Infection Control at a Certain Dallas Hospital and Emergency Response by WHO

A nurse has publicly come forward about the conditions at the emergency room where the first Ebola virus patient was treated. She described the “gown and glove” procedures and said that she had voiced her concerns to her supervisor at the time. She said she was told to just put tape over any exposed skin.
This is an important issue because unlike other, better behaved, infections, Ebola frequently causes copious discharges of vomitus, feces, and blood. Just cleaning up after an Ebola patient will strain the resources of the average American hospital.
It is clear that the two American nurses who are infected with Ebola were victims of poor infection control practices at the hospital where they work. This is especially obvious after observing the videos provided by the New York Times that show the gowning and un-gowning procedures that are recommended by Doctors Without Borders.
This same situation is also going on in Spain, where some of the nurses who treated a priest who returned from West Africa and died in a Spanish isolation ward showed symptoms and caused widespread anxiety.
Meanwhile, Senegal has quarantined itself and been declared Ebola free; Nigeria is nearly so. The three countries worst affected are Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. So far, the number of cases has doubled every month.
Sierra Leone is suffering from famine as a secondary result of the epidemic, and the World Food Program has been distributing food.
The World Health Organization, which is nominally responsible for coordinating international responses to contagious diseases, has criticized itself in an internal document for failing to respond so far, saying “Nearly everyone involved in the outbreak response failed to see some fairly plain writing on the wall.”
We hope that the chief epidemiologists at WHO get a second wind and respond more aggressively. Otherwise, things will eventually come to resemble a Steven King novel.