I am totally confused as to who thought the United States was ready for an Ebola pandemic! I'm a serviceman with twenty years of experience in providing protection for myself and my shipmates in the event of a Biological or Chemical attack! The fundamental procedures utilized to decontaminate my ship, shipmates, and myself are an established protocol that we practice quarterly to be 'PREPARE' in the event we are exposed to a NBC (Nuclear, Biological, or Chemical) attack.
Furthermore, these same procedures would meet the minimum requirements to protect individuals in harms way from any pandemic such as Ebola! So what the hell went wrong in Dallas; how can we be fully prepared to protect the populous of the United States, if we only have four or five hospitals that have isolation units to support the influx of no more than eight or ten people! We are so not prepared for a pandemic in these United States!
Here is a recent worst case scenario that supports my position... a plane arriving from Belgium experienced an incident of vomiting by a man that came from Liberia! Vomiting is one of the alerts to Ebola! The plane lands and 'all' passengers and the crew disembark from the plane and join the people waiting in the airport for flights, people waiting for arriving passengers! Later, when cognizant authorities are made aware of the incident on the plane in flight, a public announcement is made via the airport public announcement system. The announcement instructs passengers on that flight to isolate themselves from others... if they are in the airport!
What occurred in this incident does all of the following:
1. Exposes everyone in that airport to Ebola!
2. Those that promptly left the airport are potential 'carriers' at-large, capable of infecting untold hundreds of others!
3. Those still in the airport can, in no way, be isolated to reduce the chance of spreading the disease because their is no area so designated and certified to contain an infected person, or persons suspected of being exposed to the disease!
4. There are no certified medical persons stationed at the airport to facilitate an event of Ebola exposure!
We are now learning that none of the people at the hospital in Dallas, TX were certified to protect themselves from a patient presenting with Ebola; in fact, the Ebola patient who requested to be admitted, was initially turned away... creating yet another scenario of mass exposure! The Dallas nurses charged with triage of incoming patients were not certified to perform triage on a patient presenting with Ebola; they did not even know how to protect themselves from expose to the disease!
In essence, we are no more prepared to protect the nation from a mass exposure than any of the three countries experiencing a pandemic of Ebola now! We all heard the officials from CDC stating emphatically that "We know how to contain Ebola; we have done it before, and we can do it again! That was a blatant lie, evidenced by the reactions of the people in that hospital in Dallas, and by the measures taken to protect everyone on the flight into Newark!
Add to that, the defunding of departments of health that would facilitate the gearing up to meet a demand of more than eight to ten patients presenting with symptoms of Ebola, and you can easily surmised that we are in deep trouble!
In a democracy, silence is not golden; it is condonance in the face of injustices; it is fear, where the thought of reprisal fosters control – Rodney A. Davis
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