The nurse in Texas seemed to have taken all the precautions needed to protect herself from Ebola. She wore a mask, gown, shield and gloves. Her patient, a man who contracted the virus in Africa, was in isolation at the Dallas hospital where she worked.
How did a health worker in Dallas wearing full protective gear catch Ebola if the virus “does not spread easily”? Just last week, Barack Obama declared to the public that you cannot get Ebola “sitting next to someone on a bus”, and yet a nurse in protective gear that was taking extreme precautions to avoid being exposed to the disease has just caught it. The head of the CDC says that there must have been a “breach in protocol” somewhere, because of course the CDC guidelines regarding the transmission of this virus could never be wrong.
If there is a major Ebola pandemic in America, all of the liberties and the freedoms that you currently enjoy would be gone. If government officials believe that you have the virus, federal law allows them to round you up and detain you “for such time and in such manner as may be reasonably necessary.” In addition, the CDC already has the authority to quarantine healthy Americans if they reasonably believe that they may become sick.
Now that a man in the United States has been diagnosed with Ebola, some are asking why we haven’t stopped allowing people traveling from West Africa into our airports. Thomas Eric Duncan, the patient currently being treated in the Dallas area, boarded a flight from Liberia on Sept. 19 and arrived in Texas on Sept.
Two days after a man in Texas was diagnosed with Ebola, a Missouri doctor Thursday morning showed up at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport dressed in protective gear to protest what he called mismanagement of the crisis by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Gil Mobley checked in and cleared airport security wearing a mask, goggles, gloves, boots and a hooded white jumpsuit emblazoned on the back with the words, “CDC is lying!
For the moment, our top public health officials are quite adamant that there absolutely will not be a major Ebola outbreak in the United States. But what if they are wrong? Or what would happen if terrorists released a form of weaponized Ebola or weaponized smallpox in one of our major cities?
Health experts all over the United States are promising us that we do not need to be worried about Ebola whatsoever. Even though one case has already been confirmed in Dallas, Texas and another potential case is being monitored, health authorities assure us that we have the greatest health system in the history of the planet and that we will be able to handle any isolated cases very easily. And all over the mainstream media on Wednesday, there were headlines declaring that the arrival of Ebola in America is a non-event.
Now that Ebola is officially in the US on an uncontrolled basis, the two questions on everyone’s lips are i) who will get sick next and ii) how bad could it get? We don’t know the answer to question #1 just yet, but when it comes to the second one, a press release three weeks ago from Lakeland Industries, a manufacturer and seller of a “comprehensive line of safety garments and accessories for the industrial protective clothing market” may provide some insight into just how bad the US State Department thinks it may get. Because when the US government buys 160,000 hazmat suits specifically designed against Ebola, just ahead of the worst Ebola epidemic in history making US landfall, one wonders:
The day that many of us hoped would never arrive is here. Ebola has come to America. Air travel between the United States and the countries of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone should have been totally shut down except for absolutely essential personnel but it wasn’t.
The virus that has infected nearly 10,000 people in West Africa and killed over 3,000 so far this year may now be in America. Multiple news sources are reporting that an individual showing symptoms of the Ebola virus has been admitted to a hospital in Dallas, Texas. The patient, whose travel history suggests he or she may have been exposed to the virus, has been isolated and Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas says it is following testing and quarantine procedures outlined by the Centers for Disease Control.
An undisclosed number of people who’ve been exposed to the Ebola virus — not just the four patients publicly identified with diagnosed cases — have been evacuated to the U.S. by an air ambulance company contracted by the State Department.
Two American aid workers who contracted Ebola while working in West Africa have been released from the hospital. Doctors say the former patients are no longer contagious, posing no threat to others. Kent Brantly, a physician with the humanitarian group Samaritan’s Purse, was discharged from Atlanta’s Emory University Hospital on Thursday.
