Ebola 2
Years ago, back in the 1980s and early 90s I worked with ‘high risk’ HIV patients. How the general public is responding to Ebola reminds me a lot of the attitudes back then, except this time around there is not the stigma of it being a homosexual [only] disease as was believed back then. Some of my friends worked in public health at the time. One of them who I will call Rob was a minister by training and was working as a paper pusher compiling statistics and writing reports except on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. On Monday, Wednesday and Fridays the nurses in the clinic drew all the blood and collected other samples for syphilis and gonorrhea screenings and they were not concerned for their own safety beyond ‘universal’ precautions. However the blood draws for HIV screening were done Tuesday and Thursday mornings NONE of the nursing staff would do those blood draws due to fear of catching the HIV bug. Rob had to do all the HIV blood draws because of this. Rob and I discussed all this often and we would both laugh – AT those nurses – because it was the same patient group who had been in the day before for the syphilis blood draw. It would have been easier on the patients [and the nursing staff] if all the blood was collected at the same time.
The short of the story is that there is a lot of fear over some things that as long as you take reasonable precautions and pay attention to details you will remain very safe even when dealing with deadly diseases such as HIV and Ebola. That is as long as whatever ‘bugs’ of the day have not been tampered with and weaponized. If they have been, well all bets are off.
Basically if you treat everyone as if they have everything –germ wise- and take those Universal Precautions AND use your head, you should be reasonably safe.
http://www.preparesurvivethrive.us/ebola/ or http://www.preparesurvivethrive.us