twice daily. When the health worker showed signs of a fever, the person notified the hospital, went directly there and immediately was admitted to an isolation room. Varga said the entire sequence of events took less than 90 minutes.

Despite transmission of the disease to the worker, who was reportedly wearing protective gear, Fauci said the system for preventing spread of the virus has long worked for organizations that frequently deal with Ebola patients, such as Doctors Without Borders.

“She was on voluntary self-monitoring,” Fauci said. “She found she got infected, and she immediately did what she was supposed to have done.”

“So even in this troublesome situation, the system is working,” Fauci added.

The CDC did not consider person to be “high risk,” Varga said. The person treated Duncan, the Ebola patient, after his second visit to the ER, on Sept. 28. The health worker was “following full CDC precautions,” including wearing a gown, gloves, a mask and a protective face shield.

“We’re very concerned,” Varga said, though he added that the hospital is “confident that the precautions that we have in place are protecting our health-care workers.”

The hospital has put its emergency room on “diversion,” which means that ambulances are not currently bringing patients to the ER, though patients already in the hospital are still being cared for.

“The system of monitoring, quarantine and isolation was established to protect those who cared for Mr. Duncan as well as the community at large by identifying any potential Ebola cases as early as possible and getting those individuals into treatment immediately,” Varga said.

Dallas officials deployed hazmat teams to decontaminate the entrance and common areas of an apartment complex in the 3700 block of Marquita Avenue where the health worker presumptively lives and the vehicle that the person used to travel to the hospital. That person’s home has been secured, and law enforcement officials are ensuring that no one enters. The city also knocked on doors and issued reverse 911 calls to homes in the area and distributed information sheets to homes in the area on Sunday morning.

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings also said that there is a pet in the worker’s apartment and that “we have a plan in place to take care of the pet,” which seems to have shown no signs of the disease. He said the hazmat team plans to enter the apartment later Sunday and decontaminate it.

“While this is obviously bad news, it is not news that should bring about panic,” Jenkins said.

Duncan traveled by plane from Liberia to Texas through Brussels and Dulles International Airport near Washington, though he wasn’t symptomatic at the time of his trip.

He became sick several days after arriving in Dallas and first sought treatment Sept. 25. But he was released by the hospital, despite saying that he had traveled from Liberia and that he had a fever and abdominal pain.

He was admitted to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital on Sept. 28, and the CDC confirmed Sept. 30 that he was infected with Ebola.

Ebola is contagious only if someone has symptoms. It can spread through bodily fluids or infected animals but not through the air.

The virus has killed more than 4,000 people and infected more than twice as many this year, according to the World Health Organization.

Months after the deadliest Ebola outbreak in history began ravaging West African countries, the virus has slowly begun to spread around the world.

On Monday, a Spanish sanitary technician who had treated an Ebola-stricken priest in Madrid tested positive for the virus, becoming the first case of Ebola transmission outside Africa.

The nursing assistant said she may have contracted the virus while removing her protective suit. Health-care workers at her hospital are now refusing to work, out of concern that the safety conditions there are inadequate.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...as-eric-duncan-has-tested-positive-for-ebola/
Let it spread. I'm Nigerian. I'm immune to Ebola's effects. I can only spread the virus.

Thank God it started in Texas. Couldn't think of a better state.
 

Poitier

My Words Law
Supporter
Joined
Jul 30, 2013
Messages
69,411
Reputation
15,469
Daps
246,399
Many in West Africa May Be Immune to Ebola Virus
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.SEPT. 5, 2014

Photo
06immune-tmagSF.jpg

The Ebola virus.CreditCenter for Disease Control, via Associated Press

Right now, there are about 1,800 survivors of the current West African outbreak, all of whom are now immune, of course. But there may be many thousands more.


OPEN GRAPHIC

Small studies of household contacts of Ebola victims show that some people are infected without ever falling ill — perhaps because of some unknown genetic advantage.

But many Africans who have never seen a victim also have antibodies.

It is possible that some get low doses of virus by eating infected monkeys or bats that are undercooked.

“If someone got just two or three or four virus particles, if it enters through the mucus membranes in the mouth, yes, it’s plausible,” said Thomas W. Geisbert, a hemorrhagic fever expert at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. “It would take a while for the virus to get going, and it’s a race with the clock. The immune system gets a chance to fight it off.”

Antibodies, Y-shaped proteins that attach to a virus and block it from invading cells, are the immune system’s first line of defense; the second line is white blood cells primed to recognize and digest the virus.

One of France’s leading Ebola experts says he believes that many rural villagers are “vaccinated” by eating fruit gnawed on by bats and contaminated with their saliva.

“We imagine that this is the main route,” said Dr. Eric M. Leroy, a veterinarian and virologist at the International Center for Medical Research in Franceville, Gabon. “But it is a hypothesis. We do not have the evidence.”

Determining the overall level of immunity in West Africa would require testing thousands of blood samples, an impossible task in the current chaos, especially when any slip of a needle or a broken vial could fatally infect a health worker.

But in 2010, Dr. Leroy led such a study in Gabon, a Central African country that had four Ebola outbreaks from 1994 to 2002.

His teams took 4,349 blood samples in 220 randomly selected villages. They found that 15 percent of Gabon’s population had antibodies. But it varied widely: near the coast, only 3 percent did; in some jungle villages near the Congo border, up to 34 percent did.

Also, their antibody levels varied widely, and what level is protective is roughly known for lab monkeys, but not for humans.

“I don’t think we have a good idea of what constitutes a person who’s going to survive versus a person who’s going to succumb,” said Randal J. Schoepp, head of diagnostics at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Md., who led a study of blood from patients in a Sierra Leone hospital who were originally thought to have Lassa fever but did not. Nearly 9 percent had Ebola antibodies — and the samples dated from as far back as 2006, proving that the virus circulated long before this year’s outbreak.

Also, there is anecdotal evidence that some West Africans are resistant. Victims have relatives who never get sick. At the funeral of a traditional healer where 14 women became infected, at least 26 other mourners did not, Dr. Garry said, even though most probably touched the body.

There is firm evidence for silent infections.

In 2000, Dr. Leroy’s team studied 24 Gabonese who had tended victims without ever falling ill. Eleven had not just antibodies but remnants of virus and markers of inflammation in their blood — meaning they had clearly been infected but had defeated the virus on their own.

A similar 1999 study by American scientists in the Democratic Republic of Congo found similar results in five of 152 household contacts.

Those who are immune can donate blood containing antibodies to be given to acutely ill patients, as was done for Dr. Kent Brantly, one of the first two Americans to get Ebola. He survived, although his Emory University doctors later said it was unclear whether the transfusion or an experimental drug,ZMapp, containing cloned antibodies, helped him at all.

Having those who are immune be caregivers and body carriers makes sense, said Tom Skinner, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“But we can’t count on their immunity,” he added. “They would still need full personal protective gear.”

Relying on such measures may be inevitable, Dr. Garry said, adding: “There’s no more ZMapp out there. It’s time for creative solutions.”
 

QamYasharahla

All Star
Joined
Jul 31, 2014
Messages
3,130
Reputation
-320
Daps
7,157
Thats not how assertions work. You can't make an absolute statement to an unknown. Common sense.

If you have definitive proof of there being immunity, then post it. Otherwise, you're typing just to type. Better yet, go get infected, and if you survive, we'll see if we can get you infected again.
 

Poitier

My Words Law
Supporter
Joined
Jul 30, 2013
Messages
69,411
Reputation
15,469
Daps
246,399
If you have definitive proof of there being immunity, then post it. Otherwise, you're typing just to type. Better yet, go get infected, and if you survive, we'll see if we can get you infected again.

"Right now, there are about 1,800 survivors of the current West African outbreak, all of whom are now immune, of course. But there may be many thousands more.
"

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/06/health/ebola-immunity.html


You were wrong, now keep it moving.
 

QamYasharahla

All Star
Joined
Jul 31, 2014
Messages
3,130
Reputation
-320
Daps
7,157
"Right now, there are about 1,800 survivors of the current West African outbreak, all of whom are now immune, of course. But there may be many thousands more.
"

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/06/health/ebola-immunity.html


You were wrong, now keep it moving.

No, I wasn't. The article's contents are claiming an immunity (without the scientific proof might I add), and that doesn't match up with the title that they MAY have immunity. Again, where is the PROOF of immunity? Posting an article doesn't prove shyt. Try again.
 

The Nigerian

The Realest Member of TheColi
Joined
Jun 23, 2012
Messages
11,230
Reputation
-5,500
Daps
16,528
Reppin
All The Way One Hunnid
Look, if I get Ebola that means EVERYBODY gets Ebola.

You'll see me hugging, dapping, and back slapping everybody on the street.

I just can't wait to see how this all plays out.
 
Top