Ebola: Note on Hand Hygiene to Doctors, Nurses, and Other Health Workers

September 8, 2014

In this struggle against EVD, doctors, nurses, laboratory personnel and ward attendants constitute the vanguard force and so are the most at risk population. This underscores the dire need for the adequate provision of PPEs for use by these personnel.

Reproduced hereunder are fliers from the WHO which suggest ways of ensuring that proper hand hygiene is deployed as a means of checking the spread of this virus.

God help us all. God bless Nigeria and everywhere else.

What You Need to Know About Travel to and from Ebola-Affected Countries

September 8, 2014

Ebola: Protective Measures for the General Public | Ebola and Food Safety

September 7, 2014

How do I Protect Myself and My Family Against Ebola? | Ebola and Food Safety

What you need to know

The risk of Ebola transmission is low. Becoming infected requires direct, physical contact with the bodily fluids (vomit, faeces, urine, blood, semen, etc.) of people who have been infected with or died from Ebola virus disease (EVD).

To protect yourself, your family, and your community from EVD transmission, immediately report to the nearest health facility if you develop symptoms indicative of EVD, including high fever, body aches, joint pain, vomiting, diarrhoea, or haemorrhaging (bleeding). Isolation and professional clinical treatment increase a person’s chance of survival.

Currently an outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD) is ongoing in several (West) African countries. Ebola virus disease is a severe illness.

The infection is transmitted by direct contact with the blood, body fluids and tissues of infected animals or people.

During an outbreak, those at higher risk of infection are health workers, family members and others in close contact with sick people and deceased patients.

Appropriate infection and prevention control measures can be implemented to stop transmission; supportive care to patients helps to considerably reduce the mortality. Spread of the infection can be controlled through the use of recommended protective measures in clinics and hospitals, at community gatherings, during burial ceremonies or at home.

Current outbreak: a human to human transmission

Ebola viruses are known to cause epidemics of disease among wild animals, particularly non-human primates.

Potential hosts of Ebola viruses are non-human primates, duikers, bats, small rodents, and shrews.

The initial source of past EVD outbreaks was likely human contact with wild animals through hunting, butchering and preparing meat from infected wild animals (“bush meat”), with subsequent transmission from human to human.

However, in the current outbreak, the majority of cases are a result of human to human transmission.

Food, animals and Ebola

If food products are properly prepared and cooked, humans cannot become infected by consuming them: the Ebola virus is inactivated through cooking.

Basic hygiene measures can prevent infection in people in direct contact with infected animals or with raw meat and by-products.

Basic hygiene measures include regular hand washing and changing of clothes and boots before and after touching these animals and their products.

However, sick and diseased animals should never be consumed.

God help us all. God bless Nigeria and everywhere else.

WHO: Ebola situation in Port Harcourt, Nigeria - September 3, 2014

Situation assessment - 3 September 2014

The Commissioner of Health, Rivers State, Nigeria, has now reported 3 confirmed cases of Ebola virus disease in Port Harcourt, the country’s oil hub. Additional suspected cases are being investigated.

Background on the Port Harcourt index case

Ebola virus was imported into Nigeria via an infected air traveller, who entered Lagos on 20 July and died 5 days later. One close contact of the Lagos case fled the city, where he was under quarantine, to seek treatment in Port Harcourt.

The close contact was treated, from 1 to 3 August, at a Port Harcourt hotel, by what would turn out to be the city’s index case. This case was a male physician who developed symptoms of weakness and fever on 11 August and died of Ebola on 22 August. His infection was confirmed on 27 August by the virology laboratory at Lagos University Teaching Hospital.

The male physician in Port Harcourt is therefore indirectly linked to Nigeria’s first case.

The case history of the index case in Port Harcourt is important, as it reveals multiple high-risk opportunities for transmission of the virus to others.

After onset of symptoms, on 11 August, and until 13 August, the physician continued to treat patients at his private clinic, and operated on at least two. On 13 August, his symptoms worsened; he stayed at home and was hospitalized on 16 August.

Prior to hospitalization, the physician had numerous contacts with the community, as relatives and friends visited his home to celebrate the birth of a baby.

Once hospitalized, he again had numerous contacts with the community, as members of his church visited to perform a healing ritual said to involve the laying on of hands. During his 6 day period of hospitalization, he was attended by the majority of the hospital’s health care staff.

On 21 August, he was taken to an ultrasound clinic, where 2 physicians performed an abdominal scan. He died the next day.

The additional 2 confirmed cases are his wife, also a doctor, and a patient at the same hospital where he was treated. Additional staff at the hospital are undergoing tests.

Given these multiple high-risk exposure opportunities, the outbreak of Ebola virus disease in Port Harcourt has the potential to grow larger and spread faster than the one in Lagos.

The response

Nigerian health workers and WHO epidemiologists are monitoring more than 200 contacts. Of these, around 60 are considered to have had high-risk or very high-risk exposure.

The highest-risk exposures occurred in family members and in health care workers and patients at the facility where the index case was hospitalized. Church members who visited the index case while he was hospitalized are also considered at high risk.

The government, supported by WHO, UNICEF, and MSF (Doctors without Borders), has introduced a number of emergency measures. More will be introduced later this week.

An Ebola Emergency Operations Centre has been activated, with support from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A mobile laboratory, with RT-PCR diagnostic capacity, is set up and functional.

A 26-bed isolation facility for the management of Ebola cases is in place, with plans for possible expansion. WHO has 15 technical experts on the ground.

Twenty-one contact-tracing teams are at work; they have good training, provided by WHO, and adequate transportation, thanks to government support. Two decontamination teams are equipped and operational, as is a burial team.

Port Harcourt is the capital of Rivers State. WHO, together with the Rivers State Port Health Service, has assessed public health measures at airport gates and other points of entry. Screening is under way at domestic and international airport gates.

Social mobilization efforts have been stepped up, initially targeting key community and religious leaders.

However, civil unrest, security issues, and public fear of Ebola create serious problems that could hamper response operations. Military escorts are needed for movements into the isolation and treatment centre.

Source: http://who.int/mediacentre/news/ebola/3-september-2014/en/

And Nero Fiddled While Rome Burned...

FUNKE EGBEMODE @ SUNDAY SUN:

TIME TO LOSE THE ROSE-TINTED GLASSES

Let me start exactly with what bothers me most right now. And I don’t feel like pulling my punches today. How exactly are we going to conduct a suc­cessful election in 2015? I see everybody getting ready and I am wondering if I am the one who is paranoid or they are the ones who have taken permanent residence in fool’s paradise. I see posters of aspirants all over the place and I feel sorry for them because I can see millions of naira going into the drain. I hear parties planning primaries and promising that they will be transparent, free and fair but I do not see what gives them confidence. And INEC doing voter education, distributing permanent voters cards and saying it is putting everything in place to give us a 2015 that will be better than 2011. But me, from where I am sitting, and maybe I should stand, all I can see is temporary voters cards flying in the air as the owners flee their homes with terrorists in hot pursuit. All I see is voters cards dis­appearing in angry flames of fire in burning villages. All I see are ugly vultures holding meetings where polling booths stood in 2011 after heavy lunches of decaying bodies of men, women who voted in 2011. And in case you are still wearing rose-tinted glasses, thousands of Nigerians whose names are on INEC registers are in refugee camps in Cameroon, Chad and Niger.

Perhaps your next defence for your optimism about 2015 is that Boko Haram will be contained before the elections. Here’s the breaking news: Boko Haram is not Ebola. Nigeria has not been able to contain it. We have neither the ZMAPP nor the vaccine. Neither the international community’s assurances of assistance and the Nigerian military forces’ boasts of their virility has contained the rampaging insurgents. Look back and see how far we have travelled with our bag of optimism and see if the bag is still hanging on our shoulders or it is now ragged, and drag­ging on our dusty road to the wilderness of pessimism. I most certainly don’t see what is there to cheer or clap about.

I was at the Nigerian Police Head­quaters a few weeks ago and right at the lobby, in marble, wall-to-wall, is a list of Nigerian policemen who have fallen in this war, fighting insurgents, trying to nurse our hopes, killed by the Ebola the world has no solution to as I write this. I do not want to imagine the number of soldiers we have lost to the insurgents, the number of fathers and husbands who left home to defend our territorial integrity, to do what they signed up for, and never returned. Many returned in body bags but many do not have graves today. Every time I think of those names on the wall of Louis Edet House’s lobby and the pain in former IGP M.D. Abuba­kar’s face when I asked him, I get goose bumps. The number of orphans, widows, bewildered aged parents Boko Haram has created…Isn’t it time we did something drastic instead of speaking big big gram­mar? It is all so frustrating.

Let me even agree for a moment with those who think this insurgency virus is in the North, that only a third of Borno has fallen to Boko Haram. If the insurgents moved on Borno, hoisted their first flag and in three short weeks, a third of one of Nigeria’s largest states has fallen into the hands of the Islamic Caliphate, how long do you think it will take for the whole state to fall? Considering the inroads the rampaging sect has made into Yobe and Adamawa, how many weeks will it take at this new speed of Boko Haram before it annexes the rest of the region? Let us even assume that the worst that could happen before 2015 elections is Nigeria will lose Borno, Yobe and Adamawa to the Islamic Caliphate of Boko Haram, just three states, right? Good. That will leave Nigeria with 33 states. That will mean we have to re­draw our map. If the collated results at the end of the Presidential election show that the difference between the candidate who comes first and the candidate that comes second is the total number of registered voters who could not vote in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa, won’t that compel INEC to declare the election inconclusive?

Again, let us assume INEC does not declare the election inconclusive, have you factored in what our lawyers, Senior Advo­cates of Nigeria do with loopholes like this? Have you thought of the injunctions, court order and counter restraining orders that the courts will produce in their dozens? And that all these will be on between February and May 28, 2015? And if you cannot swear in a President for a new term on May 29, where exactly does that leave us? Tenure elongation or another feverish bout until we find yet another Doctrine of Necessity? What if it is not as smooth as the last time which was not entirely smooth, come to think of it!?

If the candidate who comes first in the election is President Goodluck Ebele Jona­than and the candidate who comes second is General Buhari… I do not have to expatiate beyond here, do I?

A politician whose opinion I respect, when I presented this scenario to him, said Nigeria might as well get ready to send Ambassadors to those three states, if we allow the insur­gents to take them.

Seriously, are we going to amend the electoral laws just in time to suit what may become our new map and abridged territorial integrity before 2015? Let us not even worry about not being able to hold governor­ship, National Assembly and State House of Assembly elections in Borno. Let us just worry about the implication of an inconclusive election Presidential election. If you don’t think it is scary, why are you looking for the Electoral Act or reaching for your phone and scratching your head?

We are in danger, extreme danger whether we are reciting positive confes­sions or not. Did you even see yesterday’s newspapers? If soldiers’ families are vacating barracks, doesn’t that tell us that army barracks are no longer safe? If insurgents have taken over Emir’s wives, doesn’t that tell us nothing is sacred to this virulent sect?

You think I’m immobilized by fear already? Fine, now swear that my fear is unfounded, that you believe that without the kind of immediate help that routed the ISIS in Iraq and the insurgents in Mali, that we are not in trouble? That apart from our incurable optimism and positive confession, you do not see Boko Haram in the South?

Let the politicians print their posters. Let them hold their rallies. Let them also know that those who sleep with Emir’s wives will think politician’s wives are just desserts. Boko Haram has proved that it means business. Did the sect not attack our Police Headquaters? Did it not poke its fingers in the eyes of the international community by bombing the UN building? Did the sect not move from slitting the throats of our sons in their sleep to abduct­ing our daughters from their hostels, keep­ing them for 146 days now? We were told that Nigeria was on top of it, that we will win this war, that the insurgents would have become history by now but here we are today. For all you care, the Federal Republic of Nigeria would be one state and one governor short by this time next week. Or hasn’t Boko Haram delivered on all its threats?

I know those who lost their thinking caps at the parties they attended yester­day will come up with all kinds of dumb reasons behind this piece but that is what I expect from those who live in fool’s paradise. But before you join the Fool­ish Peoples Party, think of this: if you have a son in final year in the university and chaos takes over this country, and he cannot graduate, what happens to your aspirations and his own? If your son is posted to do his NYSC in Yobe, what will you do? If your daughter is transferred to Borno from her comfy Lagos office where she works for MTN, Airtel, Glo, Etisalat, Dangote, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Oando, The Sun, etc, what will you do? Oh oh, so now you see what I see? Awesome. Can we now lose the rose-tinted glasses and face our real fears otherwise a certain 2015 prediction might just happen. I most certainly don’t ever want to have to interview the Nigerian Ambassador to the Islamic Caliphate of Boko Haram.

>>>Retrieved from http://sunnewsonline.com/new/?p=80584 at 7pm on September 9, 2014