Great news:
Dallas Nurse Nina Pham, who became the first person to contract Ebola on U.S. soil while treating patient Thomas Eric Duncan, is now free of the virus and will be discharged from a special facility at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., the NIH says.
Pham's discharge, scheduled for 11:30 a.m. ET, comes just a day after fellow nurse Amber Vinson's family said she had been declared free of the virus and Dr. Craig Spencer, a physician who had treated Ebola patients in Guinea while working for Doctors Without Borders, was said to have the potentially deadly virus.
Once again, the Ebola virus has proved to be not as dangerous as the hyperventilating mass media would have us think. To reiterate: none of the people who flew on a plane with Duncan, and none of the people who shared a small apartment with him even when he became symptomatic has contracted the disease. Two nurses who had been inadequately trained and equipped, and who were in regular close contact with what has been described as "copious" amounts of his bodily fluids did contract the disease, but one has now been cleared. Let's hope the other soon will be.
In other good news, the EU has pledged a billion Euros to fight the disease where it really is dangerous, in West Africa; Cuba has sent a second group of medical staff to help treat those afflicted with the disease; and the World Health Organization is sending extra medics to Mali while also announcing new Ebola vaccine trials.
For Americans, there are two lessons here. The first is that you can't trust the American mass media to put a major story into its proper perspective. The other is that nurses in this country remain inadequately appreciated and protected. They put their lives on the line to protect others. It's well past time they were paid and appreciated and protected commensurate with their value to society.