First case of Ebola contracted outside Africa

October 6, 2014 • 12:24 pm

I’m still not worried that Ebolo is going to become a pandemic outside of west Africa, but this bulletin, just in from CNN, is worrisome:

A nurse’s assistant in Spain is the first person known to have contracted Ebola outside of Africa in the current outbreak.

Spanish Health Minister Ana Mato announced that a test confirmed the assistant has the virus. She had helped treat a Spanish missionary who contracted Ebola in West Africa.

I hope the Spanish have proper containment facilities.

30 thoughts on “First case of Ebola contracted outside Africa”

  1. I would almost expect this sort of thing. You are going to see a handful of stray cases like this in contacts and health care workers. I would expect one or more people in that apartment on Dallas to contract Ebola. There is, however, almost no chance of sustained transmission in developed countries.

  2. I’m still not worried that Ebolo is going to become a pandemic outside of west Africa

    You’ve not been keeping up with Naomi Wolfe then:

    http://www.vox.com/2014/10/5/6909837/naomi-wolf-isis-ebola-scotland-conspiracy-theories

    The US is sending troops overseas to bring Ebola back with them and thereby justify a security crackdown. That, plus faking the ISIS beheadings and, um, Scottish referendum. Something.

    Obviously off her meds but The Guardian equivocates:

    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/06/the-line-between-conspiracy-and-scepticism-is-getting-harder-to-draw-just-ask-naomi-wolf

    2. I don’t know what happened to Naomi Wolf. She seemed to go a bit off the deep end from what I’ve read and I haven’t felt like looking at the gory details yet.

      1. I always found her a bit off the deep end. I remember reading “The Beauty Myth” and noticing that she started the book by saying that sexist men use to say how women would find it so hard in the workforce, and then she spends half the book explaining how hard women found it to join the workforce. She (correctly) said that women were just as smart and capable, and then spends chapter after chapter belittling the intelligence of women and how they just can’t understand why an employer might want a receptionist to look pleasant rather than slobbish at the front desk, but a police officer should not look pretty and delicate but authoritative. It’s just so confusing for women, according to Wolf, to know how to dress for a job.

        I just remember how obliviously insulting it was to both men and women, and completely vapid when it came to social understanding and value. It seemed more like a conspiracy theorist description along the lines of “Illuminati have secretly defined how beauty operates in society for their personal benefit.”

        I’ve read some of her works since and haven’t seen much of a change.

  3. “I hope the Spanish have proper containment facilities.” Given that the nurse contracted the disease whilst treating the priest who died in a Madrid hospital, I fear not.

      1. Hospital procedures are very rigid. It’s as if the staff are encouraged NOT to think and NOT to take initiative. They genuinely fear doing so. I’ve seen them put up curtains around people they think are infected with contagious respiratory illnesses (like pneumonia) and all the while letting their relatives walk free every where. This was the case with my mother a couple of times. They surrounded her with a curtain and then put on masks, gloves and gowns then yelled at me for not doing so, meanwhile, I had been around her the whole time, walked all over the hospital touching things and already told them that wasn’t the problem as she has a chronic lung issue.

        I was right. She wasn’t contagious. They wouldn’t listen and I was amused at how they handled what they thought was a contagion – as if the germs won’t cross the curtain, “drat! they’ve put up the curtain. Now we’ve been foiled!”.

        1. Kind of “Masque of the Red Death”-ish. One of my favorite stories when I was a kid.

    3. This morning reporting is that they (with their emphasis) think she may have got infected while removing the full-body isolation suit that she wore to clean the room of one of the missionaries who died in Madrid a couple of weeks back.
      Which is worrying, because it means that although they’ve got the equipment, they don’t have adequate experience using it.
      One hopes that training courses are being cranked up all over the world. These are skills that are going to be needed.

    4. This morning’s Grauniad is carrying worrying allegations :

      Spanish health authorities said medics treating Ebola patients in Spain followed the protocols laid out by the World Health Organisation, but their claims were widely disputed. While level 4 protective equipment is required to attend to Ebola patients, healthcare workers in Spain who treated the missionaries had only level 2 equipment, said Juan Carlos Mejias, of Satse, a union that represents nurses. “Level 4 is what’s being used in other European countries.

      Definitions of biosecurity levels :

      Level 1 : well-characterized agents not known to consistently cause disease in healthy adult humans
      Level 2 : agents of moderate potential hazard to personnel and the environment.
      Level 3 : indigenous or exotic agents which may cause serious or potentially lethal disease after inhalation.
      Level 4 : agents that pose a high individual risk of aerosol-transmitted laboratory infections, agents which cause severe to fatal disease in humans for which vaccines or other treatments are not available,

      If substantiated, that is very worrying.

  5. In West Africa 979 people reportedly died of ebola in August and 1628 in September (my calculations). This is an increase in deaths of 66% in a month. If that rate stays constant, more than 20,000 will die in January alone. At a certain point all order will break down, people will panic, and nothing will contain the advance of the disease. Mali, an Islamic state, is just inland. Senegal is just north and Ivory Coast and Nigeria south and east of the affected area. If there is a general panic and exodus, who will be able to stop ebola’s spread?

    The developed world needs to step in heavy now. What could have been stemmed cheaply in May will now be costly. If things go badly, the fault must fall on those who have the capacity to foresee consequences and resources and manpower to solve the problem, but do not. I wonder if US, EU and UN would be so lethargic if a similar epidemic was overtaking Japan or Australia. The word genocide begins to form in my mind.

    1. “The word genocide begins to form in my mind”

      Then you should banish it forthwith. “Genocide” means a deliberate act of mass killing intended to eliminate an ethnic group. Nothing of the kind is taking place here. The situation in West Africa is tragic, but genocide it ain’t.

      1. I can understand the use of the word genocide here in a sense: when adequate measures are not taken the consequences could be similar to a genocide by omission. Failure of a crop due to disease can lead to famine, disease, social panic and emigration.
        The Irish famine is an example. Better measures could have been taken, in that cash crops were exported while many people were starving, there being also an epidemic of cholera and typhus with smallpox as well. It can be argued that there was not a cold-blooded plan to commit genocide, but there wasn’t a great will to prevent or limit the calamity either.

      1. NO! Dave has it right; no Wolfy conspiracy theory. It is a matter of definitions: I do not distinguished between crimes of commission and those of studied omission. Callously let someone drown rather than throwing the buoy you are carrying, and the word ‘murder’ begins to form in my mind. The rest is fancy lawyer talk.

    3. As the population densities in Mali and Senegal are considerably lower, I’d expect the epidemic to sputter out as it approaches the Sahel.
      On the other hand, the potential spread along the coast of the Gulf of Guniea and Bight of Benin is very worrying.

      The developed world needs to step in heavy now.

      With what? Volunteer medics? Are there enough? I sincerely hope that the manufacturers of “Chemturion” (and equivalent) “space suits” are ramping production, because with tens of thousands of cases in realistic projection, and hundreds of thousands potentially, they’re going to be in demand.
      You know, I’m almost glad that the only appropriate item I can find on eBay is ID# 160807157322.
      There comes a point at which you draw a line between desert and sea, and erect a cordon sanitaire. With machine guns.
      I just hope my friends and colleagues of the last year stay far enough offshore to not meet any significant numbers of “boat people”. Fortunately the flotilla is already “hardened” (details not being published – but the hardeners do know their business) against piracy, which should be sufficient to keep disease refugees from boarding.

  6. It’s the end of the world.No really i’ll listen to what Jack Van Impe says,ha ha ha or lol.

  9. Gentlemen! God *has* spoken!

    If you pay for missionaries, than Ebola spreads. God wants YOU to pay for medical research.

  10. It looks like the situation in Liberia etc is going critical. They have one doctor for every 100,000 people in Sierra Leone! They have insufficient beds for people.

    I would like to know about those who recover in those countries – I read there is a 50% mortality – so 50% recover.
    Do they fully recover?
    Are they then immune?
    Do they have other health consequences?

    1. Mortality in this outbreak is running close to average for the disease – in the mid-60s of percent.
      People are considering whether the blood (plasma, serum) of survivors may be useful as a treatment or even a prophylactic. But questions such as “how long after the end of symptoms does the patient remain infective” need to be answered first. People are looking at this, but the groundwork hasn’t been done. Diseases of poor foreigners never attract much investment, and most of the work has followed the realisation that Ebola (and relatives) have real potential for bioterrorism.
      I’m not trying to sound overly pessimistic, but this is a serious and dangerous situation. We do have solutions available, but they’re all going to involve large numbers of deaths.

  12. And another one.
    Australia’s first suspected case.

    A woman in Australia is being tested for Ebola after developing a fever since returning home from Sierra Leone.Health officials confirmed the 57-year-old woman developed a “low grade” fever on Thursday, and was taken to Cairns hospital to be assessed by specialists.

    Link.

Comments are closed.