By Betsy Todd, MPH, RN, CIC, AJN clinical editor
Some aspects of last month’s case of Lassa fever in New Jersey seemed to parallel the story of Thomas Duncan, who died last October in Dallas after contracting Ebola virus disease in Liberia.
A man arrived in the U.S. from Western Africa. He was screened for Ebola at the airport and instructed to monitor his […]
While debates about measles vaccination swirl around the current U.S. measles outbreak, most U.S. nurses have never actually seen the disease itself, and right now we are a lot more likely to encounter a case of measles than of Ebola virus disease. Here, then, is a measles primer.
Measles is an upper-respiratory infection with initial symptoms of fever, cough, runny nose, red and teary eyes, and (just before the rash appears) “Koplik spots” (tiny blue/white spots) on a reddened buccal mucosa. The maculopapular rash emerges a few days after these first symptoms appear (about 14 days after exposure), beginning at the hairline and slowly working its way down the rest of the body.
Infected people who are severely immunosuppressed may not have any rash at all. “Modified” measles, with a longer incubation period and sparse rash, can occur in infants who are partially protected by maternal antibodies and in people who receive immune globulin after exposure to measles.
The virus spreads via respiratory droplets and aerosols, from the time symptoms begin until three to four days after the rash appears. (People who are immunosuppressed can shed virus and remain contagious for several weeks.) Measles is highly contagious, and more than 90% of exposed, nonimmune people will contract the disease. There is no known asymptomatic carrier state, […]
By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief
Taken by Dr. Heidi Soeters during Guinea’s 2014 Ebola outbreak, photo depicts red- and green-colored gloves propped on sticks to dry after being washed in a hyperchlorinated solution./CDC
It’s sad but not surprising that Ebola has all but disappeared from the headlines. After all, it’s not an imminent threat here anymore. […]
By Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor/blog editor
Filamentous Ebola virus particles budding from an infected VERO E6 cell (35,000x magnification). Credit: NIAID
It’s unsurprising that some of our top blog posts this past year were about Ebola virus disease. But it’s worth noting that our clinical editor Betsy Todd, who is also an epidemiologist, cut through the misinformation and noise about Ebola very early on—at a time when many thoughtful people still seemed ill informed about the illness and its likely spread in the U.S.
Ebola is scary in itself, but fear was also spread by media coverage, some politicians, and, for a while, a tone-deaf CDC too reliant on absolutes in its attempts to reassure the public.
While the most dire predictions have not come true here in the U.S., it’s also true that a lot of work has gone into keeping Ebola from getting a foothold. A lot of people in health care have put themselves at risk to make this happen, doing so at first in an atmosphere of radical uncertainty about possible modes of transmission (uncertainty stoked in part by successive explanations offered as to how the nurses treating […]
By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief
A perhaps idealized past: ‘Home for Thanksgiving,’ Currier and Ives lithograph/Wikimedia Commons
At the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., it’s customary to take some time to reflect on our good fortune—to give thanks for what we have. For many of us, it means being thankful for family and good health. But what about all the other people who may make a difference in how we live our lives, who make the world in which we live better or in some indirect way have had an impact on what we do, how we do it, how we feel about life or our work?
Here are some folks I’d like to thank: