Re: Ebola - all or nothing?
Earlier today at work I had a teleconference with, among other participants, a doctor who's a professor at the University of Chicago Hospitals. In the context of an unrelated medical concept we were discussing, he made the point that doctors at hospitals affiliated with medical schools are, in general, more apt to be on top of current best practices than doctors at other hospitals because they're constantly involved with teaching medical students these practices, as opposed to other doctors who don't have as much of a built-in incentive to stay current. In support of this point, he noted that the patients who've been treated at hospitals in Atlanta (affiliated with Emory) and Nebraska (affiliated with the University of Nebraska) have survived, whereas Thomas Duncan, treated at Texas Health Presbyterian (with no university affiliation), died and two nurses there were infected due to deficiencies in or failure to follow proper treatment protocol. Now, it's certainly possible that this doctor's opinions are skewed by his own professional experiences or contacts, but it also does seem to jive with common sense. But if any of you are ever unlucky enough to come down with ebola, and hopefully this is never the case, my recommendation is to get yourself to a teaching hospital.