Ron Fournier:
It's not enough. Julia Pierson's otherwise distinguished career at the Secret Service ended Wednesday when she resigned as director of the disgraced agency—her last act the right one. Now President Obama and Congress must do their part to fix the Secret Service.
They should start by undoing a Bush-era reform approved by Congress in the name of hardening U.S. defenses against terrorism. After 9/11, several Secret Service agents, including those in leadership, warned me that no good would come from plans to yank the quasi-independent agency out of the Treasury Department and fold it into the fledgling monstrosity that would come to be known as the Homeland Security Department.
"We are who we are because we aren't a bureaucracy," a senior Secret Service official told me in February 2003, a month before DHS swallowed the service.
Want answers about the first #Ebola case in US? Hear from CDC experts 10/2, at 4PM ET. Use #CDCchat to join the conversation.
— @YTHorg
AFP:
US health officials scoured the Dallas area Wednesday for people -- including schoolchildren -- who came in contact with a Liberian man who was diagnosed with Ebola, as it emerged a hospital mix-up saw him initially turned away.
More people may have been exposed to the contagious man after he first sought treatment on September 25 because an apparent miscommunication among staff resulted in his release back into the community for several days, Texas hospital officials admitted.
Ebola is spread through close contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person, and can only be transmitted when a patient is showing symptoms like fever, aches, bleeding, vomiting or diarrhea.
I have
an Ebola piece here, but Ebola is not all that
infectious transmissible,
though very infectious [my error] and containment/case tracking will work, at least in the US. How it happened that the patient had a few more days to expose people is another issue altogether, and something that
every US hospital ER needs to brush up on. And here are two fascinating (in different ways) reads on Ebola:
Vanity Fair on how it played out in W Africa,
Reuters on US hospital Ebola waste containment.
More politics and policy below the fold.
Reuters:
The United States is days away from settling the critical question of how hospitals should handle and dispose of medical waste from Ebola patients, a government official said on Wednesday.
Experts have warned that conflicting U.S. regulations over how such waste should be transported could make it very difficult for U.S. hospitals to safely care for patients with Ebola, a messy disease that causes diarrhea, vomiting and in some cases, bleeding from the eyes and ears.
Safely handling such waste presents a dual challenge for regulators, who want to both prevent the accidental spread of the deadly disease and avert any deliberate attempts to use it as a bioweapon.
USA Today:
Federal health officials are investigating whether a rare respiratory virus sweeping the country contributed to the deaths of four people, including a 10-year-old Rhode Island girl who was hospitalized.
So far, no deaths have been directly attributed to enterovirus D68.
Doctors in several states have reported that some children hospitalized with breathing problems caused by the bug have developed paralysis in their arms and legs.
As of Wednesday, 500 people in 42 states and the District of Columbia were confirmed to be sick with EV-D68, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. Almost all infections have been among children, many of whom had asthma or a history of wheezing.
Earlier in the week, the CDC reported 277 infections in 40 states; two weeks ago, the tally stood at 160 infections in 22 states.
The Rhode Island Health Department announced Wednesday that the girl, from Cumberland, died last week of a staph infection associated with D68, which it called "a very rare combination." Her parents had taken her to Hasbro Children's Hospital in Providence after she developed breathing problems.
It certainly seems the death was from the bacterial infection, with the viral co-infection present and contributing in an unknown way. But, if enough kids get sick with this virus, somewhere there'll be a directly attributable death. It happens every fall and winter with respiratory viruses.
And here's the latest:
At least four people have died after contracting a severe respiratory illness that has spread to more than 40 states, public health officials announced on Wednesday.
The deaths were the first to be linked to the nationwide outbreak of enterovirus 68, which has caused an influx of sick children — some of them critically ill — at hospitals around the country. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed 472 cases of the infection as of Wednesday, although experts said the true number of cases was likely to be many times that number.
Tests showed that four patients who died had been carrying the virus, but it was unclear to what extent the virus contributed to their deaths, the C.D.C. said.
Again for perspective, tens of thousands of people die from flu each year. We don't have an enterovirus vaccine but we do have one for flu. Quit whining and get your flu shot. It's not perfect, and won't make you flu-proof, but the data suggests that it's effective, especially in kids.
app.com:
Gov. Chris Christie's job-approval ratings are near their lowest level, according to new Quinnipiac University Poll results.
The poll finds 46 percent of New Jersey registered voters approve of Christie's job performance and 45 percent disapprove. His approvals dipped 3 points and his disapprovals 2 points since an August poll. It's his lowest approval rating since June 2011, when 44 percent approved.
The share of registered voters without an opinion of Christie rose to 9 percent, a trend also measured in the latest Monmouth University/Asbury Park Press Poll. The Monmouth/APP Poll found 46 percent of registered voters approve of Christie's job performance and 42 percent disapprove.
"The governor's numbers have dropped, while people saying they're not sure about him have increased," said Monmouth University Polling Institute director Patrick Murray. "That's the kind of 'don't knows' you normally see earlier in a career, when people aren't sure what's going on. Right now, that has a lot to do with all the presidential buzz."
But let's keep talking about him.
Or maybe it's Mike Pence? Matt Yglesias thinks so.
7 reasons Mike Pence will be the GOP nominee in 2016
Aaron Blake:
Get ready to pop the champagne, White House. For the first time since January, President Obama is polling a 50 percent approval rating on an issue: his handling of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
That is not a typo: It has been eight months since Obama last cracked half the American public on any given issue -- foreign policy or otherwise -- in Washington Post/ABC News polling.
The newest WaPo-ABC poll shows 50 percent approve of Obama's handling of the Islamic State, as compared to 44 percent who disapprove. That's an improvement from August, when the question referenced only Iraq and not Syria, and 42 percent of Americans gave Obama a vote of confidence.
NEJM:
Provision of No-Cost, Long-Acting Contraception and Teenage Pregnancy
We found that pregnancy, birth, and abortion rates were low among teenage girls and women enrolled in a project that removed financial and access barriers to contraception and informed them about the particular efficacy of LARC methods. The observed rates of pregnancy, birth, and abortion were substantially lower than national rates among all U.S. teens, particularly when compared with sexually experienced U.S. teens. Stratification according to factors known to be associated with sexual behavior and pregnancy risk (age and race)21 showed that this was true among both older teens (18 to 19 years of age) and younger teens, as well as among both white and black teens.