Two weeks ago, the first Ebola case was diagnosed in the United States. Thomas Eric Duncan, the infected, had direct contact with at least 18 people, while 100 people were contacted and a handful are being monitored. No one Duncan has been in contact with has started showing symptoms of Ebola. Duncan, on his airport departure screening, lied about having been in contact with any person infected with Ebola, and will be prosecuted.
Ebola has infected over 7,000 people and killed over 3,000 in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Senegal and Nigeria. The outbreaks in Nigeria and Senegal are estimated to be over, but in the other countries listed, the number of Ebola cases double every three weeks. The CDC has estimated Ebola could affect up to 1.4 million by the end of the year.
Four people close to Duncan, his partner, her 13-year-old son, and her two twenty something-year-old nephews, were being quarantined in Duncan's apartment in Dallas, where his personal items were still located. They were ordered not to leave for 21 days, the incubation period for Ebola. The order covering the family members of Duncan also orders them to report any symptoms that they begin to exhibit. Symptoms include fever above 100.5 degrees, headache, nausea, diarrhea or abdominal pain. After days of being housed with items used by the infected, the first phase to clean out the apartment was enacted on Friday. The family was moved to a four-bedroom house in Dallas while the apartment is being cleaned. The quarantine on the family will end October 19th.
While I agree that the family should be quarantined, I think they should've been taken to a hospital or government facility in order to do so. If they weren't infected with Ebola, they could have been once being housed for days with towels, sheets, and other personal items Duncan had used.
Do you think the CDC and Dallas Sheriff's Department made the right call, quarantining the family in Duncan's apartment? How could the airport security in Liberia have better handled screening people?
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/10/02/ebola-family-quarantined/16579953/
http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/03/health/ebola-us/index.html
Photos taken by Sana Syed.
Replies
Excellent job!
I don't think that it is really the airports fault as long as they aren't showing symptoms. I don't think they should have quarantined them in Duncan's apartment. They should have put them in a clean area and then watched them. They very well couldn't have had it before the quarantine and then as they were in there, they got it. I think they could have made a better decision.
I feel tighter security on Libya airports, and that it was the right thing for quarantining the family and others.
I think they probably did the right thing by quarantining the family so that the disease doesn't spread! And I think the Liberia should have a better way to screen people, given that ebola is such a bad illness.
Yes they made the right call because if these people that could be infected went out in public and interacted with people they could have infected others also so i think they made the right call.
It wasn't right for Duncan to lie about being in contact with people, but at the same time, It wasn't right for the people overseeing the Ebola case to just let Duncan loose in an airport, potentially infecting hundreds. I think it was right for CDC to quarantine the family, and It wasn't the airports fault that Duncan decided to be stupid.
Do you have an opinion on the fact that the family was in an infected home for several days before the CDC even began cleaning the apartment?
I think they did the right thing by quarantining the family in order to protect them and others with the potential to be infected with the disease, but I don't think they made the right decision by having them quarantined within the home containing items that could infect them, if they were not already infected. I think they should have moved the family right away to a clean home and then began quarantining them.
They already had the chance to be infected, so why risk the danger of spreading the disease to the hospital with four more carriers? With a disease like Ebola, it would be a waste of resources to make a quarantine zone at the hospital that can support five people instead of just one. The personal items that could have carried Ebola they would have already had contact with, and were being cleaned out by the CDC crew.
Also, I would like to add that this article was very well written and had useful pictures. Good job.
The CDC didn't start cleaning out Duncan's apartment until days after he was diagnosed. What makes you think it is a waste of resources to help keep four people from catching a fatal disease?
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