jack schidt: Seemingly the most likely (
and tragic) reasons behind the numerous infections & deaths amongst 'health workers', i.e. within those affected (
infected) West African countries, has been due to:
- Lack of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) at various remote locations / remote county clinics & hospitals (albeit with plenty of PPE likely available within the more major conurbations). Remembering that this stuff costs money to procure, takes time to obtain, and equally time to implement / logistics.
- Lack of training (and budgetary constraints therein) for medical staff (especially nurses), remembering that their level of training will likely be commensurate with their treatment of specific & localised medical conditions (e.g. they're typically only used to dealing with the likes of malaria, typhoid, midwifery, etc).
- The speed of events / infections overtaking all of the above!
Imho it is highly unlikely that the medical personnel within those Ebola infected countries were ever trained to deal with that type of disease and / or had little or no concept of how virulent the likes of an Ebola virus can be.
Coupled with this, a lot a West African 'health workers' have only rudimentary levels of education themselves (
remembering that having all of ones teachers either run away and / or be murdered, during what amounts to almost 14 years of civil war - i.e. in Liberia - doesn't exactly help consolidate ones education during ones formative years... and ones typical 'nurse' in West Africa is almost certainly not at the same standard as, say, an A&E triage nurse in the UK... that said, the various Nurses, Doctors, plus various heath workers, in West Africa, are undoubtedly doing their v.best against almost impossible odds, and therein I, for one, have the utmost respect towards them for their integrity, commitment, and bravery in their tackling of this disease).
Imho, the majority of people whom might read this thread are unlikely to have ever experienced of the levels of poverty that we're talking about here (
i.e. specific to West Africa), it being a region where the vast majority are surviving on a hand-to-mouth existence of between $1 and $2 USD per day.
To perhaps help put it all into perspective, the Government of Liberia's entire annual budget (
for a country of 4.2 million people) is typically the same (
and sometimes less than) the annual budget allocated to run
just one 'National Health Service' (NHS) hospital of a large town / averaged sized city in the UK.