“Do you have body bags? The leak-proof kind...we need as many as you can spare!”
My shoulders slumped as the voice on the phone offered me camera bags instead. I was sixteen and had just returned from an infectious diseases course at Emory University, where my final presentation was on Ebola. Within weeks, the first infected American arrived at Emory for treatment. Our country panicked, while thousands lay dying in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, their last visions strangers in spacesuits. I ached for the people, especially the children, who were dying alone, and I needed to help. Drawing on my new knowledge of Ebola’s pathology, I had an idea that I thought might work.
Ebola Kits. Rubber gloves, masks, and bleach, shrink-wrapped together inside a sturdy bucket, instructions in pictures to bridge the languages of Mende, French, Krio, Fula, and Susu. While the kits contained only the bare necessities, they would allow people to care for family and neighbors without inviting the spread of Ebola. Doing nothing was genocide, with
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I am disturbed that not all lives are valued equally. I cannot accept the fact that children die from preventable diseases, simply because they are born in countries with less wealth and stability. In America, we are curing cancer with a mutated poliovirus strain, but we haven’t eradicated polio in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We come together in crises, highly publicized earthquakes and tsunamis, but we haven’t come together to solve the problem of basic human health, a right for every person on earth. Ensuring our health is complicated and daunting and requires the mass coordination of agencies and governments to build sustainable infrastructures with local citizens in charge. I want to be part of the solution and am engaging in public health in every way I can: in the field, in the classroom, and through global health
The average fatality rate of patients infected with Ebola is around 50% according to the World Health Organization. The nonfiction book titled The Hot Zone by Richard Preston takes readers through true events pertaining to an outbreak of Ebola in the late 1980’s at a monkey testing facility in Reston, Virginia. The author heavily emphasizes the danger surrounding ignorance and uncertainty in regard to the viral and morbid Ebola at the conclusion of the book. While Preston makes this point evident countless times, three particular quotes give a clear example of Preston’s intention.
This book displays the historical encounters and effects of the Ebola virus have had on past lives and how the virus functions to destroy its host.
According to Kelley Beaucar Vlahos (2014), it was in 1995, with the release of Richard Preston’s novel The Hot Zone that Ebola’s infamy was came into the minds of the western public, the book is experiencing a resurgence. Preston chronicled how monkeys, which were shipping to the United States from Philippines, began to die in their cages. The book shaped a basic sense about Ebola and the concept of Ebola was present for the first time, additional, author’s opinion effects abounded in later report. In Adam Nossiter (2014) article, one woman lay curled in a fetal position, eyes shut, precariously balanced on cardboard sheets next to an open gutter in front of locked storefronts. From a wary distance, she had a high fever. Michael T. Osterholm (2014) also writes that the Ebola have been caused 4,300 cases and 2,300 deaths over past six months, and in 2012, a research team from Canada proved that the Ebola virus could be transmitted by the route from pigs to monkeys, whose lungs of both are very similar to those of humans. No doubt, this kind of scene did little to allay the fears of the public, even though the Ebola have not yet infected humans in American. Those three logical facts show the severe situation, Ebola has transformed into a completely killer virus, which influences and threatens people in the world. Media’s function in earliest representation is to let public know what the Ebola is, why should public focus on
We live in a country where all children go to school to gain an education and 25% of them will go onto receive some type of college degree. Compare this to low-income countries, in which children are 16 times as likely to die prior to their fifth birthday (Nickitas, Middaugh & Aries, 2016). Beyond the lens of our smartphones, Facebook friends and Nike sneakers is a world full of desperate people wishing to have enough food to eat for today. Many parts of the world lack sanitation, safe housing, sparse medical care and no medication. The global health issue are everyone’s problems not only for the sake of altruism but, with the increase in global travel for routine business and pleasure, dangerous pathogen are no longer confine by boarders. The Ebola outbreak four years ago, proved the necessity of a global solution to global health issues. The collaborative practice of several world health agencies and economically developed countries along with the use of volunteers, statistical updates, the latest literature and practices kept this outbreak mostly contained to its region of origin and the death toll to approximately 11,000 people (mainly in West Africa) (WHO,
Some of the people who were infected first in the story were visiting a site in Kenya called Kitum Cave. A U.S. scientific expedition goes there in hopes of finding the origins of these viruses. Unfortunately for the U.S. scientists and military, the mission is unsuccessful, but the doctor who put the expedition together was able to stow the equipment used when the cave was treated as a Hot Zone. This experience and equipment made the eventual decontamination project at Reston possible. The story ends with the book's author visiting Kitum Cave to explore the place that is still suspected to be home to Ebola's host. Through all his research and writing on the book, he has learned how to keep himself as safe as possible during his explorations. Rather than searching for the actual origin of the virus, however, he is searching for the origin of the story. It’s scary to think that this has happened in our own society, and one little mistake can go a long, horrific road. Always remember to vaccinate and keep your immune system strong, because you never know what dangers are coming your
Unlike HIV or other global viruses, Ebola is until this day geographically restrained, facilitating the deduction that the responsible originated from West Africa or returned from areas confirmed as danger zones. The list of suspects is indeed rather short: it amounts to Western Africans travelling to America and U.S. citizen contaminated in the same region. The latter category is, as cases in the western world indicate, consisted virtually exclusively of humanitarian helpers and health personal having been in contact with Ebola patients. Albeit these categories are subject to broad generalizations, they are the fruit of the apparent human condition to investigate, regardless of the rationality behind the reasoning. Seale baptised these generalisations “health imagined communities” (Seale, 2007, p. 92). Lupton emphasized on the experience that constructed risk communities don’t differ from real risk communities as much in their consequences as they do in their
Ebola is a virus that is transmitted to other individuals through direct contact with blood and body fluids of those infected (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2015). In the most recent outbreak in 2014, the video Ebola Outbreak (2014) illustrated that the virus quickly became a worldwide epidemic. As the virus became so widespread throughout Africa, Ebola-infected so many people in such a short time frame. While the organization, Doctors without Borders was intimately involved early on, they quickly learned that the manpower they had to offer was not nearly enough. The group identified that they had no way of performing contact tracing, which is a way of following patients that were contaminated and quickly led to additional cases of infection in astronomical numbers. According to the follow-up video, Outbreak (2014) the organization Doctors without Borders communicated to the World Health Organization (WHO) made a valiant
There has been an acute worry roaming about the United States concerning the Ebola Outbreak. Originally, Ebola had never touched the United States until September of 2014. (4) The disease was originated from and named after a river in the Democratic of Congo. Since discovered, there have been known cases in Africa. There have been many very deadly cases of Ebola - the fatality rate is estimated to from about fifty to ninety percent. (2) To the United States, there had never been any worry about the disease until September twentieth of 2014. A man by the name of Thomas Eric Duncan boarded flight 822 from Liberia to Dallas, Texas. Flight 822 was where it all began. Nobody had any
In late 2013, Ebola virus disease (EVD), a deadly and lethal disease, remerged in West Africa spreading to various countries in the region. In humans, the disease is spread through contact with infected bodily fluids leading to haemorrhagic fever (World Health Organization [WHO], 2015). Originating in 1976 in equatorial Africa, past outbreaks with a few hundred cases had been contained within rural, forested areas in Uganda and Congo (Piot, 2012). In 2014, a total of 20, 206 cases and 7,905 deaths were reported to have occurred in up to eight countries worldwide. Of all cases and deaths resulting from the disease, 99.8% occurred in three neighbouring West African countries - Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea (WHO, 2014). With a case fatality rate from about 50% to 90%, and the absence of preventative or curative therapies, the Ebola epidemic has led to overall global alarm and further elucidated existing global health disparities that perpetuated the epidemic with these West African countries.
In 2014 the United States was hit with a force far more deadly and dangerous than many threats received. The ebola virus took the world by storm after it was carried to the United States and spread by people who had visited West Africa. This virus was all the more deadly as it often took hours for any symptoms to occur. In this time the Center for Disease Control spent much time and many resources looking for answers to the many questions they had. Under the time constraint and scrutinizing public, they had to determine what ebola was, what it did and its effects on the general public.
In this article, 38 years old, Emily Abaleo lives in Monrovia , Liberia, with her two children who are in a dreadful stage in their lives. She complains about her living conditions. Living in a slum has been difficult to provide food and shelter and wealth. Recently, Liberia has been affected by Ebola. Abaleo’s husband passed away from the disease a few months ago. As a single parent she is doing as much as she can to properly raise her children under theses horrific circumstances. However, Abaleo tested negative for Ebola,but the government still strictly enforced a quarantine to prevent the disease from spreading to other countries. Seeing Abaleo’s family in desperate need of assistance the government should provide better precautions to save the ones in Liberia as well as the ones in other
What was usually a disease contained in regions of sub-Saharan Africa became a global worry. Although the outbreak started in Guinea, it quickly spread to two neighboring countries. From these three countries, cases were then transmitted to the United States, Spain, and the United Kingdom. No vaccine was available to stop the spread of Ebola. This deadly disease went from being a problem in only a small region of the world to being seen in three noncontiguous countries, which could have sowed the seeds of a pandemic had the cases not been contained. As a global community, we gain from our interactions with all citizens, but we must also be aware that we can also suffer from diseases that we think of as only affecting the “others.” If we do not help those “others,” we may become part of
The four major strategies for managing Ebola patients include: isolation, malaria treatment, broad spectrum antibiotics and antipyretics before diagnosis. Present management for ebola is mainly symptomatic and supportive. Isolation includes keeping the patient in a single room with a private bathroom and closed door. Facilities should keep a log of all healthcare workers and others that enter the patients room. The room should have dedicated medical equipment for the patient care, and nondedicated items need to be thorurougly cleaned and disinfected. All healthcare workers need to use personal protective equipment and appropriate precautions. This strategy helps in containment of the virus and prevents outbreaks in communities. Another strategy
The Ebola Virus is a very sensitive subject at this time, with an outbreak within Western Africa (Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia most affected) causing panic and fear among many countries across the world. Within this essay, I aim to cover the transmission of the virus and how it replicates within the host cells, whilst briefly looking at the symptoms and dangers of the disease.
Prevention of the Ebola virus is more useful than the treatments. Improving sanitation is an important thing to do in rural African countries. Any victims need to be isolated as soon as possible. Quarantining of infected people from others plays a major role. People who have been in close contact with the infected