#1 Africa: Ebola lessons learned, forgotten, relearned.
Patients at the hospital show symptoms of Ebola. Suspecting a different sort of infection, doctors prescribe antibiotics. Then nurses fall sick.
It’s the beginning of an Ebola outbreak, and health experts are distressed by mistakes at the hospital that let the deadly disease spread.
But it’s not Dallas in 2014 — it’s Kikwit, a medium-size city in Congo, central Africa, in 1995.
The echoes from many outbreaks in Africa are strong: Doctors missed warning signs when the virus showed up in their country. Nurses said their training and gear were inadequate.
As will be the case in Dallas, better medical attention eventually snuffs out each outbreak. But over and over, caregivers have to relearn lessons from the past.
Those who have dealt with outbreaks in Africa say that passing on knowledge from one generation of doctors to the next is critical. Continual vigilance and training is mandatory. Research and documentation are vital. Otherwise, Ebola will win.
On recent events in Dallas:
“I’m persuaded that they didn’t have anybody there with an institutional memory, with specific experience, and there were assumptions all around of competence,” said Joseph McCormick, regional dean of the University of Texas School of Public Health Brownsville Regional Campus. “Certainly with Ebola, that’s a recipe for disaster.”
U.S. hospitals need to pay attention to what has happened in Africa, Dallas and, now, New York City to stack the odds in their favor, experts say.
“I think if you really manage to analyze what happened in great detail, there are very valuable lessons to learn,” said Dr. Matthias Borchert, a German doctor now fighting Ebola in Liberia with the U.S.-based International Rescue Committee. It’s his fifth epidemic treating diseases like Ebola.
“Does that mean another provider will never make the same mistake again? You can never guarantee that,” he said. “Humans will make mistakes.”...“Misdiagnosis is absolutely typical of an Ebola epidemic,” said Dr. C.J. Peters, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston who helped during the Kikwit outbreak while working for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention... |