In an interview with CNN s Richard Quest World Bank President Jim Yong Kim dismissed remarks from a top United States health official who said Thursday that the global Ebola outbreak was similar to AIDS, warning that Ebola could be even harder to fight.
Kim, a medical doctor who previously directed the HIV/AIDS program of the World Health Organization, said Ebola was "more complicated" than HIV because it is easier to transmit and harder to treat.
“AIDS is a sexually transmitted infection, so it's actually more difficult to transmit HIV than Ebola," Kim said Thursday in an interview with CNN’s Richard Quest.
"For AIDS, it was a matter of identifying the cases and getting them on chronic, long-term treatment,” he said. “Ebola is different — you have to have almost intensive care services available.”
Jim Yong Kim said Thomas Eric Duncan's decision to return to the U.S despite knowing he contacted the Ebola virus was the best option for him at the time, because coming from a person who contacted the virus from Liberia, where adequate health facilities is limited, Duncan knew he needed help and had to get out of Liberia to seek help in the United States; where he believed he would get better health treatment.
Unfortunately, Duncan died before that could happen.
According to reports, Thomas Eric Duncan contracted the virus while taking a dying neighbor to the hospital in a taxi during his visit to Liberia.
He left Monrovia on a Sept. 19 flight and arrived in the U.S. the next day, he started showing symptoms of the Ebola virus on Sept. 24, and went to Dallas hospital for treatment on Sept. 26. He was sent home, only to be brought back by ambulance on Sept. 28 and diagnosed with the deadly virus.
...even when it was alleged that Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a media briefing with reporters earlier this week, said that doses of the experimental medicine ZMapp which was administered on Dr. Kent Brantly, a Texas doctor, and U.S. missionary, Nancy Writebol, were "all gone" and that the drug, produced by San Diego-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical, is "not going to be available anytime soon."
Why wasn't the second experimental drug, made by Canada's Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corp, which though "can be quite difficult for patients to take." administered to Duncan?
News has it that Duncan's family would have access to it, if they wanted to....
were they approached on this?
did they object to it?
What really happened?
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