Dropping the Ball: The [Not So] Good News on Ebola

And now, the not-so-good news about ebola.
Just about two days ago I posted this recap of some of the news around the latest ebola outbreak.
My post centered mostly on three things: One, the fact that people infected can be cured; two, the rather thoughtful-and-not-at-all-panicky public reaction to the issue; and three, the hope that this reaction might lead to avoiding the shameful way people reacted to the AIDS scare in the 80s.
I wrote that barely a couple of days after a previous one, in another blog of mine, deploring the overtly emotional reaction among some people to the news about the death of Excalibur, the mascot of Spanish health worker Teresa Romero.
The dog, euthanized in Madrid by the government shortly after the reports that Romero had become the first case of contagion with ebola outside of Africa, became something of a cause in the social networks.

Breaking news, at the local and national level

So much so that after official confirmation of the first case of transmission of the virus in the United States, lots of emphasis was placed on the fact that unlike Excalibur, the pet belonging to nurse Nina Pham would not be destroyed in Dallas.
It is not a matter, I said at the end of last week, of pretending to keep anybody quiet or of trying to control people’s emotions.
“To cry out because a dog has been euthanized without regretting the negligence, missteps and mistakes around this tragedy, that has Madrid on the main stage, while at the same time disregarding — that’s about the only possible conclusion one can derive — that what is happening poses a threat to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, if not millions of human beings, is totally preposterous,” I said then.
There is a measure of heroism in the way medical healthcare personnel, both in Spain and the United States, have reacted to the demands placed on them by the ebola outbreak.
In Madrid, as narrated by a Romero spokesperson in this article published Wednesday by the daily ABC, the nurse has been quoted as saying that she’d not hesitate to provide care again for another ebola victim: “Now I have the [ebola] antibodies, nothing to worry about,” Romero told her husband, according to the report.
In Dallas, nurses at the hospital where the two new cases of contagion with ebola have been confirmed, denounced what the New York Daily News called “an astonishing series of failures” around the case.
The press conference subject of that story happened just a few hours after the confirmation of the second case of a nurse testing positive for ebola, and the later reports that she boarded commercial flights from Dallas to Cleveland, and back, despite being one of the at-risk healthcare workers.
Want to worry about something?
Look at what the healthcare authorities are doing to manage the outbreak. They are, to put it mildly, dropping the ball.

The Good News on Ebola

Good news on the latest ebola virus outbreak.
You read me well. There is good news — I kid you not.
This is not a gimmick, an ill-thought-out stratagem of mine to have you click on my post and read it. As Spanish healthcare worker Teresa Romero has entered a 48-hour decisive period [at the end of which we may find what will happen to her] and as more attention is given to the presence of ebola in the United States, with details of the second confirmed case of transmission of the virus outside of Africa, there is, after all, good news.
It’s not necessarily breaking news.
I also believe that the significance of the developments I am listing here [I am kinda summarizing to account for brevity so it may very well be that there is other good news around the murderous virus] may have been lost in the din generated by the more pressing news.
Good News #1: People afflicted with ebola can be cured.
In fact, as you’ll read in the link provided, there are even more cases of survival to ebola than those of American Christian missionaries Nancy Writebol and Dr. Kent Brantly, both subject of the hyperlinked exclusive NCB News story.
In an update to this post, the latest reports indicate that the Dallas nurse who caught the ebola virus while treating the Liberian tourist who died of the disease has received a plasma transfusion donated by Brantly.

People around the world prayed for him, says Kent Brantly

Good News #2: The public reaction to the news about ebola outside of Africa — that includes the reaction in Spain, where Romero’s case was the first known to the world — has been, so far, more expectant than alarmist.
In the United States, the recent event in Dallas generated widespread fear and concern that may have at times bordered on panic and, perhaps, hysteria. That’s Brantly’s evaluation, as you can read in this report about a forum in which he participated at his alma mater, Abilene Christian University.

Virus free: Nancy Writebol and husband, David [Photo SIM USA]

The concern remains high, more so especially after Nina Pham, the 26-year-old nurse at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, became over the weekend the first known case of contagion or transmission of ebola in American soil.
Similar to the Romero case, the young nurse’s story in Dallas has generated controversy after health authorities suggested that a “breach in protocol” — code for “her mistake” — may have resulted in her becoming afflicted with the virus.
Whether either healthcare worker was in fact responsible for the mishap, or there is some other type of failure that nobody knows about — are protective garments in use in fact effective and efficient to prevent the contagion? — is yet to be established.
The point that should not be lost is this: As reiterated many times by health authorities, only by direct contact with the bodily fluids of infected people can the ebola virus be transmitted.
 Which brings me to…
Good News #3: If the present public reaction continues, we may be able to avoid a repetition of the AIDS-hysteria of the early 1980s.
Remember Ryan White? A hemophiliac, as you’ll read in the Wikipedia link, he contracted the HIV after getting contaminated blood during a transfusion.
If you don’t remember Ryan’s story or even knew about it, click on the link and get updated.
Even better: Click here to read the letter that British rocker Elton John wrote Ryan in 2010, on the 20th anniversary of Ryan’s death.
“Ryan, I wish you could know how much the world has changed since 1990, and how much you changed it,” says John to his friend in the letter.
The musician is of course talking about the contemporary public reaction to AIDS but in a way, I think, he could be talking about how the news on ebola is being dealt with in the present.