Hope for the best, plan for the worst is a cliché, sure. But it’s much better than hoping for the best, planning for the best, which is what the WHO seems to be doing.
by Joe Vipond, Dick Zoutman, Kashif Pirzada
It’s happening again.
Reducing airborne alert for an event that is not a global pandemic but a deadly respiratory virus possibly spread by airborne transmission.
You’d think we’d learned by now.
On May 8, the World Health Organization (WHO) came out with Recommendations for healthcare workers Treatment of patients with known or suspected Andes Hantavirus. Inexplicably, they recommend “Standard Respiratory Precautions,” That is, wearing a medical mask instead of an N95 or FFP2/3 respirator mask unless transmission is specified by the WHO as airborne.
For a disease that has a mortality risk of up to 40-50 percent.
Hope for the best, plan for the worst is a cliché, sure. But it’s much better than hoping for the best, planning for the best, which is what the WHO seems to be doing.
We’ve been here before. In 2003, SARS-1 tore through the health-care systems of several countries, sickening and killing mainly health-care workers, patients and their families. Fortunately, it did not spread widely among the masses. At the start of that event, in Toronto, only medical masks were used, although the spread only spread when public N95 respirator masks were deployed As early as April 2003 (among other mitigation efforts).
four years later, Justice Archie Campbell acquitted the Sars Commission One of the report’s most important recommendations? Treat all illnesses with epidemic potential and the precautionary principle: assume airborne transmission until proven otherwise.
In March 2020, the WHO did just the opposite. Fact: Covid is not airborne It’s a tweet that still famously exists on the World Health Organization’s X page. After twenty-five million (at least) deaths, WHO (And US Centers for Disease Controlthe Public Health Agency of Canada and all other public health agencies) belatedly recognized airborne transmission. Some are even recommending airborne precautions when handling COVID (but curiously, not all).
In retrospect, the WHO’s Jeremy Ferrer, citing airborne transmission errors, said it was resulting in a large number of deaths.
Echoing the Campbell Report, the United Kingdom released the Covid investigation quite recently Module 3 Reportstates: “In the future, such guidelines should assume that all routes of transmission are possible until there is sufficient evidence to prove otherwise.”
To add to the chaos, The 2020 NEJM report is available Andes hantavirus variant (the same one on cruise ships) which clearly states that the epidemiology is related to airborne transmission. More worrisome: Some transmissions have occurred in brief, public exposures, such as birthday parties and wakes. This is in stark contrast to claims to the public that it “only happens” with very close, prolonged contact.
Fortunately, both the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control and the CDC advise healthcare workers to wear N95 respirator masks to prevent airborne infections.The WHO’s resistance to this application of the precautionary principle is more difficult to understand. This is a question best left to its leadership.
Its consequences, however, are profound.
This puts healthcare workers caring for these patients at unnecessary risk. This makes an outbreak, which could otherwise be adequately managed in its early stages, become more likely to spread with very serious consequences for those infected. Maybe this outbreak won’t start a pandemic. But eventually another epidemic will occur, and poor PPE guidance may make its spread somewhat easier.
Unless we can learn.
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Previously published with on healthdebate.ca Creative Commons License
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