Ebola - the best way forward?

We saw nurses going out of her room to deal with other patients without washing their hands.

It isn't just the nurses. When I was in hospital 3 years ago (and had a clear view of the nurses station at the reception area to the ward), I saw one nurse direct a doctor to the hand washing basins (he had been about to walk into one of the side wards) and made him wash his hands. He was about to walk off again and she made him put his hands inside some contraption which shone a light on his hands - she made him wash his hands again. Whatever it was that that light revealed, she had no intention of letting him into any of the wards until his hands were clean enough. When it comes to the spread of infection, my guess is that most of it occurs with the medical teams.

What? You posted your mother's experience, I posted my experience as I stated, within two large city hospitals!!

If you think for a minute that I was even implying your mother was a lair jen, that, is in your head only!

All hospitals are different. I worked in a cottage hospital and also in city hospitals and as Galen recounted, mixed diseases occurred on the same wards in small provincial hospitals

HTH

Now off to visit my elderly mother in law in her nursing home and find out which infection she has got this week. Last week it was a urine infection which put her in hospital for a day. The month before she had c-difficile.

Still 120 health workers fewer, whatever age they were, Galen.
And the company making it has no more ZMapp in stock to treat Ebola patients.

At least one of them was elderly.

Haven't seen any reaction to my link about the 120 health workers who have died from Ebola.

I would have loved to have seen that, harrigran. Hope you washed and disinfected your hands afterwards.

I share durhamjen's concern, having seen some inexcusable lack of hygiene in a local hospital. I once visited a relative and there were dirty dressings left on a bed table, I took them to the nurses station and put them into the hands of the sister, her look of horror spoke volumes.

Yes, we did, because they were trying to blame us for the MRSA. My mother had a tracheotomy tube and the MRSA was in the tube. The only people who touched the tube were the nurses, as my mother was not capable of doing it herself by then.
When she got rid of the MRSA the second time, we got her into a nursing home, where, surprisingly, she never got MRSA again.

It does not sound to me as though there need be a fight over the truth/not of what JenDurham's recounted. there are big city teaching hospitals and there are smaller provincial ones with fewer facilities or space.

Procedures ought to be the same though, everywhere. In the past it was scrupulous cleanliness that kept infections at bay. With modern chemical cleaners and disinfectants, and antibiotics, and a separation of nursing and cleaning duties, it is easy to think that something is clean enough when that is not clean enough for a hospital.

Is the record in private hospitals any better? Something like Ebola will be treated VERY carefully in a specially designed unit in a NHS hospital.

I hope you reported the unwashed hands. They are supposed to wash them and to take every precaution against cross-infection. If everyone who saw a breach of regulations reported it, crackdowns would follow and infections would be minimised.

According to the above link, there is no more ZMapp to treat patients with ebola.

Actually I remember having different diseases on the same ward. Sometimes we ran out of isolation cubicles on the paediatric ward and we only had one cubicle on each of men's and women's medical wards.
I did my house jobs at a small provincial hospital.

www.onmedica.com/newsarticle.aspx?id=bc5f66cc-9c90-41c7-b063-223986292932

No, elegran, but the NHS record on infectious diseases is not inspiring, is it?

Is the ebola patient being admitted to a pre-NHS ward, then?

So, Agus, my mother was lying to me, was she?
Are you old enough to have worked pre NHS, as she did?

Jess I wasn't dismissing a whole continent - simply referring to what has been reported - that the outbreaks have been worse in remote communities where primitive ideas of medicine are more prevalent.

I worked in infectious diseases units within two city hospitals. Having different diseases on the same ward was unheard of jen, due to the high risk of cross contamination. We also had isolation rooms for different cases.

Isolation procedures are not difficult to facilitate with trained staff and the right decision was made to bring this British nurse home.

Jane its true there is mistrust but there are also millions who walk for miles to get their kids to places where they can be treated by western doctors and vaccinated against dangerous childhood diseases. I think it is dangerous to dismiss a whole continent as distrustful of western medicine.
Yes there are ethical considerations with experimental drugs.
However new drugs are, obviously, tried out initially on informed volunteers and if the drug was easy to produce then you can bet this would be rolled out briskly. The epidemic is not going to go away in a few months. Buy being a biological molecule I imagine that production would be extremely slow even if it were know to be safe already.

absent, janea, soutra, good to read your level-headed posts.

Isolation wards/hospitals in the past and the state-of-the-art facility at the Royal Free can't be compared.

As far as the money for transferring the British nurse is concerned, the Government (i.e. tax payer) is not paying for or administering the research for suitable drugs to treat Ebola. Part of the problem is that Big Pharma likes drugs that will be used in the millions or billions over long periods of time - for treating arthritis, high blood pressure, etc. Ebola has killed a few hundred and spending huge amounts on research - and research does cost huge amounts - isn't cost effective.

Presumably, the nurse is officially resident in the UK and therefore entitled to treatment and care on the NHS.

It was and it wasn't Soutra.
My mother worked as a nurse in an isolation hospital when she first trained. She said that if they passed one disease to someone else on the same ward, they would have been sacked.
When she was in hospital just before she died she got MRSA twice. We saw nurses going out of her room to deal with other patients without washing their hands.
Like papaoscar said earlier, isolation hospitals used to be well away from centres of population.

I hope that was just a flippant tongue in cheek remark durhamjen. It is an extremely high level isolation unit with filtered air, and every possible other precaution. I believe it is the only one of its kind in London. And as DH will be just one floor down I too trust they know what they are doing. Having seen ITU, the Hepatology unit and Cardiology, I think I can trust them.

I don't think it's simply a question of difference in resources between rich and poor Jess.
As I understand it, many of the people in the affected countries distrust western medicine and even if the monoclonal antibody drugs were available in the quantities needed, there would be an issue around valid consent to what is still experimental treatment.

Sounds like they have managed to get hold of a dose of the monoclonal antibody drug for him. Pity this is not something that can be quickly mass-produced.
It does highlight the huge gap between the resources of rich and poor doesn't it.

Hope they have decent cleaners at the Royal Free.