First Person to Contract Deadly Disease Within US
**VIDEO**
Skippy Massey
Humbodt Sentinel
The government is telling the nation’s hospitals to ‘‘think Ebola’’ after a Texas nurse became the first person to contract Ebola within the United States yesterday.
“Stopping Ebola is hard. Every hospital must know how to diagnose Ebola in people who have been in West Africa and be ready to isolate a suspected case,” Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), said Monday.
Many local, state and federal officials want to find out how the nurse became infected.
The CDC is scrambling to interview all staff of the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas who could have been exposed to the original patient, a Liberian man who became sick after traveling to the United States and died at the hospital. Anyone at risk will be monitored, Friedan said.
The new Ebola patient has been identified as critical care nurse Nina Pham. Hospitals officials said that she helped treat Thomas Eric Duncan, the Ebola patient who died less than a week ago in Dallas.
Officials believe she may have violated safety protocols and became infected with the deadly virus, although they don’t know and can’t explain how that may have happened.
Prior to Pham becoming infected, she was not among the other 48 health care workers, relatives of Duncan, and others whom the hospital was evaluating daily.
This is the first confirmed case of Ebola transmitted in the U.S. The mode of transmission has not been identified, and Duncan, the original case, was in quarantined isolation at the time.
According to The New York Times, Pham always wore her protective gear. She monitored additional places and people at risk of contracting the disease.
The details as to how she contracted the disease is important, reported The Daily Beast. The news of Ebola being contracted in the U.S. raises fears of health care workers across the country who have become increasingly nervous.
Many physicians, nurses and health care workers have become anxious about possibly handling Ebola cases. The confirmation of the second Ebola case in Dallas opened more doubts in the minds of health care workers.
The CDC said it would conduct a nationwide training conference call on Tuesday to prepare thousands of health care workers for treating patients with Ebola.
“The care of Ebola patients can be done safely, but it’s hard to do it safely,” Frieden said. ”Even a single, inadvertent innocent slip can result in contamination.”
“A lot of us are starting to get worried,” said Debra Buccellato, an emergency room nurse in Santa Rosa, California.
Buccellato said she has not received any training, nor has she seen anyone else being trained on how to treat an Ebola patient.
The latest Ebola case, the unknown way it spread, and Friedan’s comments raises questions about the assurances given by health officials in the United States that the disease will be contained, and that any American hospital should be able to treat it.
Ebola patients aren’t contagious until they begin experiencing symptoms. As they get sicker, they become more infectious and the amount of virus in their bodily fluids increases — putting those caring for them at greater
risk.
Nonetheless, a top federal health official said earlier in the day authorities should consider requiring Ebola patients be moved to specialized ‘‘containment’’ hospitals.
Patients with Ebola often die before they can infect others, so past outbreaks of Ebola haven’t spread very far. This time, however, is markedly different. Already, 3,400 people have died, more than in all previous Ebola outbreaks combined. And the numbers are expected to keep climbing.
“We’ve stopped every Ebola outbreak from Africa– except this one,” Friedan said.
With Ebola infections increasing, and the death toll rising, the World Health Organization is now calling Ebola “the most severe acute public health emergency we’ve seen in modern times.”
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