DarkTraveler777 wrote:
The picture is too small to really tell. If she is wearing gloves, then she needs to get out of the OR and into the sun because her forehead and neck are as pale as her hands. Stock photo aside, it is interesting that you have the medical background you claim to have and yet are still posting dubious content in this thread. What is your aim here?

 Jihadin wrote:

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:
The picture is too small to really tell. If she is wearing gloves, then she needs to get out of the OR and into the sun because her forehead and neck are as pale as her hands. Stock photo aside, it is interesting that you have the medical background you claim to have and yet are still posting dubious content in this thread. What is your aim here?

Which part is the hang up

 Jihadin wrote:
US


Over there


Something is not right here.....

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:

 Jihadin wrote:

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:
The picture is too small to really tell. If she is wearing gloves, then she needs to get out of the OR and into the sun because her forehead and neck are as pale as her hands. Stock photo aside, it is interesting that you have the medical background you claim to have and yet are still posting dubious content in this thread. What is your aim here?

Which part is the hang up

This part:

 Jihadin wrote:
US


Over there


Something is not right here.....

You provided two photos, without context and you leave an ominous "Something is not right here..." with the extra periods added to the ellipses so we could all know how fethed we really are. When I point out the differences you harp on the gloves. So, what was the point of the post above? Are you trying to unnecessarily scare people? If so, why?

If you aren't trying to scare people what are you trying to do?

 Jihadin wrote:

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:
The picture is too small to really tell. If she is wearing gloves, then she needs to get out of the OR and into the sun because her forehead and neck are as pale as her hands. Stock photo aside, it is interesting that you have the medical background you claim to have and yet are still posting dubious content in this thread. What is your aim here?

Which part is the hang up

Edit

This, US of A


Or



Which one?

Notice the yellow suit guy spraying. Notice the open neck?

 Jihadin wrote:
Because your thinking I am "Peter Wiggin" and went into a roll. Who am I to stop you if its a good roll.

 Jihadin wrote:
what's up with the nurse?

 Jihadin wrote:

Edit

Idiot with the Camelback is one less Counseling Form to do

The UN says the ebola outbreak must be controlled within 60 days or else the world faces an "unprecedented" situation for which there is no plan.

The United Nations made the stark warning as it warned that the disease "is running faster than us and it is winning the race".

Nearly 9,000 cases of ebola have been reported so far in West Africa, including 4,447 deaths.

"The WHO advises within 60 days we must ensure 70% of infected people are in a care facility and 70% of burials are done without causing further infection," said Anthony Banbury, the UN's deputy ebola coordinator.

"We need to do that within 60 days from 1 October. If we reach these targets then we can turn this epidemic around."

But Mr Banbury told the UN Security Council the 70% target was becoming harder to meet as new infections stack up.

He urged: "We either stop ebola now or we face an entirely unprecedented situation for which we do not have a plan."

The UN's Unmeer emergency mission is following a four-pronged plan to fight ebola.

Identify and trace contacts; manage cases; ensure safe burials and provide people with information to protect themselves.

"If we fail at any of these, we fail entirely," warned Mr Banbury.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) earlier said there could be 10,000 new cases of ebola per week within two months.

WHO assistant director general Bruce Aylward told a news conference the total was expected to top 9,000 by the end of this week.

He said the death rate from the current outbreak had risen to 70% from about 50%.

When asked how the situation could develop in the next two months, he warned: "We anticipate the number of cases occurring per week by that time to be somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 per week.

"It could be higher, it could be lower, but somewhere in that ball park."

Some 95% of the cases are occurring in the same limited number of districts of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea which were affected a month ago, he said.

Dr Aylward said it was "too early to say" whether this meant that the epidemic was slowing down.

The plateau in reported infections may simply be due to limitations in the ability of authorities in the region to check and record cases, he said.

Dr Aylward said there were "positive" signs of a slow down in the rate of new cases in northern Liberia and Guinea, probably due to behaviour changes among the local population.

But he warned: "This is ebola, this is a horrible, unforgiving disease - you've got to get to zero.

"With a bit of change in the behaviour of populations, with some burials happening safely, with a little bit more case management and a couple of new centres opening, you are going to slow this down very quickly."

BBC wrote:Ebola outbreak: Second Texas health worker 'tests positive'

A second health worker in the US state of Texas has tested positive for Ebola, health officials say.

A 26-year-old female nurse is already receiving treatment after becoming infected by a Liberian man who died from the deadly virus last week.

US officials say they are monitoring 48 contacts of the Liberian national and the healthcare workers who treated him.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says 4,447 people have died from the outbreak, mainly in West Africa.

Nina Pham was exposed to Ebola at a Dallas hospital when she treated Liberian Thomas Duncan, the first person diagnosed with the virus on US soil.

Doctors at the Health Presbyterian hospital said she was in good condition on Tuesday.

The identity of the second health worker has not yet been revealed, however, the person also cared for Mr Duncan while he was in hospital.

The health worker was immediately isolated after reporting a fever on Tuesday, the Texas state department for health said in a statement.

"Health officials have interviewed the latest patient to quickly identify any contacts or potential exposures, and those people will be monitored," the department said.

 Grey Templar wrote:
It could actually be a good thing long term in that it could force people to learn some basic hygiene practices.

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:
The secure wrist sleeves? Yeah, I see them on her.

 Frazzled wrote:
Looks like a second health worker has contracted Ebola now.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/15/health/texas-ebola-outbreak/index.html?hpt=hp_inthenews

Troubling allegations
Also Tuesday, National Nurses United made troubling allegations about the hospital, claiming "guidelines were constantly changing" and "there were no protocols" about how to deal with the deadly virus."
"The protocols that should have been in place in Dallas were not in place, and that those protocols are not in place anywhere in the United States as far as we can tell," NNU Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro said. "We're deeply alarmed."
Nurses were told to wrap their necks with medical tape when equipment left their necks exposed; they felt unsupported and unprepared, and they received no hands-on training, union co-president Deborah Burger said.
A Texas Health Presbyterian spokesman did not respond to the specific allegations, but said patient and employee safety is the hospital's top priority.

News that a nurse in full protective gear had become infected with the Ebola virus raised some disturbing questions on Monday. Has the virus evolved into some kind of super-pathogen? Might it mutate into something even more terrifying in the months to come?

Evolutionary biologists who study viruses generally agree on the answers to those two questions: no, and probably not.

The Ebola viruses buffeting West Africa today are not fundamentally different from those in previous outbreaks, they say. And it is highly unlikely that natural selection will give the viruses the ability to spread more easily, particularly by becoming airborne.

“I’ve been dismayed by some of the nonsense speculation out there,” said Edward Holmes, a biologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. “I understand why people get nervous about this, but as scientists we need to be very careful we don’t scaremonger.”

Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, one of four hospitals in the nation with biocontainment units for diseases like Ebola.Questions Rise on Preparations at Hospitals to Deal With EbolaOCT. 13, 2014

Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, released a letter demanding more money to train local hospitals.Debate Over Ebola Turns to Specific Policy RequestsOCT. 13, 2014
Dr. Jim Yong Kim has found his moment with Ebola, which offers a large-scale test of ideas about health care that he has been working on for decades.Head of World Bank Makes Ebola His MissionOCT. 13, 2014
Sierra Leone's national team at a training session in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. The players continue to face reminders of the Ebola crisis.Sierra Leone’s Soccer Team Struggles With Stigma Over Ebola OutbreakOCT. 13, 2014
Christine Lagarde, the I.M.F. head, cautioned against scaring the world away from all of Africa.Calculating the Grim Economic Costs of Ebola OutbreakOCT. 13, 2014

Ebola is a mystery that invites speculation. The virus came to light only in 1976, the first known outbreak. Forty years later, scientists are just starting to answer some of the most important questions about it.

Is the U.S. Prepared for an Ebola Outbreak?
A look at the government agencies and private entities that were involved in the case of the first person found to have Ebola in the United States.

Just last month, for example, Derek J. Taylor, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo, and his colleagues published evidence that Ebola viruses are profoundly ancient, splitting off from other viral lineages at least 20 million years ago. Dr. Taylor’s research suggests that for most of that time, strains of Ebola infected rodents and other mammals.

In 1976, the virus spilled over into the human population from one of those animals, possibly bats. And every few years since then, a new outbreak has emerged in different parts of Central Africa.

Each has been caused by a descendant of the 1976 strain, according to new research by Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh.

“It’s possible that there’s a diverse range of viruses, but just a few can make the jump,” Dr. Rambaut said.

Pardis C. Sabeti, a geneticist at Harvard, and her colleagues have analyzed the genomes of Ebola viruses isolated from patients in Sierra Leone to reconstruct the history of the current outbreak. Their research indicates it was the result of a single infection, probably last December.

Since then, the viruses have acquired new mutations as they have spread from person to person. Scary though that may sound, it does not surprise researchers.

All viruses are especially prone to making errors as they copy their genes, and many of these new mutations have no effect. Some are beneficial for the virus — but they don’t necessarily make it more deadly.

Evolutionary biologists see no evidence that new mutations in the Ebola virus are responsible for the huge size of the current outbreak.

“It’s far more plausible that the difference is that it’s gotten into a different human population,” Dr. Rambaut said.

Instead of being limited to remote villages, the virus ended up in cities like Freetown, Sierra Leone, and Conakry, Guinea. The combination of a big population of hosts and a medical system unable to control the infection has led to an epidemic.

“You’ve got a fairly standard Ebola virus,” Dr. Holmes said. “It’s just in the worst possible place.”

As the current outbreak spreads, the virus will continue to mutate. It is conceivable that those increased mutations will lead to evolutionary changes.
Many viruses alter their surface proteins, for example, enabling them to escape the immune system of their hosts. Dr. Sabeti and her colleagues have found some evidence of these shifts in Ebola.

She said it is vital to keep track of the evolution of these shifts. Otherwise, an experimental vaccine might target an out-of-date type of virus.

“We have the advantage over the virus,” she said. “We can see the genome in real time and respond to it.”

It is conceivable that Ebola might become more deadly during this outbreak, but it is by no means a certainty. Ebola outbreaks typically last only months, but other viruses have needed decades to make the change.

Like its close relatives, Ebola spreads through infected fluids, such as vomit and blood. There is no firm evidence that the strain that has caused human outbreaks can spread through the air.

Over the course of millions of years, viruses do sometimes switch their route of infection. “It does happen in an evolutionary context,” Dr. Holmes said.

But it would be a mistake, he warned, to imagine that with a single mutation Ebola might become an airborne pathogen. The change would require many mutations in many genes, and it might be nearly impossible for so many mutations to emerge during a single outbreak. The mutated viruses would survive only if they were superior to the ones spread by bodily fluids.

“The virus is doing pretty well right now,” Dr. Holmes said. “So it would need to be beneficial for the virus to make this quite big jump.”

Dr. Rambaut agreed that the odds were exceedingly low. “Viruses generally don’t change to that radical degree,” he said.

Dr. Sabeti said, “It is biologically plausible, but very unlikely.” Rather than give the virus the opportunity to evolve in any way, she argued, we should focus on stopping Ebola in its tracks.

“We do not know where it is going, but we do not want to wait to find out,” she said.

The ancient history of Ebola, just now coming to light, suggests we may expect to encounter more of its cousins in the future. This fearsome lineage of viruses may have been sprouting many evolutionary branches for tens of millions of years.

“There will be lots more things like Ebola out there,” Dr. Holmes said.

Correction: October 14, 2014
An earlier version of this article misstated part of the name of the college with which Derek J. Taylor, an evolutionary biologist, is affiliated. It is the University at Buffalo, which is part of the State University of New York system; it is not the University of Buffalo.

 d-usa wrote:

 whembly wrote:
Ummm... paging clinical folks (d-usa)...

Here's the CDC protocol for PPE when dealing with e-bola.
http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/pdf/ppe-poster.pdf

You take your gloves off first? o.O

You *can*, and some people certainly do. The idea being that you are essentially clean from the wrists down, so while you are reaching for other theoretical clean areas (the back of your gown, back of your mask, etc) you shouldn't contaminate your hands now that the gloves are off.

I learned example #2 (page 3) during the time I worked in surgery (so we would in fact have hands and gowns that were covered in blood) and that is what I have always used. I always preferred doffing my eye protection after my gown so that I had some extra protection if any droplets get in the air during doffing.

The main problem with example #2 is that it can be harder to do if you are using gowns without tear-away ties. Disposable gowns have paper ties or strips of glue and you can pull on the front and make those ties snap. Gowns that are laundered don't have that option so you have to untie them manually.

The CDC has talked about double gloving, but at the same time has not really provided much guidance about that either.

 Jihadin wrote:
More likely from having a mind set of "its the US and won't happen here." Still though, 103 fever and lack of urination and still sent home is pretty much condemning the hospital