{"id":5354,"date":"2014-08-10T09:15:15","date_gmt":"2014-08-10T13:15:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/?p=5354"},"modified":"2015-06-04T14:32:12","modified_gmt":"2015-06-04T18:32:12","slug":"waiting-and-preparing-for-ebola","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/waiting-and-preparing-for-ebola\/2014\/08\/10\/","title":{"rendered":"Waiting (and Preparing) for Ebola"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"unicef<\/a>For Infectious Diseases doctors, there’s a certain life cycle to the big ID topics that make their way to the lay press, and it’s playing out right now big time with the terrible Ebola\u00a0outbreak in Western Africa. It goes like this:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Someone\u00a0reports an outbreak in a venue like ProMED<\/a><\/strong>.<\/li>\n
  2. Almost synchronously, it is covered by the news.<\/li>\n
  3. Depending on the severity of the outbreak and the Gladwellian “stickiness factor,”<\/a><\/strong> it then becomes well known outside of the ID community. And boy, does Ebola have plenty of stickiness — much more than chikungunya<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0or\u00a0listeria in fruit<\/a><\/strong>, for example, to cite some\u00a0recent entities\u00a0that grabbed a fair\u00a0amount of attention.<\/li>\n
  4. Suddenly everyone wants to talk to you, Dr. ID Person,\u00a0about it — the orthopedic surgeon (two of them mentioned Ebola\u00a0to me last week!), the ICU nurse, the people you play canasta with (I don’t play canasta, just assuming), your Aunt Becky (I do have an Aunt Becky), and even complete strangers who, in the course of serving you food at a restaurant or fixing your car or changing the grip on your badminton racket, find out that you’re an ID doctor. You’re the expert, after all.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The problem is that going from Item #1 to Item #4 can happen awfully fast. And because these newsworthy outbreaks\u00a0frequently haven’t played out before — otherwise they’d be less newsworthy — it’s virtually guaranteed you are\u00a0not<\/em> in fact an expert. At least not yet.<\/p>\n

    Which sends you (and all of us, trust me) scurrying to the great big web in the sky\u00a0for some intense reading on the disease du jour.<\/p>\n

    So for the ID doctors reading this out there, please share your best sources for the latest in Ebola news and information. CDC<\/a>, of course, and the aforementioned ProMED<\/a>, the prescient HealthMap<\/a> and if you want to drink from a fire hose of lay coverage, the Google news feed<\/a>\u00a0— where else?<\/p>\n

    And for non-ID readers, cut your ID docs\u00a0a little slack if we don’t instantly know the answer to your Ebola questions. We’re working on it!<\/p>\n

    In the meantime, please don’t eat plums eaten by bats.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    For Infectious Diseases doctors, there’s a certain life cycle to the big ID topics that make their way to the lay press, and it’s playing out right now big time with the terrible Ebola\u00a0outbreak in Western Africa. It goes like this: Someone\u00a0reports an outbreak in a venue like ProMED. Almost synchronously, it is covered by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[302],"class_list":["post-5354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-care","category-infectious-diseases","tag-ebola"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5354\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}