<p>So, I don’t know where people are reading condemning the family. There is some definitely some discomfort with the family leaping to a lawsuit and there were clear indications that this was where the whole debacle was headed well before Duncan died. Also, as I understand it the four people who are called the family consist of a past girlfriend and her teenaged son and two young men in their twenties one of whom is a half nephew of Mr. Duncan. There’s also the girlfriend’s grown daughter who called him stepdaddy but just met him the day he arrived in the US. Can’t really blame folks for being confused about the who’s who…</p>
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<p>No. Of course not. Just saying it’s somthing Duncan could have brought up instead of denying that he was in contact with sick people. If his neighbor had a malaria, he aws in a malaria prone area and it should have been looked into.</p>
<p>Flossy, did you not see the many pages of comments about how “ungrateful” the family was? I also don’t know that they have leapt to a lawsuit. Has one been initiated?</p>
<p>And Consolation is right. It is frustrating that people are not reading the facts, even when they have been posted right on this site. The girlfriend is the mother of his child and they were planning to get married. </p>
<p><a href=“Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan's story of love and loss”>Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan's story of love and loss;
<p>I still don’t get the judginess about what constitutes a family. Is there some test? Or is it only your view of it that counts?</p>
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<p>I don’t know how many are thinking that far that he came here to get cured. Everything is speculative but that sits on thinner ice. I think he was planning to come before Ebola. My guess is that he didn’t cancel the trip as he was supposed to after he contacted the patient. </p>
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<p>It’s possible he thought they can diagonise right withoiut him telling them. Look what happened when Liberian government thought he lied in the form…</p>
<p>Family has legal ramifications. It’s not judgeyness, at all. And, the marriage stuff is a long way from a fact since even she failed to mention it in the beginning. It appeared out of nowhere much later in the story and when asked why he came by Anderson Cooper at the time she claimed it was for a graduation but he didn’t have the money for a ticket so he came when he got the cash. The ungrateful pages came after the family slammed the US government, the Liberian government, and the hospital. They thanked the mayor and the judge who found them a house. JJ has made it very clear they are planning to sue. No-one cares why he came here anymore because his death makes that point mute, anyway. The Liberian president was planning to prosecute him for lying. That won’t happen now. All of the lying stuff came out of Liberia from people like his boss who told the press he knew. But again., it doesn’t much matter anymore.</p>
<p>So they gave him a CT scan to check for appendicitis among other things. That tells us that they weren’t just skimping on tests because he was uninsured or black or African. It does tell us that they were checking for the common things that cause people to present with such symptoms. He spiked to 103 on the first time he went to ER which tells us that he was MUCH sicker at that time than people were led to believe from the original reports. According to the links above it wasn’t just a “sin of omission” that he didn’t volunteer that he had contact with a sick person. The links say that he was asked directly and said that he had not. According to Nancy Writebol’s account Brantly’s private aid organization was able procure “a single three-infusion treatment course” of ZMapp which they ultimately split. It isn’t that the clouds parted and a red carpet was rolled out by I’m not sure who and they were guaranteed a full recovery. Their situation was very touch and go and not at all certain.</p>
<p>Yes, the hospital medical team should have eventually connected the dots or at least kept Duncan for observation. The discrepancy between the recorded fever and doctor’s notes is a flag for sure. Still . . . these conspiracy theories rankle. What benefit would there possibly be to turning an Ebola case back out into the community? They didn’t figure it out, although they tested him for many of the more common things. It bothers me that the nephew is making comments that it is “conspicuous” that the white patients survived and the black one didn’t. That is not remotely helpful. In fact, I think that trying to pin the doctor or hospital or CDC with discrimination charges will make it harder to honestly evaluate what went wrong and how to fix it. The bias charge muddies the waters unnecessarily IMO. To be clear, I do think there is bias in many places, but this idea that he was skimped on RE tests, transfusion and experimental drugs out of bias is just ludicrous. It seems much more likely that the staff at Pres. Hospital is just more provincial and less worldly than they might have been.</p>
<p>I have a friend who had Lyme Disease from a tick bite on Long Island (it was ultimately determined). She never saw the tick and we live in Seattle - a tick free haven completely across the country from tick central in the Hudson Valley and she hadn’t been hiking or cavorting over on the dry side of the state. She went to several specialists with some pretty severe symptoms before a University of Washington Infectious Disease specialist decided that she had Lyme. Acute Lyme is just not something that you see too much of where I live. I would think diagnosing Ebola would be similar for the first case ever in this country.</p>
<p>From the linked article:</p>
<p>Then Samaritan’s Purse, the missionary organization that Brantly works for, and SIM managed to get a single three-infusion treatment course of an experimental drug called ZMapp. A combination of lab-engineered antibodies, it is specifically designed to boost the body’s immune response to Ebola infection. It had never been tested in humans.</p>
<p>It was offered to Brantly first. He said Nancy should get it. “This was not a heroic decision to sacrifice myself for the sake of Nancy,” Brantly said. “I thought she was older than I am. She’s sicker than I am.”</p>
<p>He called her from his bedroom, where he’d been isolated since he became ill July 23.</p>
<p>“I wasn’t sure I wanted to take it,” Nancy said. “We had a phone conversation and I said, ‘Kent what are you going to do?’” Brantly wasn’t sure.</p>
<p>“I said, ‘If you are not going to take it, I am not going to take it,’” Writebol said. “I wanted to know what his opinion as a doctor was.”</p>
<p>Nancy Writebol recounts ‘hardest’ Ebola casesTODAY</p>
<p>In the end, the doctors decided. Brantly got much sicker. They gave him the first dose, and told him Nancy could take the next two doses.</p>
<p><a href=“Ebola Survivor Nancy Writebol: All Doctors Could Say Was 'We Are So Sorry'”>http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ebola-virus-outbreak/ebola-survivor-nancy-writebol-all-doctors-could-say-was-we-n194361</a></p>
<p>“I don’t know how many are thinking that far that he came here to get cured”</p>
<p>Many people on this thread have stated they don’t believe he was coming here to marry the girlfriend. That it is a fabricated story and he just upped and quit his job and bought a plane ticket to the US because he knew he was exposed to Ebola. Then he knowingly lied to get on the plane leaving Liberia. I’ve read that on this thread and in many comments sections in new articles. </p>
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“It is sad and ironic that the doctor(s) apparently ran a number of tests looking for things that weren’t there, but didn’t see the obvious. And hadn’t the hospital <em>just had</em> Ebola training?”</p>
<p>I don’t find it sad and ironic at all that the ER checked for an appendix that was about to burst. That seems completely logical to me. I am not an ER Doc or nurse but it seems like exactly what you would do . . . check for the acutely dangerous problems that you see every day and that match the symptoms. </p>
<p>If you come to an ER with fever and stomach pain which may or may not be localized to the area where “typical” appendicitis pain occurs, the ER will put you at the top of the queue and a CT scan is a SOP. This is what the ER surgeon who operated on Mr B told me. Plus, the patient is given antibiotics right away to prevent the possibility that a ruptured appendix would cause further infection, and the docs do not wait for the CT results to start you on antibiotics, because stuff happens fast. </p>
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<p>If this is true, wouldn’t it have been in his best interest to say the “E” word when the hospital staff didn’t bring it up? Or to raise it right at the beginning of his interaction with the doctors and nurses?</p>
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<p>I agree. I don’t think there was anything intentional. Ebola just wasn’t in their radar. I don’t know much about ER procedure but I think Duncan received the same care everyone would have received except he was infected with Ebola and it didn’t register in their mind. From everything I read, the hospital took great care of Duncan once they knew what was going on. So why sue? What discrimination?</p>
<p>Maybe he didn’t tell them because he was still in semi-denial and didn’t want to admit to his hosts that he HAD been in contact and potentially put them in jeopardy as well. He was apologetic later for possibly exposing them, I understand. Whether he knew or not at the time that the now dead young woman had Ebola, he must have suspected when he became ill. I can see how he would be ashamed to say in front of his friends and family that he had knowingly put them at risk even if unintentionally. Still . . . knowing that it seems unwise and unfair to make the medical team play guessing games if they don’t need to. </p>
<p>They wouldn’t have to sue for discrimination. They might have a wrongful death or malpractice case, based on the doctor giving conflicting and untrue information that led him to be sent home.</p>
<p>“If this is true, wouldn’t it have been in his best interest to say the “E” word when the hospital staff didn’t bring it up? Or to raise it right at the beginning of his interaction with the doctors and nurses?”</p>
<p>Yes, of course it would. Which is why I don’t think he thought he was exposed to Ebola before he left for the states and why he didn’t say anything to the ER nurse or doctor. </p>
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<p>I don’t believe that marrying story. I think he just came for a visit. No one heard of any marriage until Friday Oct 3. And some girls in Liberia got concerned on hearing Ebola since they had a “relationship” with him shortly before he left for the US. Nothing wrong with it. Nothing wrong with just being a visitor. i do object making up a sob story. It is what it is. He doesn’t deserve to die if he was just visiting. All the same it is unfortunate.</p>
<p>Just to play the devil’s advocate. It should be noted that “Some girls” comes from a report in a Liberian rag. Also, if he came here on a visitor visa, announcing marriage would not be in his best interests even if he really had the intent to marry, because he could be in violation of his visa terms, which would be the grounds for deportation, if someone reported him. </p>
<p>I think he may very well have had intent to marry if she is a citizen. That’s still a long way from a love story or even a done deal. But, I would not be at all surprised if that was his intent. Who quits their job to go on vacation?</p>
<p>How do people come to the US if they are marrying? Wouldn’t it expedite the visa process if you tell them you are marrying an American citizen? Duncan’s visa took so long they say. I am sure you don’t have to wait so long if you tell them you have to go to your own wedding. Besides, would Troh’s granddaughter call Duncan new boyfriend if she was about to marry?</p>
<p>"“Oh, Grandma has a new boyfriend,” 6-year-old Rose exclaimed when her mother returned to pick her up."</p>
<p>“Wouldn’t it expedite the visa process if you tell them you are marrying an American citizen?”</p>
<p>I don’t think so. My nephew married a girl from Scotland and it took several years before she could come here and live. And he is a lawyer for INS. </p>
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<p>Wasn’t that basically what Texas ER did on Duncan’s first vista? </p>