How do doctors catch Ebola?

Ok . I realize much has been said about Ebola. Dr Craig Spencer arrived here October 17th and did his well known tour of contamination from brooklyn to manhattan. Theres volumes to be said here because he was said to be monitoring his own developments. If your monitoring your own developments from possible ebola , why the hell would u go anywhere , let alone NYC subways? but more troubling is the pundits saying theres nothing to worry about, including Gov. Cuomo. They all claim its only transmissible through exchanging bodily fluids .. i.e. sex . So what youre telling me is that the good doctor had sex in Guinea? ANd then decided to do a complete freeball tour of NYC? WHo the hell bowls anymore ? Did he get a strike ? Well if thats possible what about what he did in Europe from oct 14-17th. I just dont buy it. The more they tell you no way, the closer it gets. I wish I had some posts but it seems the tracks he layed in Europe are top secret. The whole problem with the line the give us is if theres no way you can catch it except transmission in bodily fluid then why would health care workers catch it? obviously they would know this to be true, And also they dont say how he passed the screening at the airport. Im not the one to go back and look at every detail, but nothing here or in the bigger scheme of things makes any sense. Perhaps the virus told Dr. Spence to go out and spread me....

The point is a lot of healthcare workers aren't catching it.

We hear a lot about the tiny number who do.

But how many healthcare workers will have treated the guy in Spain? 20? 30? And only one got sick.


There are many hundreds of Western healthcare professionals volunteering in Africa to help with this. And only what, 3 or 4 have become infected?

The trouble is an awful lot of people including nurses who look on doctors as gods. You only have to look in hospitals at the way nurses react when doctors are around. Talk about creeping and crawling and yes sir no sir three bags full sir. Any nurses on here will come on and refute all of what I've said but see for yourself when you go into hospitals. Now to answer your post, doctors are human just like you or I, they can catch Ebola just like you or I. But they are dealing with contaminated people on a daily basis and I would seriously contend to you that if a doctor caught Ebola then he would be failing as a good doctor. Looking after yourself is the very first priority and that includes doctors.

a reply to: Speckle

To hear you talk, you would think that you believe that the only fluid in the body of a human being, is the fluid secretions resulting from sexual stimulation.

For goodness sake!

Ok... blood, saliva, tears, urine, faeces, vomit, these are all fluids (in the case of someone suffering Ebola, there is a high probability of runny stools to say the least of it) which can transmit the disease from an infected person to other people. Unlike an airborne virus which can move around in the air without being encapsulated in a drop of bodily fluid, Ebola travels in liquid mediums as I described, and can only infect those who come into contact with those fluids.

How have doctors and nurses, therefore, come into contact with the virus? By singular moments of inattention, a failure to properly seal whatever HAZMAT suit they wear during hotzone operations, by passing through unidentified infected areas, which would mean that they would not be wearing a biohazard suit (because one cannot wear them all the time, since they are so bloody inhospitable to be inside, that a maximum of half an hour in a suit is the recommended amount of time a person can stay inside of one. They are hot, they carry only a certain amount of air supply... and so on and so forth). The methods by which these people become infected may vary in terms of the specifics of the situation, but no one is being infected while the proper protections are in place.

It is the moments when those protections are not in place, which are causing the trouble.

There was probably a break down in personal protection gear. I've heard they don't have enough over in those parts.

(Maybe we have enough, but don't use it, or don't use it properly.) Very frustrating.

a reply to: Painterz
About 4% of all the dead are healthcare workers. Latest number that I recall are 150 out of 4500. Also last I heard, 17 staff from MSF/DWB have or have had ebola and 9 have died.

That's nothing to sneeze at.

a reply to: Speckle
"And also they dont say how he passed the screening at the airport. "

He didn't have a fever when he came through the airport, and also there was no mandatory quarantine set in place at the time he landed back on American soil from ebola infected countries.

a reply to: Speckle

How ignorant are you? Bodily fluids means sweat, saliva, blood, urine, feces and any other fluid in your body.

Just think about what you wrote there... "The whole problem with the line the give us is if theres no way you can catch it except transmission in bodily fluid then why would health care workers catch it?" what do doctors and nurses do when they are examining you? Well they take your temp (depending on how ie old school thermometers where they must touch or be inserted in the body, right there you are exposed to sweat/saliva/feces depending on how they get your temp reading), Blood tests would be done (again in contact with blood), Clothes that the infected have on would have some bodily fluids on them, if they are in a hospital, their room would be contaminated as they would be in there coughing, drooling, peeing, pooping,sweating .... all of which will stay in that room so when doctors go in there, they are exposed to high amounts of ebola.

Also... You say that they give us no reason as to how he passed the screening to get back to the states. But again that is ignorant. It takes somthing like 21 days from the point you come into contact with the virus until you begin to show symptoms of ebola, you can only spread it AFTER your symptoms appear. The doctor knew this, That is why when he noticed the symptoms he brought himself to the hospital.

Maybe you should be the one to go back and look at every detail because you are so ignorant to the facts that it hurts. If you actually looked into how ebola spreads then you would have never posted this uneducated rant on Ebola.

Hope you have a wonderful day.

Snyp

a reply to: TrueBrit

hmmmm....not sure about Bio-hazard suits having a lack of air.. since they come eq'd with full bio mask....*grin* I"m not an expert by any means.. but, I've spent 2 hours in MOPP4 gear in the military ...in the desert.

originally posted by: crayzeed
The trouble is an awful lot of people including nurses who look on doctors as gods. You only have to look in hospitals at the way nurses react when doctors are around. Talk about creeping and crawling and yes sir no sir three bags full sir. Any nurses on here will come on and refute all of what I've said but see for yourself when you go into hospitals. Now to answer your post, doctors are human just like you or I, they can catch Ebola just like you or I. But they are dealing with contaminated people on a daily basis and I would seriously contend to you that if a doctor kcaught Ebola then he would be failing as a good doctor. Looking after yourself is the very first priority and that includes doctors.

you maybe correct but you could also say that about the army. Privates do the same thing to their superiors, yes sir no sir three bags full sir.

Edit: you could actually say that about any job, lower level staff always have to do what their supervisors say if they want to keep their job.

It is the nature of their job, The doctors are the ones with the most training, Doctors are the ones administering care to the patients, the nurses are just (in the most basic terms) support staff for the doctors. So yes they better be doing what the doctor says.

I would HATE to go to a hospital where nurses DIDN'T listen to the doctors.

Also I don't know what hospitals you have been too but I have never seen a nurse treat a doctor like a god, Like a supervisor yes, Like a god.....Hell no.

a reply to: Speckle

Yes....

My thoughts exactly since ...well....he's a doctor. Makes me beg the question of the decon procedures after seeing a patient, ie. Stay in decon for 30 days and THEN you get the all clear to leave the country~!!

a reply to: Komodo

Milspec suits for operations in areas where infectious disease, toxilogical, and radiological threats are present, is very different from the gear that CDC and others operate in, when dealing with the highest level of contagious diseases. For a start, their gear is pressurised, and is more like a space suit than a military N.B.C. suit.

Second, it makes it very difficult to move around with the same dexterity that you are probably familiar with. Also, the sort of things they are asked to do in those suits, are different to the things you probably had to do in your more mobile, less restrictive military garb. Milspec gear is built to allow the maximum of mobility, so that the service person is still combat effective, while being protected from whatever environmental threat is present. But purely medical suits have a tighter focus on absolute isolation of the person inside the suit, from any potential microbial threat, and are made of less mobile materials and design as a result of that initiative behind their design.

In short, because milspec gear is designed for combat, not providing medical care in a constant exposure environment, and because their gear is purely for use in controlled situations, it has not been designed so that persons within the suit can remain on station for hours at a time.

a reply to: snypwsd

duh. of course i realize this. its not ignorance those are assumed parameters in the field. So after being in close proximity to that stuff, you do that? wake up bro. He might very well go down in history as the most compassionate socialite killer virus spreader that brought NYC to its knees

If anyone can find out where exactly he was in Europe , please add to the post. Thats where this story is blacked out.

What ??? Even with numbers from 10-12-14 from WHO and Nationalgeograhicnews.com there are 416 healthcare workers infected and 233 dead in W. Africa. Remember, that was 13 days ago...so numbers are likely higher !


reply to Painterz

a reply to: snypwsd
NO! I've seen it in multiple hospitals multiple times. I have 3 friends whose wives are nurses (2 in casualty and 1 midwife) and if you really want to see the grovelling, quite embarrassing sometimes, go to some of their parties and dances outside from the hospital. My best friend lost his wife to a doctor. Doctor seduced her and persuaded her to leave my friend for him and when she left him the good wonderful doctor dumped her. The amount of times she told us stories about when she worked in casualty about failed suicides and how the nurses hated them for taking their time. She ended up putting a pipe from her car exhaust into her car because she couldn't face going back to her husband. Believe me this is not a story I've made up it really happened.