Liberian Community in Texas Raises Concerns About Dallas Ebola Patient's Treatment
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/liberi...cerns-dallas-ebola-patients/story?id=26078938
The attitudes expressed by the 'Liberian community (because I guess they don't consider themselves Americans? or perhaps they aren't Americans, I don't know) just make me sad. The family thinks Mr. Duncan received substandard care because he--as the first patient in the country to be undiagnosed before he got here--wasn't immediately admitted and treated for Ebola. Did he tell the ER staff that he was very intimately in contact with someone in Liberia who died a few hours after his last contact? I doubt that, but here is a wake-up call for the Liberian community and every other community in this country--our hospitals, urgent care clinics, physicians, and walk-in clinics in grocery stores and pharmacies around this country are NOT accustomed to seeing or treating Ebola patients, and it is NOT going to be the first, second, third, tenth or even 20th diagnosis that comes to mind if you go in describing symptoms of fever and stomach pain. And let's be real here--flu is going to kill many, many more people in this country this year (as in every year past in history) than Ebola and
there is no cure for flu, either. There IS a vaccine, but even that isn't 100% effective, and many people are more afraid of that than getting the disease that could kill them.
If every medical provider in this country is to now consider Ebola a primary suspect every time a patient comes in with stomach pains and/or fever and has to order tests, quarantine, hospitalization, etc. then our medical system would soon collapse. I don't care whether you have insurance or not, or are a citizen or not, it is just not logistically or economically possible to do that. So what are the alternatives? Quarantine every person who has traveled to or through West Africa for the past 30 days and in the future? Seal our borders? (We'll all take a moment to laugh at that concept.) Or maybe, just possibly, people who have handled critically ill, vomiting, bleeding individuals in one of the countries where Ebola is known to be rampant should very clearly and honestly state that instead of just magically expecting a country's medical establishment with no experience with this disease at all to diagnose it out of thin air.
As for the family's demands to know why Mr. Duncan wasn't transferred to Emory? Emory is a fine hospital, and we in this area are proud of it. But is is NOT the only hospital in the U.S. that is more than capable of treating Ebola if--and this is key--they already know the diagnosis when the patient arrives, which was the case with the two patients who survived there. Emory isn't the magical place where every Ebola patient automatically gets well, and ZMapp--even if there were still a supply of it, which there isn't--isn't a magical cure-all. Some of the patients who received it died anyway, and who knows? Maybe the ZMapp killed them.
It's just sad that there is this whole belief of persecution when the hard truth is that most of the patients who get Ebola are going to die no matter what treatment they receive.