Doctor at New York City Hospital Tests Positive for Ebola
Photo Credit: Joshua Bright for The New York Times.Doctor in New York City Is Sick With Ebola
By MARC SANTORA.
A doctor in New York City who recently returned from treating Ebola patients in Guinea became the first person in the city to test positive for the virus Thursday, setting off a search for anyone who might have come into contact with him.
The doctor, Craig Spencer, was rushed to Bellevue Hospital Center and placed in isolation at the same time as investigators sought to retrace every step he had taken over the past several days.
At least three people he had contact with in recent days have been placed in isolation. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which dispatched a team to New York, is conducting its own test to confirm the positive test on Thursday, which was performed by a city lab.
While officials have said they expected isolated cases of the disease to arrive in New York eventually, and had been preparing for this moment for months, the first case highlighted the challenges involved in containing the virus, especially in a crowded metropolis. Dr. Spencer, 33, had traveled on the A and L subway lines Wednesday night, visited a bowling alley in Williamsburg, and then took a taxi back to Manhattan.
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Photo Credit: Alessandro Della Valle / EPASome US hospitals weigh withholding care to Ebola patients
By Reuters.
The Ebola crisis is forcing the American healthcare system to consider the previously unthinkable: withholding some medical interventions because they are too dangerous to doctors and nurses and unlikely to help a patient.
US hospitals have over the years come under criticism for undertaking measures that prolong dying rather than improve patients’ quality of life.
But the care of the first Ebola patient diagnosed in the United States, who received dialysis and intubation and infected two nurses caring for him, is spurring hospitals and medical associations to develop the first guidelines for what can reasonably be done and what should be withheld.
Officials from at least three hospital systems interviewed by Reuters said they were considering whether to withhold individual procedures or leave it up to individual doctors to determine whether an intervention would be performed.
Ethics experts say they are also fielding more calls from doctors asking what their professional obligations are to patients if healthcare workers could be at risk.
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Experts Predict ‘Catastrophic’ Ebola Epidemic in West Africa If Aid Delayed
By HealthDay News.
A large influx of international aid is needed, and soon, if West Africa is to avoid tens of thousands of deaths from the widening Ebola crisis, a team of Yale University researchers predict.
Using a specially designed mathematical model, the researchers looked at the possible future of the outbreak in just one densely populated county of hard-hit Liberia — Montserrado County, home to the capital city of Monrovia.
The researchers said that if international aid isn’t delivered to Liberia in sufficient time and quantity, by Dec. 15 Montserrado County will have more than 170,000 cases of Ebola — 12 percent of its population — and more than 90,000 deaths.
However, if the international community ramps up efforts by Oct. 31, almost 98,000 of those cases could be avoided.
“Our predictions highlight the rapidly closing window of opportunity for controlling the outbreak and averting a catastrophic toll of new Ebola cases and deaths in the coming months,” study senior author Alison Galvani, professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, said in a university news release.
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Photo Credit: Joe Penney / ReutersEbola Reaches Mali
By CARI ROMM.
Less than a week after two west African countries successfully rid themselves of Ebola, another has announced its first case of the disease. In a television address on Thursday, Mali’s health minister, Ousmane Kone, revealed that a two-year-old girl has tested positive for the virus.
The girl was hospitalized yesterday in Kayes, a town in western Mali. A health official told Reuters that relatives brought her into the country from neighboring Guinea, where the outbreak began, after her mother died of the disease a few weeks ago.
Kone said that the girl is improving, Reuters reported, and that those who had direct contact with her are currently being monitored for signs of the disease.
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