[maxerickson]

MSF seems to be effective in training people:

http://www.msf.org/article/ebola-workers-risk-tragic-reality...

(of their ~3000 staff in the region, 14 have been infected, they believe most of those infections have taken place outside of their hospitals)

The doctor in the article, who decided to check someone with potential Ebola exposure for a fever with his bare skin, was not being extremely careful.

[danieltillett]

What the MSF leave out of this article is the number of their staff that are actually treating Ebola patients. Without knowing this critical piece of information we can't really know what the transmission rate is to staff.

[maxerickson]

Sure, it isn't deeply informative. Their other releases discuss treating hundreds of confirmed cases (and a multiple of that of people admitted to their treatment centers), so I guess we can presume that there are at least a similar number of personnel dealing with that treatment (even if they are severely limiting actual patient contact, they are still dealing with a lot of waste and so on). The religious hospital in the article had 10 personnel involved in treatment and 10 of them got infected. That's enough to at least direct your attention towards what the groups are doing differently (it could well come down to limiting care based on the ability to carry it out very carefully rather than training).

[ghshephard]

As long as the doctor (A) did not have any cuts on his hand and (B) washed it immediately after checking the skin temperature, and (C) the individual was not symptomatic (No Diarrhea, No vomiting) the risk is pretty minimal. Probably more risk from being coughed on.

(Note - doctors should be washing hands continuously regardless - when I went in for a checkup in Kaiser/Mountain View a few years ago, Doctor washed his hands upon coming in the room, washed his hands after checking my heartbeat with a stethoscope, and then washed them a third time before leaving the room. This was to check someone who had no symptoms whatsoever. I asked him about it, and it was Kaiser policy - he said he washed his hands about 20 times an hour. )

[maxerickson]

So go ask that doctor how he would interact with you if he believed there was a chance that you had an infectious disease with a high mortality rate. Or if he was in a room that didn't even have a sink.