The national response to Ebola seems to have been patched together on the fly. Although the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it is ready to deploy specialized teams to help any hospital with an Ebola patient, the agency’s credibility has taken a significant hit in Dallas, with CDC Director Tom Frieden facing criticism over his insistence that “any hospital in the country can safely take care of Ebola.” Front-line medical workers need not just words of reassurance, but a level of confidence in their ability to execute complex protocols flawlessly. The union National Nurses United issued an urgent call for state-of-the-art protective equipment and hands-on training.
[…] But elsewhere, the Ebola crisis is also bringing out the worst sort of scaremongering and political posturing. Scott Brown, while campaigning for the US Senate in New Hampshire, gave a radio interview linking the country’s “porous” border to Ebola, saying, “I think it’s naive to think that people aren’t going to be walking through here who have those types of diseases.” The governor and attorney general of Louisiana fought plans to put the ashes of a Dallas Ebola victim’s incinerated belongings in a hazardous waste site in their state.
All this shows the need for leadership that rises above politics. President Obama canceled a trip on Wednesday to meet with the agencies involved in the US response. Although the White House expressed confidence in the CDC’s leadership, the federal government should take the bold steps needed to coordinate training and care as cases emerge.
While the chance that an infected patient will show up at any particular hospital or clinic is very small, health workers should still know the basics of what to do if a patient arrives at their door. National Nurses United, the country’s largest union of nurses, says there has been almost no hands-on training, just easy-to-ignore guidance documents.
[…] At a congressional hearing on Thursday, House members asked whether the United States was adequately protected against people who might have been infected in West Africa but did not yet have symptoms. The current system relies on screening before they are allowed to fly out of West Africa and again when they reach airports in this country. So far, only one infected patient — the man who was treated in Dallas and later died — escaped detection at the airports since the epidemic was first identified seven months ago. There should be some comfort in knowing that that part of the system is working.
And here’s a Gannett editorial that pretty much sums up the situation on the media side of things:
It turns out that Ebola is spreading like wildfire. At least among the cable news networks.
They have all caught the Ebola bug and are now transmitting the fear it engenders to millions of Americans. Fox, CNN, MSNBC are all engaged in saturation coverage of this latest portent of the apocalypse.
To ramp up the fear in order to carve out higher ratings for themselves, they need to divest themselves of certain things: proportionality, for one, and perspective, for another. […] Surely, all necessary precautions should be taken to prevent the spread of the virus in America. But let’s all get a grip here.
Much more on this and the day’s other top stories below the fold.
