 |
| Politicsalerts.blospot.com |
Dr. Craig Spencer, a member of Doctors Without Borders, became the city’s first Ebola patient on Thursday.
He reported Thursday morning coming down with a fever and gastrointestinal distress and was being treated Friday in an isolation ward at Bellevue Hospital Center, a designated Ebola center.
New York City is “fully prepared to handle Ebola,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said Friday, a day after the first case of the disease hit Manhattan.
“We have the finest public health system, not only in this country, but anywhere in the world. … It is ready for extraordinary challenges,” he said. “The only threat is if one is coming into contact directly with the bodily fluids of someone who has this disease.”
Health experts on Friday continued to trace the recent movement of the diagnosed patient, Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency room doctor who returned to the U.S. on Oct. 17 after treating Ebola patients in Guinea. Rapid response teams from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) arrived in New York just hours after Spencer’s diagnosis. After Spencer tested positive for the disease on Thursday, the CDC conducted a second examination to confirm the case. The additional test also returned positive for Ebola. He remains in stable condition in isolation at New York’s Bellevue Hospital.
Earlier on Friday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo expressed confidence in the response to the first Ebola case in the city.
“We’ve had weeks to prepare. We took it very, very seriously,” Cuomo said on msnbc’s “Morning Joe.” “I think we’ve had one of the most comprehensive preparation efforts in the country.”
Spencer returned to the United States last week after working with Doctors Without Borders to treat Ebola patients in Guinea, where the disease was detected for the first time this year in March. City officials said Spencer began to feel “sluggish” on Tuesday but did not develop active signs of the virus until Thursday morning, when he registered a fever. Ebola cannot be transmitted until an infected patient exhibits active symptoms and has direct contact with another individual; it is not an airborne virus.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has dispatched an Ebola response team to New York. The city’s health commissioner, Mary Travis Bassett, said Friday that the CDC had confirmed Spencer’s initial test results as positive for Ebola.
She said Spencer was in stable condition.
Doctors at the hospital have reported he has been cooperative – giving details of his activities since his return and meeting with his family.
“He’s talking on the cell phone to a lot of folks,” said Dr. Ram Raju, president of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation. “He’s cheerful.”
Heath officials have repeatedly given assurances that the disease is spread only by direct contact with bodily fluids such as saliva, blood, vomit and feces, and that the dried virus survives on surfaces for only a matter of hours.
“Ebola is an extremely hard disease to contract. It’s transmitted only through direct contact with the blood or other bodily fluids of another individual,” de Blasio said Friday. “It cannot be transmitted through casual contact, it cannot be transmitted in airborne fashion.”
De Blasio also said the best thing New Yorkers can do is get flu shots so that city health professionals do not have to be distracted by ruling out Ebola. The early symptoms of the flu and Ebola are similar.
“We have to make sure our medical professionals can focus on this crisis properly,” de Blasio said. “They don’t need to have false reports or misleading dynamics clogging up their efforts.”
De Blasio said New Yorkers should call 911 or go to an emergency room if they have possible Ebola symptoms and were in the three West African countries affected by the disease in the last 21 days,
No comments:
Post a Comment