Dallas Is Not Looking Medically Competent — America’s Probably Indicative Screw Up with Ebola — even after Lots of Advance Warning

© 2014 Peter Free

 

03 October 2014

 

 

In our thoughtless eagerness to dampen ebola panic, we forgot even the basics of infectious disease containment

 

The fiasco that has arisen from dealing with just one ebola infection in Dallas shows how the pomposity of American arrogance often whimpers off into massive incompetence, when Life’s bill collector finally stops by:

 

 

More than six months after an outbreak of Ebola began its rampage through West Africa, local and federal health officials have displayed an uneven and flawed response to the first case diagnosed in the United States.

 

In the latest indication, state and local authorities confirmed Thursday that a week after a Liberian man fell ill with Ebola in Dallas, and four days after he was placed in isolation at a hospital here, the apartment where he was staying with four other people had not been sanitized and the sheets and dirty towels he used while sick remained in the home. County officials visited the apartment without protection Wednesday night.

 

The officials said it had been difficult to find a contractor willing to enter the apartment to clean it and remove bedding and clothes, which they said had been bagged in plastic.

 

© 2014 Kevin Sack and Manny Fernandez, Delay in Dallas Ebola Cleanup as Workers Balk at Task, New York Times (02 October 2014)

 

 

The Times understates the fiasco

 

When Anderson Cooper interviewed a resident of the apartment in question, she said that they had been threatened with arrest and prosecution, if they ventured outside the apartment quarantine. And she mentioned that officials had left her and the other occupants, unassisted, with the contaminated and potentially deadly remnants from ebola patient Thomas Duncan’s stay.

 

In other words, metaphorically:

 

Too bad, ma’am.

 

We’re gonna shoot you, if you exit.

 

And we’re gonna watch you die, if’n ya don’t.

 

The uncomprehending distress in the interviewee’s voice was plain.

 

 

“Only” 6 months to get ready

 

Ebola got loose in West Africa about 6 months ago. Africans have been dying by the thousands.

 

As I predicted in an article about America’s misplaced geopolitical priorities, the statistics of the ebola outbreak made it inevitable that someone, eventually, was going to make it back to the allegedly “civilized” world undiagnosed. With lots of contacts made afterward that authorities would have to subsequently track and contain.

 

 

It is not just Africa that is unprepared

 

I am not slamming Dallas. Chances are that most American cities would have been caught similarly.

 

Complacence is usually humanity’s deadliest enemy. For example — “Why practice ebola containment, when Africa’s Africa and here is here?”

 

 

Mr. Duncan is just 1 case — imagine 10 or more

 

The American government health establishment’s continuing downplay of the ebola threat to the United States has not been helpful. Just as the CDC’s initially complacent reaction to West Africa’s escalating situation was not.

 

 

NIH’s too catchall excuse — no money

 

From Gabrielle Canon at Mother Jones:

 

 

The United States government has pledged to send help to West Africa to help stop Ebola from spreading—but the main agencies tasked with this aid work say they're hamstrung by budget cuts from the 2013 sequester.

 

On September 16, the Senate Committees on Appropriations and Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions held a hearing to discuss the resources needed to address the outbreak. Sen. Patty Murray . . . asked NIH representative Anthony Fauci about sequestration's effect on the efforts.

 

"If even modest investments had been made…the current Ebola epidemic could have been detected earlier, and it could have been identified and contained."

 

"I have to tell you honestly it's been a significant impact on us," said Fauci.

 

"It has both in an acute and a chronic, insidious way eroded our ability to respond in the way that I and my colleagues would like to see us be able to respond to these emerging threats.”

 

Sequestration required the NIH to cut its budget by 5 percent, a total of $1.55 billion in 2013. Cuts were applied across all of its programs, affecting every area of medical research.

 

© 2014 Gabrielle Canon, Budget Cuts "Eroded Our Ability to Respond" to Ebola, Says Top Health Official, Mother Jones (01 October 2014) (extracts)

 

 

Really, Dr. Fauci?

 

You’re telling me that a 5 percent budget cut hamstrung efforts to properly prioritize an in progress infectious disease catastrophe? That diverting money from less pressing projects was an impossibility?

 

You further want me to believe that a 5 percent lower budget prevented the American health establishment from sounding intelligent alarms and issuing national reminders about appropriate containment protocols?

 

 

The moral? — Recognize that, on balance, much of Government becomes more and more useless, as the years go by

 

It is not that Government is the enemy. It is that it no longer seems to be capable of performing even the most minimally necessary parts of its scope of responsibility. We have the American public and its elected politicians to thank for that.

 

The United States is back in Iraq and now Syria — expensively and fruitlessly killing folks in a strategy that already proved itself to be an abysmal failure in the former, as well as Afghanistan — while:

 

ebola becomes endemic in Africa

 

and

 

our own medical and public health infrastructure is having trouble dealing with just 1 ebola case in Dallas.

 

The symbolic absurdity of this situation is epic. It has the earmarks of something that historians may later label a turning point.