This is how you handle Ebola

Good day all. The subject title is not my typical snarky remark. This is a post about how a private sector company dealt with an outbreak of Ebola and stopped it in it’s tracks. After the recent fiasco in Dallas, it may be time to turn this over to Firestone Tires. They seem to know what they are doing.

Firestone has a rubber plantation in Africa that is essentially a company town. When they detected their first case of Ebola, rather then call on the government to do something, they took care of the problem, and the patients, themselves. Here are the details from NPR:

The classic slogan for Firestone tires was “where the rubber meets the road.” When it comes to Ebola, the rubber met the road at the Firestone rubber plantation in Harbel, Liberia. Harbel is a company town not far from the capital city of Monrovia. It was named in 1926 after the founder of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, Harvey and his wife, Idabelle. Today, Firestone workers and their families make up a community of 80,000 people across the plantation.

Now I will be the first to admit that I didn’t know that anyone still made tires from rubber trees ((Hevea brasiliensis)). I thought that went the way of the dinosaurs when they started using petroleum based rubber around World War 2. I gather they still do use natural rubber, and a good thing for the people in the area.

Firestone detected its first Ebola case on March 30, when an employee’s wife arrived from northern Liberia. She’d been caring for a disease-stricken woman and was herself diagnosed with the disease. Since then Firestone has done a remarkable job of keeping the virus at bay. It built its own treatment center and set up a comprehensive response that’s managed to quickly stop transmission. Dr. Brendan Flannery, the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s team in Liberia, has hailed Firestone’s efforts as resourceful, innovative and effective.

This is what happens when you let a private corporation handle something like this. Once the decision is made, they move very quickly to fix things. We’re still waiting on the CDC and President Obola to actually do anything meaningful to prevent any further cases of Ebola from reaching the United States.

When the Ebola case was diagnosed, “we went in to crisis mode,” recalls Ed Garcia, the managing director of Firestone Liberia. He redirected his entire management structure toward Ebola.

Now screwing around here. No dodging responsibility, no going off on fundraisers. They saw a problem coming and moved to prevent it from becoming an outright disaster.

Garcia’s team first tried to find a hospital in the capital to care for the woman. “Unfortunately, at that time, there was no facility that could accommodate her,” he says. “So we quickly realized that we had to handle the situation ourselves.” The case was detected on a Sunday. Garcia and a medical team from the company hospital spent Monday setting up an Ebola ward. Tuesday the woman was placed in isolation.

That was three days. Now, how does that compare with what happened with the late Mr. Duncan’s treatment? He came in, the hospital botched the diagnosis and sent him home for three days. Then he got a lot worse, contaminated people, (Many who are still in quarantine as of this post), and finally got into the hospital. Unfortunately, he didn’t make it. The Firestone people understood what they might be dealing with, and even though they had no experience with Ebola, they buckled down and did what they could to help this woman.

“None of us had any Ebola experience,” he says. They scoured the Internet for information about how to treat Ebola. They cleared out a building on the hospital grounds and set up an isolation ward. They grabbed a bunch of hazmat suits for dealing with chemical spills at the rubber factory and gave them to the hospital staff. The suits worked just as well for Ebola cases.

Those hazmat suits were probably even better suited for the task then the standard suits. And the Internet once again proves it’s usefulness. Somehow, I don’t think they spent a lot of time on Wikipedia. They also promptly took care of the woman’s family as well.

Firestone immediately quarantined the woman’s family. Like so many Ebola patients, she died soon after being admitted to the ward. But no one else at Firestone got infected: not her family and not the workers who transported, treated and cared for her.

This all paid off. They didn’t see any more cases of Ebola for months. But, as we all know, the outbreak became a full blown epidemic. Firestone was ready.

In August, as the epidemic raced through the nearby capital, patients with Ebola started appearing at the one hospital and several clinics across the giant rubber plantation. The hospital isolation ward was expanded to 23 beds and a prefab annex was built. Containing Ebola became the number-one priority of the company. Schools in the town, which have been closed by government decree, were transformed into quarantine centers. Teachers were dispatched for door-to-door outreach.

And how does this compare to the response by Der Fubar? Well, we all know the answer to that. Rather then stopping people coming to the United States from Africa, those politically correct idiots are throwing the doors open instead. In an article from Politico:

Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on Friday said restricting travel between the U.S. and West Africa would likely “backfire” and put Americans more at risk of contracting Ebola. Appearing on MSNBC, Frieden was asked about potentially prohibiting air travel between the U.S. and West Africa, where the Ebola outbreak is most widespread. He said that such a restriction would likely be ineffective and would make it harder for health officials to root out the virus.

“The only way we’re going to get to zero risk is by stopping the outbreak at the source” in West Africa, Frieden said. “Even if we tried to close the border, it wouldn’t work,” the top health official added. “People have a right to return. People transiting through could come in. And it would backfire, because by isolating these countries, it’ll make it harder to help them, it will spread more there and we’d be more likely to be exposed here.”

This idiot should be removed from his position. But then, that SCoaMF, Obama will only appoint someone else with the same attitude. In the past, when we’ve had plague outbreaks of one sort or another, the first thing you did was keep it where it started. This means sealing off the infected zones in Africa. Right of return? Excuse me? That only covers American Citizens. The late Mr. Duncan was NOT a Citizen of the United States. Revoking all the visas from those countries, even down to stopping flights out of those countries will slow down, if not stop a possible pandemic. Anyone with a modicum of common sense knows this. Oh wait. This is the Obama Regime. Common sense doesn’t enter into any of their decision. Returning to the NPR story on how Firestone dealt with an Ebola breakout:

Hundreds of people with possible exposure to the virus were placed under quarantine. Seventy-two cases were reported. Forty-eight were treated in the hospital and 18 survived. By mid-September the company’s Ebola treatment unit was nearly full. As of this weekend, however, only three patients remained: a trio of boys age 4, 9 and 17.

A few things here. Take a look at the number of survivors. Less then half of those infected survived. There is no question that Firestone did all they could to help the victims, but there is no cure for Ebola. All the medical people can do is try and relieve the symptoms and hope the patient’s own immune system can fight off the virus. Still, they were able to stop the epidemic and without question, prevented a number of people at risk from getting the disease.

Dr. Flannery of the CDC says a key reason for Firestone’s success is the close monitoring of people who have potentially been exposed to the virus — and the moving of anyone who has had contact with an Ebola patient into voluntary quarantine.

And again, take a look at how Firestone handled thing with the way that Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas handled Mr. Duncan. As soon as the first Ebola patient showed up, the local Firestone managers went into action. When Mr. Duncan went to the hospital, he was sent home with the orders to “Take two aspirin and call us in the morning.”

Asked what’s needed to turn that around, Flannery says, “More Firestones” — places that have the money, resources and unwavering determination to stop Ebola.

Dr. Flannery was referring to the situation in Africa of course, but the same statement could be made here after the debacle in Dallas. The odds are we are going to see a lot more Ebola arrive in this country as well as in Europe, and thanks to stupidity and political correctness, there’s a better than even chance that Americans will get sick as well.

Hats off to Firestone Tires for showing the world on how to get things done. And to all you morons, moonbats, Socialists, Democrats and Obama supporters, (But I repeat myself) compare what your faith in Big Government and Barack Obola to what one of those “Evil Corporations” actually accomplished. The Firestone emergency hospital is almost empty now because they did what needed to be done. Your Big Government is so inept and incompetent, they can’t even get out of their own way.

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~