Dallas Nurse Confirmed With Second Case of Ebola, First Case Contracted on U.S. Dirt

Good morning! Did you ever dream we would be talking about Ebola here in Dallas? Most of us spent our Sunday digesting the sad news that a health care worker who had tended to Thomas Duncan, the city’s first Ebola patient and victim, at Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas, had contracted the disease from her job of caring for him in ICU at Presbyterian Hospital. Late Sunday night the Center for Disease Control confirmed the diagnosis. Speculation was made that the health care worker, a young nurse, had somehow breached the protocol of the protective gear. According to my sources, no breach took place. The hospital, infectious disease experts, and the CDC will be poring over the current containment protocols and hazmat suits worn by all Ebola health care workers in the next few days to determine many things, one of which could be a change in CDC policy for wearing of protective gear, and possibly getting out of it.  Presbyterian Dallas is already stepping up to a new level of infectious disease care, all prompted by rare chance that an Ebola patient from Liberia ended up in the Presby emergency room.

If anything, this is another sign that Dallas has become so much more of an international city, with a growing group of multi-cultural immigrants — which brings the good like real estate sales, and, unfortunately, the bad.

In the meantime, parts of East Dallas and the M Streets (her apartment apparently is in the 5700 block of Marquita, a charming clay-roofed building just behind Greenville Ave.) were shown to the world yesterday as Dallas now has a dubious new distinction: being the first city in the United States to have a resident contract Ebola on U.S. soil:

The woman, in stable condition Sunday in isolation at Presbyterian, was not identified by name. By the afternoon, a Dallas apartment rented by a critical care nurse at Presbyterian had been decontaminated, causing a stir among neighbors near that complex in the M Streets off Lower Greenville Avenue.

Indeed, this is a story that could begin to affect our city economically at any time, including our real estate market. I monitored Facebook posts over the weekend as people stated their intent to avoid crowds, travel, even the Texas State Fair. All of which is ridiculous, since Ebola can not be contracted by casual  encounters. Could this spill over to open houses? House hunting?

Then there’s the sanitation of victim’s homes. While we hope it’s rare, hazardous waste containment and cleaning from Ebola can cost landlords a pretty hefty sum to eliminate. I suspect we will be talking about this for weeks, especially here in Dallas. Will this be the new norm for apartment management? How do you clean up a property after a tenant vacates?

Meantime, here are some factual articles to help stop the spread of crazy rumors circulating. Ebola is not that easily spreadable. We need to be cautious (of course), because now it is further west in Africa, and because of funding cuts at WHO — “The WHO has acknowledged that it could have acted more quickly to confront this Ebola outbreak. Part of its failure may stem from recent budget cuts at the organization. In particular, the WHO budget for “outbreak and crisis response” was cut 51 percent between 2013 and 2014, according to the agency.” 

And a cancer physician at Columbia University advocates a new type of rapid virus screening for Ebola. Actually, he advocates taking a current cancer test in use and adapting it for Ebola screening. He says a ban on travel (as I have proposed) may not work, and could result in subversion, with people sneaking into other countries to avoid detection. As to getting health care workers into the afflicted areas, I propose military planes.

The test he speaks of is called a quick polymerase chain reaction, or P.C.R., a chemical reaction that amplifies pieces of a virus’s genes floating in blood by more than a millionfold, the stuff that makes early, pre-symptomatic infections identifiable.  The cost is less than what it cost to burn Mr. Duncan’s bed linens, he says.

Maybe if we show respect and trust to our overburdened medical community, they will find some answers to containing this disease:

There is a fourth strategy, although it will need to be evaluated and deployed carefully. Since the 1990s, novel methods have allowed doctors to detect viruses in the pre-symptomatic phase of an infection, often with remarkable sensitivity and precision. One of these involves the polymerase chain reaction, or P.C.R., a chemical reaction that amplifies pieces of a virus’s genes floating in blood by more than a millionfold, which is what makes early, pre-symptomatic infections identifiable. The technique is not particularly cumbersome: As an oncologist working with blood cancers, I have been using variants of it to detect subclinical infections in patients for nearly a decade.