Forbes – Ebola Has Already Killed More Than 200 Doctors, Nurses, And Other Healthcare Workers This Year
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Ebola has now infected multiple people in America: The first two homegrown cases of Ebola are a pair of nurses who got sick after treating Thomas Duncan, the first person ever diagnosed with Ebola in the United States.
Both nurses with Ebola — Nina Pham and Amber Joy Vinson — were among the 70-plus staff who encountered Duncan during his 10-day stay at Dallas’s Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital. However, several staff on Wednesday anonymously told reporters that the nurses were not given sufficient protection against the risk of Ebola.
(A person can become infected with Ebola after being in close proximity with a visibly sick Ebola patient, and specifically by making contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids.)
Although Duncan was admitted to the hospital on September 28, having traveled from West Africa and suffering from common Ebola symptoms like vomiting and diarrhea, staff weren’t told to wear protective gear to guard themselves against Ebola until September 30. That’s when tests formally confirmed that Duncan was infected with Ebola, and had been contagious for nearly a week.
The allegations that the Dallas nurses didn’t have sufficient protections against Ebola are disturbing — more on those in a second — but the infection pattern keeps with a sad trend: A disproportionate number of people who were sickened with Ebola in West Africa were health care workers, too.
Read more – Forbes