Thanks for sharing, Howard T Reginald Miller! Dallas Hospital “Dropped the Ball.” _____ The magnitude of potential contacts Thomas Eric Duncan could have had with others, after being sent home from the hospital—AFTER communicating his travel history to Liberia—is daunting. But likely manageable if addressed swiftly. Yet, I’d submit that his race likely factored into his clinical encounter and that negative stereotyping determined the importance and weight his symptoms and the details of his history were given when taken by allied health professionals. In 2002, the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine published a report examining these dynamics in {Unequal Treatment: Understanding Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care}. The Institute of Medicine report focused on patient outcomes, but consider the implications for infectious disease and public health. Based on anecdotal reports from doctors on the forefront of HIV disease treatment in the early 1980s, the virus had already entered into the US population by the late 70s but was not first recognized because of how it had manifested among marginalized populations of Black and Latino injection drug users. It would take several years before it would produce markedly noticeable anomalies to alert the public health system in 1981 to a new disease threat. Imagine how the lives of the 50,000+ individuals who were reported to have HIV/AIDS through 1987 when the first mass, government-sponsored prevention education efforts were undertaken might have been different if the disease had been taken more seriously and there had not been any privileging of “innocent victims”?....
Posted on: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 02:21:25 +0000
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