Medical doctors attending to an Ebola virus disease victim He said already LUTH has set up a team to handle any crisis arising from an unexpected spread of the disease. He said: “We put in place isolation mechanism, and barrier mechanisms. Everything is on standby in the event there is any case in the hospital. The Lagos State Ministry of Health and Federal Ministry of Health have also been carrying out enlightenment campaign where they have health education units to educate members of the public on how to protect themselves against exposure and to recognise and to have a high level index of suspicion. So that if there is any suspected case, the report is quickly made. “I think we should commend that private hospital because they demonstrated high index of suspicion. They were able to keep the patient and declined to allow the patient leave the hospital and they immediately alerted federal and state authorities. “The Federal and State authorities have since stepped in to investigate and try to trace the contacts while specimen are still being received and tested to see if any of the contacts are at risk. We need to reduce body contact. People no longer shake hands. The thing about communicable diseases is that there must be an agent that is transmissible from one person to the other. It is either that agent or product of the agent or a part of that agent that must be transmissible from an infected person to susceptible host. So that is very clear so the virus must go from one person, but in this case, it is virus. But in some conditions, it could be the product of the virus, a toxin from the virus can be transmitted to somebody in some other diseases, but in this instance, the virus must be transmitted from one person to another. “We have the technology to detect the virus or its products or its parts through DNA technology. For instance, we have the technology in this hospital to detect even when the person is not sick but it is just in the incubation period which means the patient is already incubating the agent only that it hasn’t manifested the symptoms. The manifestation of the symptoms is the totality of the interactions between the virus and the body. So it takes some time.” Ebola Red Alert worldwide Meantime, fears that the West African Ebola outbreak could spread to other continents are growing with European and Asian countries on alert as a leading medical charity warn the epidemic is out of control. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said the crisis gripping Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone would only get worse and warned there was no overarching strategy to handle the world’s worst outbreak of the disease. US Christian charity Samaritan’s Purse was temporarily withdrawing its non-essential staff from Liberia, it said, citing regional “instability and ongoing security issues”. Hong Kong announced quarantine measures for suspected cases, although one woman arriving from Africa with possible symptoms tested negative, while the EU said it was ready to deal with the threat. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has held talks with global health officials on potential measures to halt the spread of the disease. In Britain, where one person has tested negative for the disease, Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said it was regarded as “a very serious threat” An emergency meeting had decided that the best approach was to provide “additional resources to deal with the disease at source” in West Africa, he added. Ebola can kill victims within days, causing severe fever and muscle pain, vomiting, diarrhoea and, in some cases, organ failure and unstoppable bleeding. 57 more deaths from the Ebola epidemic spreading alarm in West Africa have pushed the overall fatality toll from the outbreak to 729, the World Health Organization said yesterday. The 57 deaths were recorded between Thursday and Sunday last week in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, the UN health agency said in a statement. It added that 122 new cases were detected over the four days, taking the total number of confirmed and likely infected cases to 1,323.Bart Janssens, MSFs director of operations, warned that governments and global bodies had no “overarching view” of how to tackle the outbreak. This epidemic is unprecedented, absolutely out of control and the situation can only get worse, because it is still spreading”, he said.
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 14:39:11 +0000
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