10-14-2014 | Katherine Harmon Courage, Freelance Contributor

In the two days since the second U.S. Ebola patient was diagnosed, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has assembled a new team to battle the threat of Ebola. This team has no steady lineup, but it will be deployed anywhere in the country that sees a new case of Ebola, CDC Director Thomas Frieden said in a press conference Tuesday afternoon.

“For any hospital, anywhere in the country that has a confirmed case of Ebola, we will put a team on the ground within hours,” Frieden said. “I wish we had put a team like this on the ground the day the first patient was diagnosed,” he conceded.

More.

10-17-2014 | Nicholas St. Fleur

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stepped out of line in claiming that “a breach in protocol” caused an American nurse treating an Ebola victim to contract the deadly virus, the two largest U.S. nurses’ unions charged Wednesday.

National Nurses United (NNU), the largest union of registered nurses in the U.S. with around 185,000 members, said that the CDC’s assertions about a violation in hospital procedures was unwarranted because current Ebola protocols are either inadequate or nonexistent in hospitals across the country. The organization held a national conference call for nurses and press on October 15 calling for hands-on training nationwide to prepare nurses to treat Ebola patients. The union asked the CDC and Pres. Barack Obama to meet its demands for better training, supplies and treatment regimens. “Not one more nurse, not one more patient should be put at risk,” said RoseAnn DeMoro, NNU executive director.

More.

October 18, 2014 |By Katherine Harmon Courage

On July 20 a man who was ill flew on commercial planes from the heart of the Ebola epidemic in Liberia to Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city. That man became Nigeria’s first Ebola case—the index patient. In a matter of weeks some 19 people across two states were diagnosed with the disease (with one additional person presumed to have contracted it before dying).

But rather than descending into epidemic, there has not been a new case of the virus since September 5. And since September 24 the country’s Ebola isolation and treatment wards have sat empty. If by Monday, October 20 there are still no new cases, Nigeria, unlike the U.S., will be declared Ebola free by the World Health Organization (WHO).

What can we learn from this African country’s success quashing an Ebola outbreak?

Authors of a paper published October 9 in Eurosurveillance attribute Nigeria’s success in “avoiding a far worse scenario” to its “quick and forceful” response. The authors point to three key elements in the country’s attack:

* Fast and thorough tracing of all potential contacts
* Ongoing monitoring of all of these contacts
* Rapid isolation of potentially infectious contacts

The swift battle was won not only with vigilant disinfecting, port-of-entry screening and rapid isolation but also with boot leather and lots and lots of in-person follow-up visits, completing 18,500 of them to find any new cases of Ebola among a total of 989 identified contacts.

Such ground-level work may sound extreme, and the usually measured WHO declared the feat “a piece of world-class epidemiological detective work.” But as William Schaffner, chair of the Department of Preventive Medicine and an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University, says, “Actually what Nigeria did is routine, regular—but vigorous and rigorous—public health practice. They identified cases early—fortunately they had a limited number—and they got a list of all of the contacts, and they put those people under rigorous surveillance so that if they were to become sick, they wouldn’t transmit the infection to others,” he says.

Art Reingold, head of epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health agrees. The steps are basic: “isolation, quarantine of contacts, etcetera,” but governments must “get in quickly and do it really well.” It was Nigeria’s vigorous and rapid public health response that really stopped the spread. Because when Ebola lands one August afternoon in a city of 21 million, things could go very, very differently.

More.

10-16-2014 | David Biello

Thomas Eric Duncan’s family has been imprisoned in a borrowed home for a few weeks now, purportedly under police guard. This quarantine is an attempt to keep any Ebola virus from spreading further after their loved one died of the disease on October 8.

That quarantine has not been applied to hospital workers who came into contact with Duncan on either his first visit to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital—when he was turned away—or his second visit two days later. To date, two of the medical workers who helped care for Duncan have now contracted Ebola, and one of them flew to Cleveland and back for the Columbus Day weekend before becoming symptomatic.

Just as air travel brought the Ebola virus to Dallas from Liberia, where the pandemic is spreading out of control, air travel could spread the virus throughout the U.S. and the world by travelers who don’t know they are infected. Travel restrictions, isolation of the infected and quarantine of those known to have been in contact with the infected are a few of the measures that have been suggested for stopping that spread.

More.

10-10-2014 | Larry Greenemeier

Physicians, nurses and other medical staff who are the first line of defense against the spread of Ebola are not always adequately protected from the virus, a situation that has contributed to more than 200 health worker deaths in west Africa since the outbreak began in December 2013. As the virus spreads outside of Africa, so do reports that problems with procedures, protective equipment and training for using that equipment are putting health workers at risk.

The nurse at Madrid’s Carlos III Hospital who earlier this week became the first person outside west Africa to contract Ebola, told media outlets in Spain that she may have accidentally touched her face with one of her gloved hands as she removed her protective gear. This revelation comes amidst reports that several health workers who attended to the nurse are now being tested for the disease and that hospital workers have been complaining about inadequate training and equipment related to Ebola treatment.

One doctor attending to the nurse wrote a letter to his superiors pointing out that the sleeves of his protective suite were too short, the Guardian reported Thursday. Spain’s El País stated earlier this week that Carlos III workers were wearing latex gloves secured with adhesive tape to their overalls.

More.