Assigning blame for the spread of Ebola to the United States is a waste of time and resources better spent on dealing with the crisis at hand, says a specialist in infectious diseases.
"There's no room for blame at this point," Olayemi Osiyemi, a Nigerian-born and Florida-based doctor, told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner on
Newsmax TV Thursday.
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Osiyemi agreed that healthcare institutions, public and private, have work to do to regain a wary public's trust now that two Dallas nurses who treated an Ebola victim are themselves infected — the first U.S. cases from an outbreak that began in western Africa and has killed more than 4,000 people there, according to estimates.
The two U.S. infections have already disrupted travel plans, school calendars, stock prices and political campaigns.
Ebola worries also led to a congressional
lambasting on Thursday of Tom Frieden, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the lead agency accused by critics of fumbling the U.S. response.
"Again, retrospectively, to look back and say they should’ve done something better, it is really hard to say because no one knew the magnitude of this crisis would be this much," said Osiyemi, a private practice clinician in West Palm Beach, and section chief for infectious diseases and infection control at two area hospitals.
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"The question is what do we do now? Where do we go from here? That’s even more important than what could have been done," he said.
Osiyemi said he and other medical professionals in South Florida are focused on Ebola education — speaking to their neighbors at health-care forums, informing them of what their facilities are doing to prepare — and reminding them about disease-prevention practices in their daily lives.
He urged anyone who hasn't already gotten an annual flu shot to do so quickly "because the symptoms of Ebola mimic flu" and medical professional need the public's help in minimizing false Ebola scares.
"We need to talk about what we're doing locally," he said. "If we can If we can start with that trust on a local level, that will kind of spread nationally."
Osiyemi said he is confident that the CDC — which is revising its Ebola treatment guidelines after the infections in Dallas — is on track and capable of overseeing a new and improved safety regimen for healthcare workers nationwide.
"The speed at which we're moving right now is pretty good," said Osiyemi.
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