New Jersey’s 72 critical care hospitals are staging drills for health care workers in the event an Ebola patient arrives here. The Health Professionals and Allied Employees union is calling on the state to designate just one hospital to handle confirmed cases and the State Nurses Association doesn’t want Ebola patients here at all. It wants them shipped to one of four bio-containment centers out of state. The 188,000-member New Jersey State Nurses Association is on alert because of 76 who cared for the first Ebola patient in Dallas, now two Dallas health care workers have contracted the virus. New Jersey State Nurses Association CEO Dr. Richard Ridge told NJTV News Anchor Mary Alice Williams that people began reacting to the news of infectious disease as information became available.
“Over the years, nurses like other health care workers, highly educated and dealing with infectious diseases and even recently had a 4-year-old boy die of an entrovirus, very different from Ebola, but infectious disease is all around us and nurses and health care workers have been trained and educated to deal with this over the years,” said Ridge.
According to Ridge, the CDC director seemed to blame the Texas nurse who had treated the patient with Ebola for having broken protocol and that was how she may have been infected with the disease. The director has apologized for the statement.
In a newsletter, Ridge recommended that medical staff use respirators over their mouths when in contact with suspected Ebola patients.
“The fact that the two nurses were infected in a way that one nurse and the other caregiver were infected in such a way that we don’t know all the details and doing our homework we came across the University of Minnesota’s Infectious Disease Institute and that’s in our newsletter as well,” Ridge said. “They’re suggesting that maybe contact isolation is not enough.”
Ridge also said that about 5,600 health care workers participated in a CDC program and that within that program they are recommending bio containment of units.
While Ridge said he doesn’t know if the CDC has released all the information, he doesn’t think the organization would purposely withhold information. He compares the situation with Ebola to the early days of HIV diagnosis.
“I think it’s similar to the early days of HIV and those of us who were around at that time, it took a couple of years for us to really understand what was happening and this will be different,” Ridge said. “I think information will flow faster this time around but it’s a matter of just getting information known and getting it into the hands of people that know how to deal with it. So we’re just going through the initial phases of this response.”