The safeguards recommended by the top hospitals and experts are:
• Wash your hands! One of the most important things you can do to prevent infectious disease is also the easiest – wash your hands frequently with soap and water. If you can’t wash your hands, you can use alcohol-based hand rubs (like Purell), as long as they contain at least 60% alcohol. It’s a good idea to keep hand sanitizer with you at all times, and use it after you shake hands or touch anything in a public place.
• Stay away from infected people. It’s critical to especially avoid an infected person’s bodily fluids, including blood, semen, vaginal secretions, vomit, and saliva. Ebola victims are most contagious when they are in the later stages of the disease and the virus is most plentiful in their bodies.
• Wear protective clothing. All health-care workers and caregivers should wear special protective clothing, including gloves, masks, gowns, and eye shields. Follow the CDC’s latest recommendations for protective gear, and be sure to properly dispose of needles and other waste from the care of infected people.
• Stay in safe areas. Before traveling, make sure you’re avoiding outbreak areas. You can check the most current epidemic information on the CDC website.
• Do not go near dead bodies of victims. The remains of Ebola victims can carry high quantities of the virus, so they should be handled by specially trained and equipped teams.
TIP
Wash your hands! One of the most important things you can do to prevent infectious disease is also the easiest—wash your hands frequently with soap and water.
The CDC adds to the list that you should:
• Avoid contact with bats and nonhuman primates as well as blood and other fluids from these animals.
• Avoid hospitals in West Africa where Ebola patients are being treated. The US embassy or consulate is often able to provide advice on safe facilities.
• After you return from any point of contact with Ebola, monitor your health for twenty-one days and seek medical care immediately if you develop symptoms of Ebola.
This is all helpful if you plan to travel to West Africa, but what should the average person in the United States do if he or she wants to prepare for a possible epidemic here? Later in this book, we’ll talk about how to set up a sick room for infectious disease and what your strategy should be to keep your people healthy.
TAKING ACTION
Here are some examples of how areas in the United States and health-care systems have become more proactive since the current Ebola epidemic began.
In Brooklyn Park, which has a large Liberian population, police and firefighters will be taking additional precautions in light of the Ebola outbreak. They will wear eye shields and facemasks, as well as gloves, when responding to calls involving flu-like symptoms. They will also ask anyone with flu-like symptoms questions about any foreign travel. This includes not just the Liberians but the entire population of the city.
In New Jersey, all patients at Hackensack University Medical Center are screened for Ebola regardless of whether they’ve recently traveled to areas affected by Ebola, and the state reportedly provides regular Ebola health alerts to hospitals and other local health-care providers.
Dallas ambulance workers have become extra vigilant in cleaning and disinfecting ambulances after patient transport. An anti-microbial is sprayed on the stretcher, the straps, the rails, and anything else that might have been touched, and is left to soak for at least ten minutes before they wipe down the stretcher. “It’s the universal precautions on steroids,” said Dr. Frank Wright, the safety director of CareFlite ambulance service.
In Louisiana, the top education board has approved new school safeguards against the Ebola virus and other communicable diseases, including authorizing the closing of schools in the wake of a health crisis. Several Texas schools were closed when it was learned that some of their students were on the airplane with Ebola patient Amber Vinson.
Major airports now perform regular Ebola screenings on travelers from Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone (more about this in the next chapter).
In addition, the nation’s largest union of registered nurses has called on President Obama to mandate uniform standards at US hospitals to protect health-care workers from the Ebola virus.
EBOLA ACTIVISM
In addition to keeping yourself and your loved ones germ-free, you can take a larger role to spread knowledge about Ebola. Here are a few suggestions:
• Work to raise Ebola awareness in your area.
• Get support from your local politicians to help further awareness on the local, state, and national levels.
• Start a committee to establish guidelines for your local hospital to follow. Work with the hospital to get the systems in place.
• Donate money to a foundation (or create one) to help aid Ebola research and eradication. Recently, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced plans to donate $25 million to the Centers for Disease Control Foundation to help fight Ebola. Zuckerberg stated, “The Ebola epidemic is at a critical turning point… . It is spreading very quickly and projections suggest it could infect one million people or more over the next several months if not addressed. We need to get Ebola under control in the near term so that it doesn’t spread further and become a long term global health crisis that we end up fighting for decades at a large scale, like HIV or polio.”
Over the past decade, funding for initiatives like this has been cut dramatically. Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, reports that “NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It’s not like we suddenly woke up and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here.’ Frankly, if we had not gone through our ten-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.”
NIH’s budget hasn’t moved since 2004, when it was $28.03 billion—in 2013, it was $29.31 billion. Meanwhile, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ budget has fallen from $4.30 billion (2004) to $4.25 billion (2013). With inflation in account, that’s a lot less money spent on protecting us from epidemic disease.
Instead, government has focused the CDC on other priorities, including community transformation. The CDC project on community transformation has received roughly three times the funding than the project to protect against infectious diseases. The program funds programs like “increasing access to healthy foods by supporting local farmers and developing neighborhood grocery stores” or “promoting improvements in sidewalks and street lighting to make it safe and easy for people to walk and ride bikes.” Bike lanes and farmer’s markets are laudable enterprises for any community, but they will do little to stem an outbreak of influenza, anthrax, or Ebola.
Don’t think that I consider community transformation projects frivolous; for the most part, they’re not. I believe, however, that they might be better funded by states, municipalities, or private charities. Public health and safety is a better area for the federal government to spend resources. Let your local leadership know if this is how you feel.