There might be good reason to be scared out of your wits if you live in the USA!
With the death from ebola of Thomas Eric Duncan the world is very much suspicious and afraid. What we have seen so far is a cover your ass mentality stemming from the observations on TV of what has actually been happening.
The first person entering the US from Liberia with the deadly disease was Doctor Kent Brantly who has since been discharged and said to be cured. He was able to have access to an experimental drug. It is now run out and was not available to Duncan.
Over a period of days we learned Duncan had presented himself to hospital and was sent home. Then was rushed back by ambulance a few days later which we are all familiar with from the expanding coverage of TV, namely CNN.
This is what I saw and heard. I saw one man with a hazmat suit on, being washed down after working in the Texas hospital. He was standing on a plastic sheet while another man without any protective gear at all washed him down bare handed!
Then we heard that Duncan's bedding was still in his apartment For days, with a woman and child there. When they finally acted to remove the soiled bedsheets from the apartment, people next door, including children nearby, watched them come and go with the sealed toxic bags. And the hospital where Duncan was isolated had his contaminated bed stuff piled high in an ante room.
The head of the CDC, Dr. Tom Frieden, told us that we had no worries. Ebola was not going to become epidemic in North America.
Then Nina Pham who helped treat Duncan came down with it. A second nurse, Amber Vinson, flew on airliners forth and back while the talking heads continued to tell us we had no worries.
Then Nurse Pham was transported cross country to another hospital in Maryland. They evidently had the ability to quarantine her better than Texas Presbyterian. And while she was going to board a plane out of Texas, surrounded by doctors and nurses in white protective gear, she wearing a yellow suit herself, a man in only shirt and slacks hovered nearby, and not a one of the protectors told him to keep a distance! All seen on TV!Meanwhile some politicians called for the suspension of commercial air flights in and out of Liberia and the other affected countries in West Africa. They were criticized for going public with their concerns. Was Wall Street afraid people would stop flying? Stocks values would decline? Again the talking heads, the people who seemed to be knowledgeable and in charge, continued to say it would do no good to quarantine a whole region.
But Senegal closed it's own borders and has no one stricken with ebola. Cases also emerged in Spain and Germany where another man died. No one in health care was given any special training on what do to about ebola. Or even how to put on and secure the hazmat suits.
Respected doctors on CNN still told us we had no worries.
Others said they had so few facilities to treat ebola patients that it could be impossible to contain if it spread much further. One said there could be as few as 20 isolation beds available throughout the country! Some politicians said America needed to close its borders with Canada and Mexico, even while planes arrived via Britain or Belgium with more passengers from the West African region. (same thing they said about 9/11 after the terrorists flew into America on legal Visas!) And the health care spokespeople struggled to avert a panic situation while the MSM feasted.
A recent poll suggested that the level of trust of the ones in charge of the scary epidemic was plummeting. No wonder.
But we know why.
If you look at the 5000 Health Care facilities in America, hospitals are literally ALL 'for profit' operations. We hear that most of them have no preparation protocol, no training for nurses, nor equipment to handle serious contagions or ebola patients. And we do know why, don't we? It would all cost money!The bottom line trumps the American public's safety even though 70% of ebola patients die.
Is that why the airlines continue to fly in and out of West Africa? Bottom line? There is not an airline in North America that is equipped to handle a coughing, puking, feverish patient from Africa. Every other passenger would be at extreme risk.
And now a Carnival Cruise ship has someone on board who also worked at the Texas hospital and could have contact with Duncan! When this came to light the ship tried to put in to Belize but was turned away. Mexico also refused docking and the cruise ship is heading back to Texas with about 4000 holidayers on board and one quarantined passenger, but Carnival is being quiet about where the person is being held. Will that be 4000 more people who need specific monitoring?
Some of those first 76 health care responders from Texas Presbyterian have been told not to fly, ride a bus or even shop at a mall! Is this crisis expanding exponentially?
Amber Vinson went shopping and now they are looking for others from that same store. Frontier Airlines are seeking passengers on seven flights including people who flew AFTER Vinson was aboard. They have cleaned the plane several times and have taken it out of service.
At least the police took their duties seriously, creating a huge convoy of vehicles to escort the ebola patient Nina Pham from the airport with virtually no chance of anything preventing the ambulance from getting to the National Institutes of Health Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. One of only four biocontainment hospitals in the nation. Good for them!
Why isn't someone acting with stronger proposals to curb the growing frantic scare? Why? There is a major political election due in short weeks. No candidate wants to alienate contributors to their campaign funds. And we know that no Republican candidate will dare interfere with the running of a private facility or criticize the unpreparedness of hospital governors!
And here is a big one - The CDC does not have any authority to force it's recommendations or suggestions on any hospital! CDC rules are only guidelines. And do we think that private, for profit hospitals will spend the small fortunes necessary to implement procedures and protocols to protect the public? The bottom line again rules the operation of a modern hospital in America! And to make matters worse, the CDC saw its discretionary funding cut by $585 million from 2010 to 2014 and the National Institutes of Health has faced $446 million in cuts during the same period. And we know there is probably more money working against Obama-care than is actually used in running the program!
So how does any private institution handle cost savings? Not by starting at the top with administrators salaries, but with the lowest paid cleaning staff, by making do with older equipment, and buying lower grade materials, We have all seen that before. Some of the nurses were taping up tears in their uniforms with regular tape! The procedures at Texas Presbyterian have been criticized by other health care professionals. But what hospital could anticipate the arrival of a Thomas Duncan?
So what next? President Obama has appointed a former Chief of Staff to Joe Biden as the Ebola Czar. Ron Klain will report to Homeland Security and Susan Rice. And no doubt he will gather a cadre around him of sycophants, to help perpetuate the job, but he will have no authority to enforce rules or regulations for private for profit hospitals! Klain has no history at all with medicine, he is a lawyer and a 'political operative'. Didn't they have a drug czar once who gave up in disgust? The fact that Klain is a lawyer may be okay, the fact that he was a lobbyist for Fannie Mae may not. Is his job just one more political appointment? An attempt to shepherd actions through this dilemma so as not to damage those in power?
Do you get the feeling that President Obama is not really in charge of anything? But just doing what someone is directing him to do?
Are you scared yet? It is a closed circle and the American public is excluded.
Even the WHO, the World Health Organization is admitting to failures, saying that their own response to Africa was marred by incompetency and ineffective bureaucracy!
Isn't that what we are all seeing daily on the news? Incompetency and a stumbling bureaucracy?
People covering their asses who really have no idea what they are doing? How does this happen within agencies of the government that are supposedly there to serve the interests of the people?
 |
| Doctors ................................... Officials |
But when the crunch comes, we get exactly what is happening right now, the complete breakdown of a fallacious health system.
And those in control are the same people who built this mess and keep asking you to vote for them. Again.
Ebola has never spread to this many countries before, and millions of people are seeing why the epidemic is becoming pandemic! Yet Americans usually rise to the occasion and someone emerges out of the mess to set the course to a solution. Cross your fingers but don't touch anything with them.
Are we afraid yet?
No?
Well I have not even touched on the idea that certain people feel that this disease might have become weaponized.
Hazmat suits come in various colors and with a little tuck at the waist they could become fashionable.
We hope not.
