Talk about difficult choices: you've got two American health care workers, trying to save lives in Africa, working with patients, who've got Ebola. They acquire the disease from their patients and are likely to die in Africa because the hospitals there cannot provide the same level of care as American hospitals. If you can keep them hydrated with intravenous fluids, support their blood pressures, dispose of their diarrhea and vomitus, keep their wounds clean, they may stand half a chance of pulling through.
We know how to do this sort of isolation here in our university hospitals, with our space suits and our sterile rooms and all that. Nobody is going to get infected here. We've got this under control.
On the other hand, the same chief of the CDC was just on the same News Hour program a few days earlier, explaining how the CDC had discovered a freezer full of vials containing small pox, which, somehow our ultra high tech CDC failed to kill and just kept in storage for a few decades. A regrettable oversight. But no harm, no foul.
I'm just saying: Even at our best centers, things go wrong.
When we deal with Ebola, say at that Level 4 Army Fort Detrick in Frederick Maryland--where they had the Crisis in the Hot Zone, the rooms where they handle those viruses, in their petrie dishes have special ventilation which suck air inside rather than venting it out to the world around the fort. Do they have that at the Emory University Hospital?
Remember Crisis in the Hot Zone? The message there was, despite all your efforts, things will eventually foul up. There was a lot of talk in Crisis in the Hot Zone about diseases "going global." It's inevitable, the doctors interviewed there said. The surprise is, it hasn't happened sooner.
And when health care workers at Emory get out of their space suits, will they not go down to the cafeteria and eat lunch with other hospital employees?
And what will happen to the diarrhea and vomit teeming with virus, as the linens are disposed of at the hospital? Who will handle these items and what if a cloth soaked in blood falls out of a bag and is picked up by a housekeeping aide who goes home on the bus that night?
In an operating room, you have a circulating nurse who watches everyone and screams bloody murder when anyone breaks sterile field. Will they have some watchdogs looking over the patients' rooms at Emory, 24/7? Surgeries may go on for a few hours--it's easier to be vigilant for lapses in sterile technique in those controlled rooms, but what about a ward room for days on end?
Now, it's entirely possible some day some African will hop a jet when he's still incubating Ebola virus during its 21 day incubation and he will not spread the virus on that airplane, but when he arrives in Detroit or Los Angeles, he'll get sick and go to an unsuspecting emergency room. So we cannot "control our borders" as Scott Brown would say.
Once, when a young man showed up in the George Washington University hospital emergency room with bubonic plague (acquired in South America) he was admitted and cared for by Martin Wolfe, MD, a renown tropical disease specialist, who could only practice in Washington, DC, where the State Department and the cosmopolitan nature of that city could keep a man like him busy and up to date. And the patient was cured. And nobody in the hospital acquired plague. But there were effective antibiotics for plague.
One might argue, better to get experience with Ebola under these "controlled"conditions than being surprised in some random ER someday in Washington, DC, New York or L.A.
But the fact is these workers, who were wearing space suits and who knew what they were doing--they got Ebola.
Which just goes to show, no human endeavor is without error. Mistakes are made all the time in hospitals, and usually you can correct them. But here, somebody wipes a nose reflexively, or gets a needle stick or gets sprayed through or around his goggles and now you've got the beginning of a little epidemic. Nothing that will wipe out Atlanta. Sherman did more damage, but still, no system devised by man is perfect, especially systems devised by Americans. Germans might pull it off for longer, but we Americans, we tend to be a little sloppy.
We did get a man to the moon and back, but in some ways that was easier. Nobody was going to cause a catastrophe on Apollo 11 by sneezing.
But every once in a while, we miss frozen "O" rings and all hell breaks loose.
I'm just amazed Ted Cruz and Scott Brown and Rush Limbaugh have not got hold of this one. Secure our borders! Once and for all!
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