Ebola Preventative Measures
Ebola Virus Disease is a highly contagious ailment that normally succumb its victims to death when the symptoms escalate to insuperable levels. If there is an outburst in concentrated populations, the disease can wreak havoc. In any case, areas will be contaminated if bodily fluids and egested stool are present in the areas like toilets and various surfaces like door knobs and in-house paraphernalia. The places should be cleaned meticulously using detergents and water while allowing drying. The cleaners must be protected with protective equipment while ruptures on the skin of patients and persons thought to have been infected.
The virus is vulnerably fragile and may be damaged easily by sunlight, desiccation, and sterilizers like soapy water and organic gel. The longest it can hold up in fluids in cool and wet places is only a few days. Along these lines, food if cooked is safe even if the virus was present as it’s denatured by heat. Raw meat from hunted animals poses a risk if the carcass was an erstwhile host of the Ebola virus.
A common fallacy is that the virus is communicable via air necessitating a protective mask. The virus does not spread through air, perhaps this is ascribable to the fact that coughs and sneezes are rare with infected persons. Nevertheless, when caring for the patient, one should have a protective mask as a violent cough with torrential and wet droplets pose threat of contamination. Discernibly, scientists have not discovered mutation of the virus while Ebola virus transmission mode has remained intact.
Most people consider wearing quasi-spaceman ship suits as it is the practice of health workers involved in containing the menace. However, they are poised to aptly work with stringent procedures for getting rid of the wear as it may have embedded viruses. This entails that bare hands do not come into direct contact with contaminated surfaces. Against the backdrop of the on-going Western and Central Africa epidemic crises, governments have stepped up painstaking screening at airports. However, the approach is not that feasible as it is restricted to body temperatures. Fevers and other symptoms are not conclusive to the presence of the virus in patients.
The symptoms which are not peculiar to the Ebola Virus Disease may cause confusion in highly concentrated areas. People may also migrate through porous borders and ports where they may not be identified and screened like in airports. Thus, screening at airports though a counter-preventive measure is not itself a panacea to the inexorable epidemic. Suffice to say, the worry is based on the fact that patients will only conspicuously expose symptoms days after entrance in a country where there are no infections. They may not have high temperatures at the point of entry, thus suffusing it to uninfected people.
In tandem with WHO recommendations to militate against crises with an international bent, dissemination of facts and implementing preventive undertakings is highly imperative. It behooves governments to put in place relevant facilities to counteract the outburst of the virus.