Why Ebola Patients Are Getting Treatment In Nebraska

From NPR

Freelance journalist Ashoka Mukpo, who contracted Ebola in Liberia, arrived at the University of Nebraska Medical Center today, becoming the second patient with the deadly disease to be treated there.

Why is he being sent to Nebraska instead of some other facility? Because the hospital is home to the largest of four high-level biocontainment patient care units in the U.S.

The Nebraska Medical Center says the unit was commissioned in 2005 as a joint project with Nebraska Health and Human Services and the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

"It was designed to provide the first line of treatment for people affected by bio terrorism or extremely infectious naturally occurring diseases," the center's website says.

Wired Magizine says

"[Hospital] staff volunteers at Nebraska Medical Center run twice yearly drills with decontamination at their hospital's 10-bed biocontainment unit. It's the country's largest, opened in 2005 with $1 million in federal and state funding. 'It's built like a concrete box,' says Angela Hewlett, the unit's associate medical director. 'We want to keep our germs inside.' But like Missoula, Nebraska hasn't seen a single infectious disease patient. Sometimes they use it as overflow for the emergency room."

the Missoula unit they talk about here is up in Montana. And given the locations of these special high-level biocontainment patient care units in the U.S. the big thing they all have in common is they are all far removed from densely populated cities. I can see the why of... if some nasty bug did break containment having few people around would limit the spread. But it seems to me those cities with large numbers of people are exactly the place where you'd want one of these special high-level biocontainment patient care units...

Anyway there you have the reason for the Ebola patients being taken to Nebraska.

a reply to: HardCorps

Lol

I thought you were literally asking the question in your title and I was going to be like " they said it right there bud".

Baha.

That's a great reason for them to be treated there. Make use of that money they spent on bio-terrorism counter measures.

~Tenth

It sounds good, and I hope it is, but it's still only as good as the weakest link. It looks to me like there may be a few weak links in this photo showing how they got the NBC cameraman with Ebola off the plane and into an ambulance when he arrived in Nebraska:



And not just the people who aren't wearing any protective equipment at all.

21 days and counting...

a reply to: tothetenthpower

LOL... No, I was just using the title NPR used...

But my wife... an ER nurse... has told my a few stories about places like these.
her big pet pea is that there are only 4 of these units for the entire country with probably less that 100 beds available...98 I guess now ???

I wonder if there are truly only 4? Interesting nonetheless.

a reply to: ikonoklast
Nice pic.
Apparently the officials in charge of this spoke with Tom Ridge before they finished planning... note the plastic sheeting in the ambulance.
We don't have to worry about it spreading (read with sarcasm).

Huh.

I went to the UofM in Missoula and had no idea that they had any kind of bio hazard units there. Interesting...

The Facilities to deal with any pandemic do not currently exist......
Nor will they exist for 99% or more of the victims of any pandemic.....
Ebola is just one of the now several potential ELE pandemics brewing out there.....
As to why this is happening at this juncture of history is unclear but there are several suspect contributors....
Air travel being the chief suspect......
There remains the supposition that those infected persons will simply lie down and die if they contract a fatal disease......THIS IS DEAD WRONG>>>>>!!!!!!!!!
They will run they, will hide, they will panic,and do all kinds of desperate things un expected by the authorities...... and will die in all kinds of compromising situations which will facilitate the spread of any seriously deadly threat.......
We are inescapably human, and the western world authorities don't even get it yet......
We are screwed if this pans out,,,......

I think we can clearly see, now, why it is that ebola spread initially from health care centers.

The ones in charge really are clueless, it's not like there are none of these in existence:



Or that they would use substandard procedures, is it?

originally posted by: mbernardin
I wonder if there are truly only 4? Interesting nonetheless.

I think that number ""4"" is for civilian hospitals...
as for the military... Back when I was in the Marines I used to drive past a Biocontainment unit over at 29 Palms that's in Southern Calif. I don't know anything about that place other than it was part of the CBREN team Garrisoned there.

From Wiki.

The Chemical Biological Incident Response Force (CBIRF) is a unit in the United States Marine Corps responsible for countering the effects of a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high-yield explosive (CBRNE) incident

Mission:

When directed, a CBIRF unit will forward-deploy and/or respond to a credible threat of a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high-yield explosive (CBRNE) incident in order to assist local, state, or federal agencies and Unified Combat Commanders in the conduct of consequence management operations.

CBIRF accomplishes this mission by providing capabilities for agent detection and identification, casualty search and extraction, technical rescue, personnel decontamination, and emergency medical care and stabilization of contaminated victims.

So the military does have ---Other places but I doubt they would take civvies without a presidential order

That picture of the Ambulance is worrying. Why would anyone take the risk of not putting a mask on and other protective layers. So they didnt touch the patient, who cares, this is beyond stupid. There is no wonder Ebola keeps spreading, people actually think that if they dont get fluids on them they are Ok, what about the microscopic fluids that cant be seen.

originally posted by: MystikMushroom
Huh.

I went to the UofM in Missoula and had no idea that they had any kind of bio hazard units there. Interesting...

Don't feel bad... I live in Colorado and didn't know the worlds biggest baddest Supermax Prison "ADX Florence" is just south of Colorado Springs.

The facility is best known for housing inmates who have been deemed too dangerous, too high-profile or too great a national security risk for even a maximum-security prison. These include the leaders of violent gangs who continued to issue orders to their members from lower security facilities, including Larry Hoover of the Gangster Disciples, and Barry Mills and Tyler Bingham of the Aryan Brotherhood. ADX also houses foreign terrorists, including the only person convicted in civilian court of the September 11 attacks, Zacarias Moussaoui, the perpetrator of the 2010 Times Square car bombing attempt, Faisal Shahzad,[12] and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing mastermind Ramzi Yousef; as well as domestic terrorists, including serial bombers Ted Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph. Timothy McVeigh, who carried out the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, was housed at ADX before he was sentenced to death in 1997 and transferred to the United States Penitentiary, Terre Haute, which houses federal death row inmates. McVeigh's co-conspirator, Terry Nichols, is serving a life sentence at ADX. Robert Hanssen, the former FBI agent who betrayed several spies to the Soviet Union and Russia, is serving 15 life sentences at ADX for his crimes. The prison also houses inmates who are a high escape risk, including Richard McNair, who escaped from a county jail and two other prisons before being sent to ADX.

See there... just another damn good reason for private ownership of firearms... Just look who I have for neighbors!

a reply to: Glassbender777

I'm thinking of sweat evaporating, aren't those aerosols? Are they capable of carrying any virus particles at all?

I worked for Enron. The branch that I worked for sold natural gas and electricity in the us and canada. Our main office was in Plattsburgh NY, not Texas. But our largest office was located in Omaha Nebraska. Most calls and data went through Nebraska. I was told that the reason for the office in Omaha was because it was the population center for the US and canada.

a reply to: RammerJammer

Nebraska Medical Center run twice yearly drills with decontamination at their hospital’s 10-bed biocontainment unit. It’s the country’s largest, opened in 2005 with $1 million in federal and state funding. “It’s built like a concrete box,”

I think they built it they could get there hands on all that grant money. Funding they get all the time... year round ...regardless whether or not the unit is in use.

The country's largest facility has ten beds eh? That ought to be plenty. That figure right there says all that needs to be said regarding the Western world's level of preparedness for bugs like ebola.

a reply to: butcherguy

Oh wow, I hadn't noticed the plastic sheeting in the ambulance. Hopefully they don't think just tearing the plastic sheeting down afterwards is all they need to do to disinfect the ambulance, but that wouldn't surprise me anymore.

a reply to: Urantia1111

Largest Civilian hospital...
as I said above... most of the bigger military bases in the country will have some kind of CBREN unit...
Civvies may have limited facilities but the military is on a whole other level!

The National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC) is a government biodefense research laboratory created by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and located at the sprawling biodefense campus at Fort Detrick in Frederick, MD, USA. Created quietly a few months after the 2001 anthrax attacks, the NBACC (pronounced EN-back) is intended to be the principal U.S. biodefense research institution engaged in laboratory-based threat assessment and bioforensics. NBACC will be an important part of the National Integrated Biodefense Campus (NIBC) also being built at Fort Detrick for the US Army, National Institutes of Health and the US Department of Agriculture.

a reply to: HardCorps

I read somewhere there are 19 beds total. But that could be wrong.

a reply to: ikonoklast

The patient is the guy in the white suit on the stretcher. Unless he is actively bleeding from his eyes or tearing, there are no body fluids coming from him to get on those people watching.

I would hope they give those plastic sheets a good dose of very strong UV light. That will kill any virus that might be on them. Then, they can indeed simply tear them down and burn them to make absolutely sure.