Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Can anyone say "Crisis Communications" or "Issue Management" in regards to Ebola? Having finished some of those topics last week in Chapter 8, I'm curious what your assessment or insights might be in regards to the Ebola outbreak in the U.S. - from the standpoint of either the CDC, American healthcare facilities - preparedness, and/or President Obama's Administration. If you choose to post replies to this, please try to keep it not about politics, but about applying what you read/learned in Ch. 8 that allows you to now understand effective crisis communications and issue management.
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The United States public relations committee is in full issue management mode in regards to the Ebola crisis on US soil. Issue management is the proactive phase of public relations; part of this phase is when President Obama announced on October 17 that Ron Klain would coordinate the administration’s efforts to deal with Ebola. Most American voters dismiss President Barack Obama’s appointment of an “Ebola czar” as a public relations move, according to a new Fox News poll.
ReplyDeleteSo, the question that comes to mind in regards to the effectiveness of public relation is, would a ‘PR move’ be considered a failure if the public knows that an action was done for public relations purposes? This is why it is important when making public relations decisions that you are not being deceitful or using circumlocution to talk around an issue with no action or plan to carry it through. If the government appoints someone to coordinate administration effort to deal with Ebola it is not just enough to create the positing in order to improve PR. The public needs to also be able to see the fallow through or action of the position in order for the ‘PR move’ to be effective.
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ReplyDeleteI’ve written a paper about Ebola before, it starts in the next paragraph if you are interested in reading it. The general public has the right to be aware of what Ebola is exactly. First, we can’t get Ebola easily, we can’t get it through casual contact with someone. In Dallas, Mr. Duncan’s family, who lived with him and helped care for him, didn't get Ebola from him. The only way we can get the disease is by coming into direct contact with bodily fluids from someone who is currently having symptoms (urine, saliva, sweat, feces, vomit, breast milk and semen). American healthcare facilities should offer a contact number for people who might be infected, so as not to have potentially infected people go to smaller hospitals. They can contact the number, and have adequate transportation supplied to facilities better prepared for the outbreak; it makes more people safer overall.
ReplyDelete“The Hot Zone,” a true novel written by Richard Preston, is an intriguing and horrifying story about the Ebola filovirus. The book actually focuses on Ebola Sudan, Ebola Zaire, Marburg and HIV, four viruses to come from Africa in the last 50 years that have no cure or vaccine. Of these four, Ebola Zaire is the most deadly. This book focuses on how quickly these viruses can possibly spread from a third world country to the United States, and how the U.S. reacted when it actually happened in 1989.
In 1983, Ebola Zaire was already being studied by the USAMRIID (United States Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, as samples had been sent to them to be studied in their BSL-4 (Biosafety Level 4) containment areas. One of the primary researchers involved was veterinarian Major Nancy Jaax, who enrolled in Eugene Johnson’s Ebola Program. She was involved in the testing of several monkeys, most of which had been infected with Ebola Zaire (test subjects) and two others as the control subjects. She and other military personnel tested the infected monkeys, all of which died from Ebola. The concerning factor was that the control monkeys, that had remained isolated from the infected test subjects, also contracted Ebola Zaire and died. According to Nancy Jaax, “It probably traveled through the air in aerosolized secretions. That was when I knew that Ebola can travel through the air” (Preston 94).
In 1989, the “Monkey House” in Reston, Virginia, a place for monkeys being imported to the U.S. to remain quarantined until free of disease (normally 2-3 months), suffered a major outbreak of Ebola Zaire among all of its 450 quarantined monkeys. Dr. Dan Dalgard, the Reston House veterinarian, noticed that large amounts of a shipment of crab-eating macaques were dying (29 out of 100) within a short period of time. Fearing SHF, Simian Hemorrhagic Fever, he sent samples of necrotic monkey tissue to the USAMRIID. One Army scientist confirmed SHF. However, one civilian Army virologist, Peter Jahrling, decided to further test for a possible filovirus. “Identification of the isolates was based on immunofluorescence of the inoculated cells plus detection of Ebola viral antigens by antigen capture enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay techniques. Use of immunoelectron microscopy showed that the filovirus particles reacted with Ebola virus reference reagents” (Geisbert & Jahrling, 1990). The three filoviruses currently known and that could be tested for were Marburg, Ebola Sudan and Ebola Zaire. The results were shocking: it was Ebola Zaire, and it was in the U.S. only 10 miles from the capital, surrounded by civilian people. The next option was how to take care of the problem, as there was no cure.
The main problem, other than the virus that was known to kill 90% of its infected persons being found near our nation’s capital amongst thousands of civilians, was the politics of the situation.
ReplyDeleteShould the Army become involved? The Army has a mission, which is to defend the country against military threats. Was this virus a military threat?...The CDC (Centers for Disease Control) is the federal agency that deals with emerging diseases. It has a mandate from Congress to control human disease…The Army has the capability. The CDC doesn’t have the capability. We (the Army) have the muscle but not the authority. The CDC has the authority but not the muscle.
(Preston 227-228)
Then they had to think of all of the agencies that had to be notified or contacted regarding this outbreak of Ebola: the county health department in Fairfax County, the state health department of Virginia, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Pentagon, etc. With so many agencies involved, it’s amazing that this problem was taken care of without any virus outbreak.
The head of the Special Pathogens division of the CDC, Joe McCormick, was in attendance, along with members of all of the agencies listed above, in an effort to decide how to handle the Reston Monkey House situation. Colonel CJ Peters, head of the USAMRIID, and Joe McCormick, were not the best of friends, according to Richard Preston’s novel. Some of their animosity could have contributed to a failure in this situation, but other officials stepped in and tried to split up some of the detailed work. In the end, “it was agreed that CDC would manage the human-health aspects of the outbreak and would direct the care of any human patients. The Army would handle the monkeys and the monkey house, which was the nest of the outbreak” (Preston 265).
When one of the monkey house caretakers fell sick, vomiting, the CDC was in charge of his care, and sent him to Fairfax Hospital. Colonel Peters recommended keeping him in isolation at USAMRIID, to prevent any spread of Ebola to other human patients. However, Joe McCormick wouldn’t budge in his decision. The monkey house was then evacuated of all human personnel, and the Army began its plan of attack on this Ebola virus. Their goal was to contain all monkeys within the monkey house and euthanize them so that they wouldn’t suffer unduly. Nancy’s husband, Jerry Jaax, was in charge of this project, and utilized 91 members, forming a decontamination team that put the monkeys to sleep with a sedative before euthanizing them. Following all 450 monkeys being killed; the decontamination unit then scrubbed the building’s interior with bleach before laying out spores of Bacillus subtilus niger, then releasing trapped formaldehyde gas within the building for three days. Only after determining the death of the spores did the team state that the building was clear of Ebola virus
From Preston’s novel, we learn that Ebola Reston is extremely deadly to monkeys, yet seems to act more like a cold or flu in humans, cycling through our system then passing on, fortunately for us. However, the interesting factors are that this virus came from monkeys in the Philippines, yet the virus is most structurally related to Ebola Zaire (just a couple of proteins different), which is only found in a very small area in Africa. It just shows us how small the world really is today, and that a virus is never more than a slight genetic change away from total destruction.
Works Cited
Geisbert, T.W. & Jarhling, P.B. (1990). Use of immunoelectron microscopy to show Ebola virus during
the 1989 United States epizootic. Journal of Clinical Pathology, 43(10), 813-816.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC502829/pdf/jclinpath00400-0025.pdf
Preston, R. (1994). The hot zone. New York, NY: Anchor Books.
Ebola is a something that is very dangerous. When it came into the picture on the news a lot of people were scared because there was no cure for it. A crisis communication occurred when Ebola was first announced. When this occurred there was a high degree of uncertainty exists. Ebola was killing people and people didn’t know why. More often than not though when risk communication is there to prevent an issue from evolving into a major problem can often turn into a crisis. In the Ebola case then turned into a crisis because everybody is talking about because it’s fatal. Ebola is a crisis communication.
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