As concern mounts over Ebola, US officials in charge of dealing with the infectious disease have one basic message meant to address public fears:
“The bottom line here is we know how to stop it,” says Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, Dr. Frieden explained his confidence: “It’s not going to spread widely in the US, for two basic reasons. We can do infection control in hospitals, and we can do public health interventions that can stop it in its tracks. We do that by identifying every possible contact, monitoring them for 21 days and if they get any symptoms, isolating and monitoring them as well.”
I certainly hope he’s right, and he probably is, although it could get dicey if several small outbreaks hit at the same time in different parts of the country. If the Ebola patient in Dallas infected others there those cases should be showing up this coming week. I pray they won’t.
A site I find very helpful in continuing to track Ebola news is
https://www.internationalsos.com/ebola/index.cfm?
Some of the latest headlines:
1) Ebola ramping up dramatically in Sierra Leone. It could soon be worse there than Liberia if current trends continue. On Saturday alone there were 81 new cases reported and 121 deaths in Sierra Leone from Ebola.
2) A nurse in Spain, who treated one of the Spanish missionaries evacuated from Africa who died from the disease, has now tested positive for Ebola, making this the first case of infection outside of Africa.
3) A French MSF health worker has been cured and released.
4) A Norwegian MSF worker is now infected and will be medevaced to Norway.
Please continue to pray for all the health workers and those responding to Ebola on the frontlines. They need God’s protection and strength. I’m thankful for and praying for the journalists as well who are helping keep the world aware of what’s going on. As the infection of the NBC photographer shows, they too are at risk.