Article Text

Download PDFPDF
A man walks into an ED…
  1. Ellen J Weber
  1. Correspondence to Dr Ellen J Weber, Emergency Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94143-0208, USA; ellen.weber{at}ucsf.edu

Statistics from Altmetric.com

Request Permissions

If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

…in Dallas, Texas. He has some respiratory symptoms. He tells a nurse (not clear which nurse) that he's come from Sierra Leone recently. A doctor sees him. The doctor does not get this history. The patient is sent home on antibiotics. Three days later he is diagnosed with Ebola.

Thirteen years after 9/11, despite an reinvigorated disaster preparedness programme which sees US hospitals drilling every few months in tents and portable showers magically appearing for a day in hospital parking lots, volunteers donning personal protective equipment (PPE), and fake victims lining up for care after a (choose: earthquake, bomb, toxin release in the subway), the first US case of Ebola simply walked into an emergency department (ED), was not isolated, and was sent home.

The hospital that allowed this happen, and, as of this writing, has two new cases of Ebola in nurses on its …

View Full Text

Footnotes

  • Competing interests None.

  • Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.