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The Director of the United State’s disease control agency, Centre for Disease Control (CDC), Tom Frieden, speaking in an interview about his tour of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the three countries worst affected by the Ebola outbreak says it's safe to "assume sick people have Ebola virus until proven otherwise".
He said so far nothing suggests that Ebola is spreading differently in this outbreak, but it is in a very different circumstance.
"In this case, the young woman was holding her niece. The niece had nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. She had a lot of body fluids, the sicker someone is, the more of the virus they have. When someone is not sick, they can’t spread it. The sicker they get, the higher the viral load and the more infectious they are. If you have a little bit on your hands, then you wipe your eye or touch your mouth, you can get infected. That’s presumably what happened in this case.
"The health education messaging for the countries that are affected is really pretty simple — don’t touch people who are sick or their body fluids and don’t touch people who have died or their body fluids. Those two key messages need to be gotten out throughout the communities.
According to him, Ebola in these countries -Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea- doesn’t look very different from a disease like malaria or typhoid or gastroenteritis.
"When it starts, it has very similar symptoms. So what we have emphasised is what’s called triage. Put anyone who might have Ebola in this group and people who don’t in this group. Use universal precautions for both. For those who might have Ebola, assume that they do until proven otherwise."
click here to read more from The Nation
#Ebola #Liberia #Guinea #SierraLeone #Africa #WestAfrica #MSF #CDC
He said so far nothing suggests that Ebola is spreading differently in this outbreak, but it is in a very different circumstance.
"In this case, the young woman was holding her niece. The niece had nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. She had a lot of body fluids, the sicker someone is, the more of the virus they have. When someone is not sick, they can’t spread it. The sicker they get, the higher the viral load and the more infectious they are. If you have a little bit on your hands, then you wipe your eye or touch your mouth, you can get infected. That’s presumably what happened in this case.
"The health education messaging for the countries that are affected is really pretty simple — don’t touch people who are sick or their body fluids and don’t touch people who have died or their body fluids. Those two key messages need to be gotten out throughout the communities.
According to him, Ebola in these countries -Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea- doesn’t look very different from a disease like malaria or typhoid or gastroenteritis.
"When it starts, it has very similar symptoms. So what we have emphasised is what’s called triage. Put anyone who might have Ebola in this group and people who don’t in this group. Use universal precautions for both. For those who might have Ebola, assume that they do until proven otherwise."
click here to read more from The Nation
#Ebola #Liberia #Guinea #SierraLeone #Africa #WestAfrica #MSF #CDC
