My fellow Catholic Patheosi, Dr Tod Worner published a post today concerning the Ebola crisis. I hope you will click on the links in this post and read it.
Dr Worner gives us a glimpse of the concerns that medical practitioners face when deciding how they would treat this illness. It also evaluates our government’s reaction to Ebola without the distorting prism of political one-upsmanship and ambition.
It is precisely the kind of non-political, rational discussion of this killer disease that should be taking place everywhere, but isn’t.
Here’s a taste:
We crowded into a small room at my internal medicine clinic and looked at each other. Some decisions had to be made. Soon. We were charged to answer one fundamental question: What would we do if a patient suspected of having Ebola were to walk in our clinic door? As simple as it may seem, this is an incredibly complex question. It requires considering the well-being of the patient, the risk to other patients exposed to him (or her, but I will use him for simplification) in our waiting room, and the risks to medical and ancillary staff who are attending to him. We must concern ourselves with the risk of over-reaction as well as that of under-reaction. We need to consider the imperfect state of our understanding of the mode and ease of transmission. And we must recognize that risk and response changes daily with an ever-evolving national and international epidemic. Confronted with this question in that small room, to a person, there was sincere concern about the patient, earnest concern about personal safety and a clear sense that there is a lot of uncertainty about this virus and the epidemic that is unfolding day by day. And yet, that has not been the message from the government leaders or the Centers for Disease Control. If anything, there has been an abundance of assurance. For example,
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