The death of a patient, who is suspected to have Ebola, has caused
panic among patients and doctors at the Lagos University Teaching
Hospital, Idi- Araba, Lagos State.
A reliable source, who confirmed this development to our
correspondent in Lagos on Tuesday, said the patient was brought in by
members of the health authorities at the Murtala Muhammed International
Airport, Ikeja, to the hospital on Monday.
According to the doctor who was on duty when the patient was admitted into the Accident and Emergency Unit…
“They rushed him to the Accident and Emergency Unit, and since he was
vomiting and purging and he also had high fever, we quickly took his
temperature, it was very high. We were all scared to take his blood
samples because we were not wearing any Protective Protective
Equipment.”
“We had to take him out of the emergency ward to the other spill-over
ward to avoid any form of contamination. We also reported to the Lagos
State Government so that they can take him to the Infectious Diseases
Hospital in Yaba for proper treatment. But he had startedvomiting blood
by this morning , and few hours after he died.”Like I said, we could not
take any blood sample when he was alive because we were not wearing
PPE, and we could not manage him effectively because of the severity of
the symptoms we saw and considering the fact that he was coming from the
airport. He could have been coming from an Ebola-affected country.”
“They will need to establish the cause of death, so as to be able to
know whether to quarantine those that he had contact with from the
airport to the hospital. LUTH does not have the facilities to handle any
suspected case of Ebola, government should know that, so they don’t
keep bringing suspected cases here. All suspected cases should be taken
to IDH.”
When contacted, the LUTH Chief Medical Director, Prof. Akin Oshibogun,
said the death of the patient is still being investigated.
Oshibogun said..
“We have been able to establish that this patient has no history of
Ebola or any contact with a person that had Ebola. We are only trying to
investigate the patient. If there is any new thing, we will let you
know. As long as we are in the hospital, from time to time, we will
always have high index suspicion and most times these patients turn out
to be negative.”
“There is a difference between suspected or confirmed cases . We are
only investigating the case to protect our people. We have had that
situation two times in the hospital now. If we have a case we will
announce it. In the case of this patient, for the fact that a patient
has high index suspicion does not make the patient an Ebola patient.
When you create panic many nurses may decide to abandon the patients.”
No comments:
Post a Comment