Delay In Dallas Ebola Cleanup- WORKERS BALKING AT TASK [View all]

[KittyWampus]

I can not figure out who exactly is responsible for cleaning up the stricken man's apartment. Is this a job that is contracted out? If this is contracted out, who gets the job? Are they reliable or the cheapest? The fact that our privatized health care system is so totally geared towards reaping profits for investors leads me to wonder how well prepared the USA really is in dealing with infectious diseases.

I have some degree of confidence in government agencies, civil servants and medical staff but much less in the medical system.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/03/us/dallas-ebola-case-thomas-duncan-contacts.html?_r=0

Delay in Dallas Ebola Cleanup as Workers Balk at Task
By KEVIN SACK and MARC SANTORAOCT. 2, 2014

DALLAS — More than a week after a Liberian man fell ill with Ebola and four days after he was placed in isolation at a hospital in Dallas, the apartment where he was staying with four other people had not been cleaned and the sheets and dirty towels he used while sick remained in the home, health officials acknowledged on Thursday afternoon.

Even as the authorities were reaching out to at least 80 people who may have had contact — either directly or indirectly — with the patient, Thomas E. Duncan, while he was contagious, they were scrambling to find medical workers to safely clean the apartment.

The four family members who are living there are among a handful who have been directed by the authorities to remain in isolation, following what officials said was a failure to comply with an order to stay home. Texas health officials hand-delivered orders to residents of the apartment requiring them not to leave their home and not to allow any visitors inside until their roughly three-week incubation periods have passed.

The orders – known as communicable disease control orders – are permitted under the state’s health code. Violations could result in either criminal prosecution or civil court proceedings.

But even as the orders were being issued, there were concerns about the conditions in the home where they were being ordered to stay.

snip

The Texas health commissioner, Dr. David Lakey, told reporters during an afternoon news conference that health workers should have moved more swiftly to clean the apartment but that they had had trouble finding an outside medical team to do the work. They encountered “a little bit of hesitancy,” he said.