The Ebola risk, does it really exist?

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EMTIsee

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In recent months, our ems company as purchased and trained with EBOLA PPE kits. Then suddenly no one was talking about Ebola. Has this disease vanished from the states?
 
There were only 4 or 5 confirmed cases of Ebola in the states to begin with. And only two that were actually contracted while in the states. The last known case was several months ago. It was blown out of proportion from the start.

Our "Ebola Response" is now a general "Highly Infectious Disease response." The Ebola hysteria did provide some very good training and ideas of what to expect for infectious and deadly diseases in general, though.
 
STXmedic said:
There were only 4 or 5 confirmed cases of Ebola in the states to begin with. And only two that were actually contracted while in the states. The last known case was several months ago. It was blown out of proportion from the start.

Our "Ebola Response" is now a general "Highly Infectious Disease response." The Ebola hysteria did provide some very good training and ideas of what to expect for infectious and deadly diseases in general, though.
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You think so about ebola?
 
EMTIsee said:
Your department, didn't have four hour meetings on it?
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Oh, we absolutely did. We had department meetings, hospital and metro health meetings. We even went to the Tier 2 research facility that studies Marburg and Ebola down here and had face to face meetings with the doctors that research filoviruses. Our department got caught up in the same hype that everyone else did.
 
Agreed, WAY out of proportion.
 
On one hand, completely out of proportion. On the other hand, I think it did gear processes that should have been in place to begin with. MY hospital (county hospital, one of the busiest EDs in California, 12th largest county in the US by population, largest by land area) undertook a 2 day crash build to convert 5 or 6 rooms in one of the units to an emergency infectious disease unit (anteroom, shower room, independent filtration, etc) in case we got an Ebola rule out case. Once confirmed (it takes a couple of days to get the final lab report back), the patient would have been shipped out to one of the designated Ebola hospitals in California.

On one hand, the crash build (2 days to set everything up, including new walls) probably cost an ungodly amount of money. On the other hand, being a county hospital, we should have been more prepared in the first place since we, along with the local university hospital, would likely be the ones getting the transfers from community hospitals, and this sort of infrastructural is useful for any infectious disease.

In regards to Ebola? I immediately pegged it as the "disease of the year," along side the other outbreaks over the past number of years like community acquired MRSA, SARS, and bird flu. I.E, for the vast majority of people, a lot of worrying about nothing.
 
Exactly. We should not have had to start at square one when it came to preparation, so perhaps it was a somewhat useful exercise. But that quickly went overboard, why my ambulance district in the middle of nowhere needed a shrink wrapped infectious disease response vehicle was beyond me, happily the kibosh was put in that. But we do now carry adequate PPE on the ambulances which may be useful someday, provided training is maintained. That may be be the biggest struggle going forward.
 
I have to play devil's advocate here and say that I don't think it was blown out of proportion in the beginning. We had no idea how it was going to affect a population such as the US. We only have seen it in action in 3rd world countries and the results are pretty scary. I think once the medical community saw how things went here, things settled down, however, the media hype/hysteria continued.
 
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