Ebola can go global -- Fareed speaks with Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, about the recent outbreak of Ebola. Watch the full interview on Fareed Zakaria GPS, this Sunday at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN. Sanjay, how has this been blocked in the past? Why does this seem unprecedented? Is there something different right now? You know, in a morbid way, its because it killed so quickly – it would just burn out. You imagine these remote villages. People werent moving around as quickly. And the Ebola virus – they would die and before they could start to spread it…its awful to think about, but thats what was happening. Now, you have a more mobile group. You have more roads between some of these smaller villages, such as in Guinea, where this originated, and the capital city of Conakry. There are roads. There are all these good passageways now back and forth. And so I think that part of it is certainly contributing. There’s also this idea that there’s a mistrust – I think a little bit of distrust, maybe – even of health care professionals. In part, thats fueled by the fact that there’s no good anti-viral, there’s no good vaccine. So we need to see health care workers show up, theyre not offering some panacea to what is happening here. And so theres not a lot of trust. And a lot of the people who are getting infected arent hearing the right messages. And you also have several epidemics sort of starting in different points almost simultaneously now. Usually, it was one place you could target. Sanjay, how are we going to control the spread? How does one track whether people have Ebola? You think about, as you say, there are roads. There are also trains. There are also planes now. People can get on flights from Liberia, from Sierra Leone. How do we handle this? Well, I think were going to hear at some point – I dont know if its during this outbreak or a future one – we are going to hear about patients with Ebola showing up in other countries in the Western Hemisphere. I cant imagine that not happening, having seen how it all works. And keep in mind, between the time of exposure to the virus and the time someone gets sick, it could be as long as 21 days. It can travel all over the world, obviously, during that time. I think if theres any good news in this, its when you think about countries like the United States, Britain, who are having high level discussions on this topic, they are in a much better position to be able to control this. First of all, they could isolate the patient quite quickly, provide fluids and blood clotting factors to try and provide what is called supportive therapy and prevent these patients with the virus becoming epidemics or the source of epidemics…Full story on CNN page.
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 18:44:03 +0000
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