In
this photo provided by CBS News, the National Institute of Health's Dr.
Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, speaks on
CBS's "Face the Nation" in Washington. Speaking on the Ebola virus,
Fauci said it's perfectly normal to feel anxious about a disease that
kills so fast and is ravaging parts of West Africa, but predicts there
won't be an outbreak in the U.S. (AP Photo/CBS News, Chris Usher)(Photo: Chris Usher, AP)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Ebola has arrived in the United States and people are frightened.
The
nation’s top infectious diseases expert says it’s perfectly normal to
feel anxious about a virus that kills so fast and is ravaging parts of
West Africa.
“People who are scared, I say, ‘We don’t take lightly
your fear. We respect it. We understand it,’” said Dr. Anthony Fauci of
the National Institutes of Health.
But Fauci emphasizes that the
United States is different from African nations whose fragile health
care systems have been overwhelmed by Ebola. Scientists know how to stop
the virus from spreading with adequate resources, he says.
In the U.S., Fauci maintains, “We won’t have an outbreak.”
That’s
not to say the first Ebola case diagnosed within the United States — a
traveler from Liberia who began feeling the effects after arriving in
Dallas — will be the only one.
The government took measures this past week to ensure hospitals are ready and is considering what more should be done.
Despite
some initial missteps in Dallas, tried-and-true methods are underway:
tracking everyone who came into contact with the infected man and
isolating anyone who shows symptoms.
What to know about Ebola in America:
———
THERE’S GOING TO BE A LOT OF TALK
Expect
to hear news reports in the coming days about people who are being
cared for as potential Ebola cases. That doesn’t mean they have the
disease.
Doctors and hospitals are isolating individuals they
believe could be at risk. That’s based on a combination of their
symptoms and recent travel from a country where Ebola is present.
The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has consulted with hospitals
about more than 100 potentially suspicious cases in recent months. More
than a dozen were worrisome enough to merit Ebola blood tests. Only the
Dallas patient had Ebola.
———
HOW IT SPREADS
Ebola doesn’t spread easily like the flu, a cold or measles.
The
virus isn’t airborne. Instead, it’s in a sick person’s bodily fluids,
such as blood, vomit, urine, semen or saliva. Another person can catch
the disease by getting those germs into his own body, perhaps by wiping
his eyes or through a cut in the skin.
Bodily fluids aren’t
contagious until the infected person begins to feel sick. The initial
symptoms are easily confused with other illnesses, however: fever,
headaches, flu-like body aches and abdominal pain. Vomiting, diarrhea
and sometimes bleeding follow as the disease progresses, increasing the
risk to others.
In West Africa, the disease has spread quickly to
family members who tended the sick or handled their bodies after death,
and infected doctors and nurses working under punishing conditions,
without proper equipment. Bed sheets or clothing contaminated by bodily
fluids also could spread the disease.
———
CAN YOU CATCH IT ON A BUS OR PLANE?
It’s very unlikely.
To
be on the safe side, the CDC defines “contact” with the disease as
spending a prolonged period of time within 3 feet of someone ill with
Ebola, a distance designed to protect health workers from projectile
vomiting.
But health officials haven’t seen real world cases of
the virus spread by casual contact in public, such as sitting next to
someone on a bus, said Dr. Tom Frieden, the CDC director.
“All of
our experience with Ebola in Africa the last four decades indicates
direct contact is how it spreads,” he said, “and only direct contact
with someone who is ill with Ebola.”
Passengers who flew on the
same plane as the Dallas patient, five days before he developed
symptoms, are not considered at risk by the CDC. Nor are the schoolmates
of children who came in contact with the infected Dallas man, but
showed no symptoms of illness while in class.
As a precaution in
case they become sick and therefore contagious, the children who were in
contact with the infected man were pulled from school and are being
monitored for symptoms.
Initially, about 100 people were assessed
for potential exposure. Health officials said Friday that 50 were still
being monitored, with 10 considered at the most risk during the
disease’s 21-day incubation period. Four family members who shared their
apartment with the patient are under quarantine.
Outside those circles, the odds of getting infected within the U.S. remain minuscule, health authorities say.
———
WHAT HEALTH OFFICIALS ARE DOING IN U.S.
The CDC is overseeing multiple layers of response:
—The
Ebola-hit African nations are checking people at airports for fever,
and asking them about any contact with an infected person, before
allowing them to board planes out of the country.
—Airlines are required by law to watch for sick travelers and to alert authorities before landing.
—The
CDC is warning doctors and hospitals to remember the possibility of
Ebola and rapidly isolate and test sick patients with a risk of exposure
to the virus, primarily those who have traveled recently from the hot
spots.
Additional safeguards are being considered.
The Obama
administration is looking at the possibility of stationing government
workers at U.S. airports to screen passengers arriving from
Ebola-stricken nations for signs of illness, Fauci said Monday. He said
the idea, and the resources it would require, would be discussed at a
Monday afternoon meeting at the White House.
“We all want to get
to zero risk to the U.S. … We can only do that by making sure that we
get it under control in Africa. And we’re beginning to see the response
ramping up there. But it’s going to be a long, hard fight,” Frieden said
Sunday.
The U.S. and other countries have stepped up aid to West
African nations struggling with the disease. But the outbreak is out of
control.
“We have never seen an Ebola epidemic before in the world,” Frieden said.
———
CAN LOCAL HOSPITALS HANDLE THIS?
Before
the Dallas case, four Americans diagnosed with Ebola in Africa returned
to the U.S. enclosed in portable biohazard units, attended by health
care workers protected by what looked like puffy space suits. The
patients were treated in special isolation units.
The U.S. has only four of those isolation units; when people feel sick, they go to their nearest health care.
The CDC says any American hospital should be able to care for an Ebola patient.
Emergency
room staff, potentially the first line, are used to safeguarding
themselves from germs. They routinely treat patients with HIV, hepatitis
and other infectious diseases.
The CDC says it’s fine to put a
suspected Ebola case into a regular private room with its own bathroom,
and doctors and nurses need only wear certain gowns, masks and eye
protection to be safe, not the elaborate biohazard suits.
Yet the system isn’t perfect, as the Dallas case shows.
When
the patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, first arrived at a Dallas hospital, he
told a nurse that he had recently traveled from West Africa, yet the
possibility of Ebola was overlooked and he was discharged into the
community. He returned in worse shape, by ambulance, two days later and
was diagnosed with the virus. He is in critical condition.
———
THIS EBOLA OUTBREAK IS DIFFERENT, ISN’T IT?
Yes. It’s the worse Ebola outbreak in history, and still out of control in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
Previous outbreaks in other parts of Africa have been halted more quickly.
Lack
of experience with the disease in West Africa contributed to its spread
this time. Other factors: a shortage of medical personnel and supplies,
widespread poverty, and political instability in affected countries.
Also,
the disease is crossing national borders and spreading in urban areas.
Past outbreaks tended to be in relatively isolated spots.
It’s
hard for Americans to grasp how much more easily diseases can spread in
some of the poorest places on earth versus in the U.S., said Ebola
expert Thomas Geisbert of the University of Texas Medical Branch at
Galveston.
In countries where inadequate health systems have been
overwhelmed by the virus, people are dying in their homes, outside
clinics that are too overfilled to take them, and sometimes in the
streets. Health workers have been attacked by panicked residents.
Yet the measures that have stopped past outbreaks still work, with sufficient knowledge and resources.
Senegal
appears to have stopped the disease at one case this year. Nigeria had
eight deaths but brought its outbreak under control by tracking 894
people who had been in contact with a man who brought the virus from
Liberia, and visiting 18,500 more people to check for symptoms, the CDC
said.
U.S. officials are confident they can stay on top of any more cases that arrive.
This
is the first case of Ebola recorded in the United States. But some of
its relatives have been here — a case of Marburg virus, considered just
as deadly, and four cases of Lassa fever in the past decade.
“There
is some history of people coming back with these exotic, highly lethal
diseases where it’s been relatively well controlled,” Geisbert said.
“Hopefully that continues.”
———
AP Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard contributed to this report.
———
Online:
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola
——
Follow Connie Cass on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ConnieCass
Associated Press reporter Matt Small contributed to this story.
- EUROPE -
Ebola Infects Spanish Nurse, a First in West
Ebola Infects Spanish Nurse, a First in West
A Spanish nurse infected with Ebola was transferred Monday from a hospital in Alcorcón to Madrid’s Carlos III Hospital.
Credit
Gonzalo Arroyo Moreno/Getty Images
BARCELONA, Spain — A nurse in Spain has become the first health worker to be infected with the Ebola
virus outside of West Africa, raising serious concerns about how
prepared Western nations are to safely treat people with the deadly
illness.
The
nurse contracted the illness while treating a Spanish missionary who
was infected in Sierra Leone and flown to Madrid’s Carlos III hospital,
where he died on Sept. 25, Spain’s Health Ministry said. The priest,
Manuel García Viejo, died three days after being flown back to Spain,
and the nurse entered his room only twice, including once after his
death, according to Antonio Alemany, a health official from the regional
government of Madrid.
The
case is particularly worrisome to health experts because Spain is a
developed country that is considered to possess the kind of rigorous
infection control measures that should prevent disease transmission in
the hospital. Although the Ebola
epidemic has killed hundreds of doctors and nurses in West Africa,
health officials in Europe and the United States have reassured the
public repeatedly that if the disease reached their shores, their health
care systems would be able to treat patients safely, without
endangering health workers or the public.
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